Back in August we set every Premier League team a target for the upcoming season. We enjoyed it so much that in January we did it all again to reflect how the landscape had shifted over the first half of the season.
With that season now entirely and undeniably finished, what better time to go back and see which clubs were sensible enough to do as we asked and which ones are Manchester City and Arsenal.
The pre-season targets can be viewed in full here, and the mid-season update here.
Arsenal
Pre-season target: Season-long title challenge, silverware ❌
Mid-season target: Silverware ❌
We were strict with Arsenal back in January, declaring that they weren’t honouring the spirit of the title challenge request because it was Arne Slot’s phase-one Liverpool rather than Pep Guardiola’s unstoppable Man City leading them in the title race.
In the end, they didn’t even manage the actual letter of the target either, their title race petering out in a sea of draws before they understandably switched their primary focus to the Champions League where, sure, they did win the Beating PSG on xG Cup but alas not the actual silverware we had tasked them with.
The continued absence of trophies and a season of slight yet undeniable regression in the league made for a vaguely disappointing Arsenal season by current standards even before you factor in the fact Spurs did win a trophy and it is now Arsenal who must face the ‘Worra trophy’ jibes until they too win something.
The good news is that we are very sure that will be next season and our predictions are famously Postecoglou-like in their accuracy.
Aston Villa
Pre-season target: Champions League knockouts, top-six finish ✅
Mid-season target: Deep Champions League knockout run, top-six finish ✅
Tick and tick. The manner in which they missed out on the Champions League in the end was deeply annoying; failing to turn up against a broken and battered Man United, losing Emi Martinez to an incredibly stupid and unnecessary red card and then ending up on a late contender for worst refereeing decision of the season.
But overall it’s still a positive campaign as long as they don’t end up falling foul of any PSR unpleasantness down the line. Which they might.
Managing a run to the Champions League quarter-finals – where they pushed PSG as close as anyone (sorry if that offends, Arsenal fans) – without completely losing the run of themselves domestically is an achievement unlocked, even if their rate of improvement over the last few years has been so rapid that this is already perhaps the last season in which they can get away with such minor ‘achievements’. Which is, of course, an achievement in itself.
At some point the next step has to be silverware, and it doesn’t require great depth of thought to work out the possible silver lining that comes with landing in the Europa rather than Champions League next season.
Bournemouth
Pre-season target: Top-half finish ✅
Mid-season target: Top-six finish ❌
This one’s probably on us; we got very giddy about Bournemouth in January. In fairness, they were at the time in the midst of an 11-game unbeaten Premier League run and handing out hefty paddlings to Newcastle and Nottingham Forest.
Never mind top six; the Champions League was a plausible stretch target at that time.
Fell off dramatically after that unbeaten run, as has always been their wont in fairness, but rallied sufficiently to end the season an entirely creditable ninth with a better goal difference than Aston Villa.
Brentford
Pre-season target: Avoid any repeat of last season’s relegation flirtation ✅
Mid-season target: Be good at home and away at the same time ✅
The pre-season target was safely ticked off by January thanks to a bizarre run of stunning home form (combined with honking away form) that was followed by a spell of stunning away form (combined with honking home form).
That led us to a largely facetious mid-season challenge but wouldn’t you just know it, Brentford went and took it seriously and achieved it anyway. They won four games in a row at one point, against Brighton (home), Nottingham Forest (away), Man United (home) and Ipswich (away) on the back of solid draws against Chelsea (home) and Arsenal (away).
Brighton
Pre-season target: Top-half finish ✅
Mid-season target: Top-half finish ✅
You can’t get much more top-half finish than eighth so it’s ticks all round for the south coast lads, even if there was a slight air of bitter-sweetness about the late run that lifted them from the mid-table morass to just outside the European places.
Thirteen points from their last five games, with 13 goals scored including three in victory over the champions, was a reminder of just how good they can be when they hit one of their hot streaks.
Chelsea
Pre-season target: Win the Europa Conference and complete the set ✅
Mid-season target: Win the Europa Conference and complete the set, plus top-four finish ✅
Briefly wobbled against the first and only actual team they had to face in the Conference League but got the job done there while also confirming fourth place on the final day.
Even in mid-season it was a low bar to clear for the investment involved, but becoming the first team to win all four major UEFA trophies is something nobody else will do for a while, although European powerhouses Arsenal do only require the last three to complete their own set so watch out for them.
Crystal Palace
Pre-season target: 50 points ✅
Mid-season target: 50 points ✅
Fifty points and an FA Cup?! Stop it, Oliver Glasner. And please don’t bugger off to Man United or Spurs or even somewhere that actually constitutes sensible career progression. We want to see how this plays out.
Everton
Pre-season target: Keep all the points they win ✅
Mid-season target: Make sure that’s enough points to stay out of the bottom three ✅
A facetious pre-season target and a mid-season target that was far more serious at the time but one very quickly Moyesed into irrelevance as Everton sauntered clear of not just the bottom three but also the stupid three – Spurs, United, West Ham – to ensure they could devote all their emotional energy to saying goodbye to Goodison rather than another desperate relegation fight. Marvellous.
Fulham
Pre-season target: Just keep Fulhaming away ✅
Mid-season target: Top-half finish while Fulhaming away ❌
Losing six of your last nine games to slip from the European fringes down to 11th but beating the actual champions in that run constitutes such elite Fulhaming that we’re almost tempted to give them the tick for that mid-season target despite there being no reasonable or accepted mathematical method by which 11th constitutes the first half of 20 anythings.
Shame. We’re open to any ideas of numerical chicanery you might suggest to allow us to correct this obvious travesty.
Ipswich Town
Pre-season target: Be the new Luton ✅
Mid-season target: Stay up ❌
January was a very, very long time ago. Seems an incredibly quaint notion to think there was any hope of Ipswich hitting that target, but you have to try and remember just how bad your Wolves and Evertons had looked up to then, even if United and Spurs were only warming up to their own full sh*tness.
Ipswich’s next target, of course, is to avoid remaining Luton in any way.
Leicester City
Pre-season target: Survive ❌
Mid-season target: Survive ❌
Would probably have taken ’13 points behind Spurs’ if offered it, as well. Even in January. Which was, to reiterate, a very, very long time ago.
Liverpool
Pre-season target: Reach season’s end with no doubts around Arne Slot ✅
Mid-season target: Win the title ✅
Achieved the second part so comprehensively that they spent the last month of the season on the beach. Which is absolutely fine and their divine right as champions. It’s also funny that despite winning none of their four games after being confirmed as champs that nobody really made a dent on their lead anyway.
But the word of caution here is that while nobody gives a shiny sh*te about that four-match winless run right now, you’d better believe it will rapidly become Five Matches Without A Win and then a full-blown cracked-badge Six-Game Winless Streak should they make an untidy start to next season, because context is and always will be less important than content.
Manchester City
Pre-season target: Win the league, don’t get point-penaltied into oblivion ❌
Mid-season target: Win Champions League ❌
We still await what if any punishment might await Man City, but that was a whole season of unpleasantness. Reader, they did not win the league. Or the Champions League. Or the FA Cup. Or anything at all, for the first time since Pep Guardiola’s very first season.
Fair to say this was not a campaign that hit any pre-season target it might have contained.
Manchester United
Pre-season target: Be proved right on Erik Ten Hag ❌
Mid-season target: Be proved right on Ruben Amorim ❌
Hmm. At best the jury is out on Amorim whose grand Europa League gamble backfired when he and his team entirely forgot to turn up for the final against fellow mono-basketed egg-possessors Tottenham.
Amorim and his team have already been set a target of finishing top six next season and at this point all we can really say is very best of luck to you with that while wondering/worrying if our 25/26 mid-season target for United really might end up being ‘Be proved right on Gareth Southgate’.
Newcastle
Pre-season target: Get back in Europe ✅
Mid-season target: Get back in Europe, silverware ✅
Smashed it. Absolutely smashed it. Bit lucky on that final day to stumble home in fifth despite a home defeat to Everton, but a return to the Champions League and a first piece of major silverware that wasn’t in, well, black and white represents a season of success at the ‘manager gets a statue’ end of the scale.
Blazed a trail that was followed by Crystal Palace and Tottenham ending their own absurd waits for trophies.
As an aside, and while noting that none of this is Newcastle’s own fault, we have unfortunately been left with no choice but to take names of all those who have voiced no concern over the Magpies qualifying for the Champions League from fifth place but nevertheless find it absurdly baffling that Spurs are in there for winning the Europa League, a tournament for which they qualified by finishing…fifth.
Nottingham Forest
Pre-season target: Keep all the points, don’t get relegated ✅
Mid-season target: Champions Actual League ❌
Swiftly became clear that the pre-season target was going to be swatted aside with indecent ease so a tough mid-season target was added. This was the biggest upgrade to targets for anyone, obviously, and despite their late collapse it was one that was still achievable deep into the final day of the season.
A fairer target would probably have been simply ‘European football’ and as with any English team that misses out on the Champions League but finds itself in one of the lesser comps, it is still worth pointing out the obvious silver-lining that comes with that.
Southampton
Pre-season target: Don’t go full Burnley ❌
Mid-season target: Don’t go full Derby ✅
Went too Burnley in the first half of the season, meaning Russell Martin tragically had to be sacked before he could catch the eye of Bayern Munich. It’s a cruel game.
Ivan Juric came and inevitably went having done away with much of the more wilfully stupid aiming of weaponry directly at their own feet that Southampton had been deploying in those early months, but with no discernible improvement to results.
It was left to Simon Rusk in his second caretaker spell of the season to scrape together the last couple of points needed to sneak past Derby and win in the most minor way possible.
Tottenham
Pre-season target: Win a bloody trophy, any trophy ✅
Mid-season target: Win a bloody trophy, any trophy (but also maybe don’t Spurs your way into the Championship in the process, yeah?) ✅
He bloody did it. The crazy Australian bastard only went and did it, mate. Having done exactly what he told us all he would do at the start of the season, Ange Postecoglou crafted one of the greatest narrative arcs in Barclays history and only the dreariest, most soulless of creatures, only someone entirely devoid of human emotion, would now want to cut this short without finding out whether season three actually can be better.
Daniel Levy is apparently that man. He is, to paraphrase Stewart Lee, a man so lacking in imagination that if locked in a room containing nothing but a tea cosy would not even have the curiosity to discover whether it could make a serviceable hat.
To be absolutely clear, we remain entirely convinced that this wildly unrepeatable high-wire act almost certainly represents the high-water mark of Postecoglou’s Tottenham career and that his chance of building an actual legacy is close to zero.
We find his ‘season three’ claim far less compelling than his iconic ‘I always win things in my second season’ shout and we’re pretty sure so does he, even though the numbers offer pretty decent support.
But at the same time he has absolutely earned the right to fail on his own terms now and the fact Levy seems so determined to let all the air out of the balloon so soon after Spurs fans got the one thing they have craved above all else for at least a decade is just maddeningly yet entirely Spurs.
They really shouldn’t be allowed to have nice things. The universe was right all these years and Ange was wrong to meddle with forces he could not possibly understand.
West Ham
Pre-season target: Better football yielding similar results ❌
Mid-season target: Any football yielding similar results ❌
We’re still relatively confident that Graham Potter will be fine at West Ham once he’s got a proper pre-season under his belt, but there’s no denying that neither the playing style nor results are there yet.
West Ham needed to move on from David Moyes but that was a painful season of transition with only really vibes and hunches to indicate it will eventually prove to be worth the pain.
Four wins from the last 17 games of the season when there were no mitigating factors of competing priorities was a miserable effort, especially when the last three of those wins were against Leicester, Man United and West Ham. Winning at Arsenal, again, was admittedly a good bit.
There were arguably some encouraging signs in the final weeks of the season, but eight points from the final six games isn’t that great really, and when all those points come from games against Southampton, Tottenham, Man United and Ipswich it becomes an even flimsier looking foundation for significant growth.
Wolves
Pre-season target: A good start ❌
Mid-season target: A good finish ✅
Nineteen points from the last 10 games of the season is undoubtedly a good finish, and if anything it’s only made even better by the fact they still managed to Wolves their way to a momentum-sapping one point from the final four games of the season.
Wolves being Wolves, every chance now that it’s that part of the run-in rather than the six straight wins that preceded it that they now carry into next season, leaving us already worried about the 25/26 target we’ve given them: ‘Start properly, don’t require managerial change by November‘