It’s high time for an update of the all-important F365 Premier League Mood Rankings, the deeply scientific and highly rigorous ordering of the 20 top-flight clubs based entirely on feels and vibes.
Fun fact: Google’s AI overview once claimed this utter nonsense was compiled by a supercomputer, when it is in fact the work of a prick.
Anyway, we were right about one thing last time: Spurs could only end the season in first or last. We’ll be honest, though, we are a bit surprised about which one it’s turned out to be. The good news is that Spurs are still Spurs, and thus are about to split their fanbase into two warring, furious tribes based on whether they make the absurd, unthinkable decision to keep Ange Postecoglou or the absurd, unthinkable decision to sack him.
Either way, we’re extremely confident they’ll be 16th by August and 20th by October. Possibly in the actual league too.
20) West Ham (10)
A slight late rally – built entirely on taking handfuls of points off entirely distracted Europa League finalists and relegated flotsam – has done little to lift the general mood of despair around the London Stadium, but if you squint hard enough it’s possible to imagine brighter times ahead.
Graham Potter strikes us as a ‘needs a full pre-season’ kind of a manager. He’s the sort of manager they should have chosen in the first place when trying to draw a line under the David Moyes Era, rather than just getting someone who was very like David Moyes only more foreign and more emotional.
Julen Lopetegui never looked like working out and West Ham p*ssed a season away because of it, and that was a shame because they did do some eye-catching transfer work last summer. It is still possible that it wasn’t a complete waste of time and we are not yet sure it’s right to rush to judgement on Potter. It’s still possible Brighton Potter is in there somewhere.
But for now, it’s all guesswork and speculation after a miserable season that was supposed to signal the start of a new era. And there’s no point pretending that Tottenham winning a trophy isn’t a very annoying crowning turd in the Hammers’ overflowing bowl.
19) Manchester City (17)
Not winning the league is one thing, but not winning anything? That’s a problem. Dig deeper and it’s even worse, because they didn’t even really compete for anything other than the FA Cup.
They were never in a title race, they stunk the Champions League out and lost to Spurs – what is it with City and Spurs? – in the early rounds of the Carabao. Only in the FA Cup did they even halfway resemble their old selves, staying upright as the other big beasts tumbled all around them, only to then lose to an inspired Crystal Palace in the final.
Undoubtedly their worst and most difficult season since Pep Guardiola turned them into a trophy-gobbling machine, and the problem for City now is that doubt exists where no doubt existed before.
Maybe they come back next season and win the league again. Maybe. But there’s no certainty anymore. You can’t even say with great conviction they’ll be in the title race.
That itself is a wild situation to be in when you’re talking about a team that had won six of the last seven league titles before this season.
They really were worse in just every way as well this year. Their fewest wins since 2015/16, most defeats, and fewest goals scored. The 44 goals they conceded was their worst since 2009/10 and the world was a very different place for City back then, right at the start of their journey to world domination.
The team that won the lot is breaking up. Kyle Walker is gone, Kevin De Bruyne is gone. There are huge doubts over whether Guardiola himself has the drive or inclination or will to push through with the regeneration and build another great side. And if he doesn’t, what then?
It’s all doubt and guesswork where previously there existed absolute certainty. And they’ve got to play in the Club World Cup.
‘Oh no we didn’t win any trophies and only finished third and have to play in a Club World Cup’ are among the more first-world footballing problems imaginable, sure, but these things are all relative and this is a situation that City simply haven’t faced for several years now.
18) Manchester United (15)
An absolute basket-case of a club who’ve just suffered the twin indignities of finishing an unthinkable 15th in the Premier League and losing an actual cup final to actual Spurs, but there’s no denying that their early summer transfer business is at the eye-catching end with Prem-proven arrivals confirmed (Cunha) and imminent (Mbeumo) from the sort of teams that have, uncomfortably, now become United’s direct rivals.
Those are important moves not because they are good players who dramatically and necessarily improve United – although they are that – but because they serve as proof that for the time being at least this remains Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About.
United – or at the very least United wages – still have a pull that transcends their current status. And that offers meaningful hope that this absurd beast of a football club can still be brought to heel despite itself.
The clock is ticking, though. We’re not entirely sure just how long United will remain a name that resonates so with players, but we do know that time is finite.
We’ve already seen the United Will Get The Job Done In A Final myth utterly busted in Bilbao, but there’s no denying this swift summer foray into the transfer market is providing some repair to a deeply damaged brand.
17) Arsenal (9)
Must reluctantly accept the mantle of Banter Club and also acknowledge that they have largely brought it upon themselves.
Finishing second again need not be disastrous, but there was definite regression and losing out to Liverpool rather than Man City makes life far harder for that particular breed of fan who refers to the club as ‘The Arsenal’ and believes they represent some bastion of class and heritage and history rather than just being another very rich football club that spends lots of money.
The big problem for Arsenal is that they didn’t win anything. Again. The bigger problem is that somehow – ludicrous and ridiculous a freaky fluke as it may be – Spurs did. And that has shifted the dynamic of the north London scene, for now at least.
It’s not fair, it’s not big and it’s certainly not clever but Arsenal have no choice but to swallow at least a year of ‘Worra trophy’ every time they start mouthing off about beating PSG on xG and such. They really are just going to have to take it, and while we are always reluctant to judge any fanbase by its most conspicuous online gobshites, it would massively help if they stop being very sniffy indeed about Spurs winning a competition – for a third time no less – that Arsenal themselves have never managed to win.
The whole ‘who’s had a better season?’ debate is facetious and largely in bad faith. There’s a very coherent argument to make that neither Spurs nor Arsenal should want to swap with the other. After 17 years, a trophy moved the needle for Spurs in a way that no amount of process-trusting second-place finishes ever could, while there remains still the sense that Arsenal are building towards something big in a way that Spurs shithousing a European pot in their worst domestic season for over 40 years absolutely does not.
But until and unless Arsenal arrive at their destination – and there are never any guarantees you’ll get there until you do – then they live in Banter Town. Only one road out of there, lads.
READ: Man Utd, Man City and Arsenal fell so far short of every single target
16) Brentford (12)
Did some madly entertaining things this season, with the whole ‘winning all our home games but losing all our away games and then switching that around for no real reason’ bit one of our very favourites from this season.
The run of home games late last year that produced five straight wins by scores of 5-3, 4-3, 3-2, 4-1 and 4-2 was sensational, as really was the fact that 4-2 win (over Newcastle no less) was in fact Brentford’s last home win for four months.
All those lads from about eighth to 12th were good value this season, and the only real criticism of Brentford is that they so rigidly confined their sense of fun to league matters when they looked every inch the sort of side that could and should have put together some kind of run at at least one of the cups. Especially the way this season panned out for rogue winners of cups.
Overall, though, an excellent season with good vibes. But while Brentford’s business model is one that doesn’t just cope with the loss of key assets but positively thrives on it, the idea of losing both Bryan Mbeumo and Thomas Frank in one summer would appear to be something that might stretch that beyond its elastic limit. The very real possibility of this coming to pass has to harsh the buzz a bit.
15) Burnley (-)
Perhaps the most interesting of the promoted teams. Think we all kind of know what to expect, to some degree, from the other two. Leeds should give it a proper go as one of few teams outside the now Settled Seventeen with the requisite heft to muscle their way into the closed shop. Sunderland should go down and suffer frequent heavy punishment for their Icarus-like ‘promoted a season too early’ folly.
But what of Burnley? They are so different to the last Burnley team to come up, who did it playing glorious football that simply didn’t survive contact with the rarefied Barclays air. Now, though, they are a team led by Scott Parker, a man so haunted by a 9-0 humiliation at Liverpool when in charge of Bournemouth that he has simply vowed to never concede another goal ever again, even if that means – and last season it very often did – not scoring any either.
Now the last couple of years have been filled with chat about the hubris of promoted teams, about their failure to be sufficiently humble to take their medicine and accept that what got them here can’t keep them here. That the way teams like Brentford or Brighton adapted to survive the transition to the far, far higher level is apparently now too much to ask of teams like Southampton, and especially Vincent Kompany’s Burnley.
But what about this Burnley? They’ve sufferballed their way in, so could they now sufferball their way to 15th? It does feel more likely than trying to Temu Man City their way there like Kompany or Russell Martin.
Yet at the same time it does also feel like they might just end up like Homer Simpson when he gets in the ring with Drederick Tatum. Premier League teams might not get tired. That cactus is right!
14) Sunderland (-)
Another thrilling Championship play-off final, another big club with a proud history getting itself foolishly promoted when it is visibly and palpably unready.
But those are concerns for far later in the summer. Let us not sully their celebratory moment with talk of it being another great chance for Derby to get their names out of the record books at long last.
That kind of chat is for August, or perhaps late July. For now, the best advice for Sunderland would appear to be go Full Forest and sign a bunch of players and worry about the rules later. The alternative paths for a team that finished 24 points behind the other promoted teams are simply too ghastly to think about for long.
13) Fulham (11)
We love Fulham. They have carved out a niche as the Premier League’s most reliable ‘can beat anybody, can lose to anybody’ team and it’s a tremendous way to go about 50-odd point-securing mid-table comfort.
They are a team that often manages to get themselves on the edge of European talk around February or March only to be nowhere near it by May without anyone really noticing or complaining about how they fell off. Seems a nice way to live.
Even the way this season ended was perfectly on brand, their European hopes fading away in accordance with the prophecy as they lost six of their last nine league games after a heavy FA Cup defeat to Palace.
Obviously one of the nine games they didn’t lose was a 3-2 win over the champions – and this was at the start of April, weeks before Liverpool had officially wrapped up the title and gone full beach/flip-flop/cigars.
Fulham this season managed to lose to Wolves, West Ham, Everton, and Manchester United, draw with Tottenham, Southampton and Ipswich (twice) and beat Newcastle (twice), Nottingham Forest (twice), Chelsea and Liverpool.
Never change, lads. Never change.
12) Bournemouth (8)
Ultimately finished second in the tremendously fun eighth-twelfth mini-league of enormously entertaining mid-table teams as Brighton pulled clear in the closing weeks to claim first place. Well, eighth place. But you know what we mean.
Bournemouth, though, remain our favourite of this gaggle of teams that also contains Brentford, Fulham and Palace. There’s something similar going on at all these clubs, who have become the Premier League’s affluent and aspirational middle-class over the last couple of years as the league’s wealth has grown and their own status within it solidified.
All of them are doing fine work in the crucial field of making mid-table life fun by being capable of going on wild runs of startling form at both ends of the spectrum, but Bournemouth are the ones for us who most conspicuously pass the eye test.
There are two versions of this Bournemouth team under Andoni Iraola. The one that goes on 11-match unbeaten runs that includes smashing top-seven teams to absolute pieces in back-to-back games, and the team that wins one match in nine trying to remember what they were doing in the first bit.
Bournemouth’s best football this season has been alarmingly close to the best football played by anyone this season, and that’s a wonderful thing. We’re not sure Iraola and this team will ever crack the code entirely and be able to turn those spells of seemingly effortless flow-state brilliance into an entire season but imagine if they did. Wouldn’t that be something, eh?
11) Everton (7)
Not as giddy now as in those early days of David Moyes’ return, but still far happier with their on-field lot than could possibly have been predicted halfway through the season.
What makes Everton so hard to place now is how to weigh up the emotional wrench of leaving Goodison Park after over a century of memories and history versus the excitement of moving into their new ground and all the potential that brings.
So what we’re going to do at this point is simply avoid that kind of complicated brain-melter altogether and simply put them right there in the middle. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
10) Brighton
Finished the season like an absolute train to finish one place and in the end just four points behind a stumbling Nottingham Forest. Always bittersweet when you end a season like that.
Sure, it’s never a bad thing to end on a high note and approach the summer with confidence for the next but at the same time Brighton ended the campaign sufficiently clear of their fellow entertaining mid-table chums (your Bournemouths, your Brentfords, the Fulhams of this world) and sufficiently close to the European spots that you can’t help but look wistfully at things like drawing six (and losing the other two) in an eight-game run around Christmas last year or even April’s failure to secure more than a single point from three games against Palace, Leicester and Brentford.
Overall, though, eighth place in the Premier League and genuine reason to believe Fabian Hurzeler’s second season can be even better than his first with that vital year’s worth of experience means the vibes on the south coast are very good indeed.
9) Nottingham Forest (2)
Ah, the cruelty of shifting expectations. Let’s be real here, it’s still been an extraordinary season for Forest, who went from relegation battlers last season to spending much of this campaign on the fringes of the title race before falling away on the finishing straight to end ‘only’ seventh.
It’s just human nature that doing it that way doesn’t feel quite as good as surging up to pinch seventh and a European spot after spending most of the season in 12th.
But while there will be some fans for whom only being in the Europa Conference represents the sky falling in, the vast majority of fans will, we suspect, see the bigger picture here. Not least the fact they now find themselves in a competition that offers a huge chance of adding a new chapter to a storied European history at the City Ground.
8) Wolves (13)
Were briefly and giddily the best team in the land for a while there, winning six straight games between mid-March and the end of April, at which point a far loftier mood position appeared on the cards with Vitor Pereira getting an absolute tune out of what turned out to be a far more talented squad than Gary O’Neil had made us all think,
But one point from their last four games is a familiar damp squib of a season end for a team that has history for allowing the way one season ends to bleed into how the next begins.
Another slow start and more managerial uncertainty in the early months of next season really would be annoying when it looked like they really might hit the summer with proper momentum.
Losing Matheus Cunha is no shock to anyone, but a massive blow nonetheless. Especially with him making such a sideways move to Man United.
7) Aston Villa (5)
Simmering resentment over the manner of missing out on Champions League qualification on the final day should ultimately give way to acknowledgement that sixth probably represents a fair enough reflection of their overall league season and is a decent enough effort when combined with a fine run on their return to European football’s top table.
They have got their feet back under the table now as a big deal in the Premier League and there is an obvious silver lining for any good Premier League team that finds itself narrowly missing out on the Champions League and finding itself instead in the Europa: that is now an enormously winnable trophy, and one that needn’t be a massive drain on the first half of your season given the fact even Spurs and United were largely able to coast into cosy top-eight finishes.
A quick glance at the current confirmed qualifiers suggests precious little to fear for a team coming off an impressive Champions League run, let’s put it that way.
We understand why, obviously, clubs want to be in the Champions League for the money and the prestige and did we mention money, but if you’re a fan of a club like Aston Villa then the idea of a proper run at winning the Europa has to appeal.
6) Chelsea (14)
Completing the new full set of European trophies and becoming the first team to do so is a neat result for completionists everywhere.
Being the first to do something is always a buzz because while others can eventually match the achievement, nobody else can ever be first. And probably nobody will match it for ages anyway; who knows how long it might be before Man United can lift themselves back to the level of qualifying for the Conference League to have a crack themselves?
If winning the third-tier European comp was a bit of a penalty kick and in fact the only way to avoid embarrassment in that competition, getting themselves back in the top four after some difficult Premier League campaigns was something with a bit more bite, even if the title challenge promised in the early months of the season faded away to nothing in the end.
We are still in the realm of bare-minimum achievement for a club that has spent such hilarious amounts on compiling their squad, but it’s also a bare minimum that has not been met for a while now.
We remain powerfully unconvinced by Enzo Maresca, but it’s hard to view the season just gone as anything other than one that has demonstrably placed Chelsea closer to where they ought to be and for his first year that was enough. It wouldn’t be enough next season, though, and having to actually deploy first-team players throughout a European campaign obviously represents a fresh challenge.
5) Leeds (-)
Promoted in often scintillating style and, whether anyone else likes it or not, are one of vanishingly few Championship clubs for whom a meaningful stab at breaking open the Premier League’s Settled Seventeen represents a realistic ambition and not just a hopeful pipe dream.
Still need a big and busy summer to have anything like a squad ready to cope with what the Premier League has become even since their last crack at it, but a real sense that Leeds are ready to give it a go.
Very much still in the celebratory partying stage of the Premier League promotion cycle and while The Fear will kick in for them as it does for everyone at some point, how Leeds go next season does feel like it’s an important barometer of the wider health of the upper levels of the English football pyramid; if Leeds disappear without a trace then the question becomes who, if anyone, won’t do that?
And if the only viable answers there become Birmingham, or Wrexham, then you’re really just raising further uncomfortable questions.
Tits to all that for now, though, yeah? Leeds are back. They’re pretty chuffed about it, and don’t really care whether anyone else is.
4) Liverpool (6)
Some fans deciding to be a bit weird about Trent Alexander-Arnold is so not rainbow rhythms and the fact Liverpool didn’t win another game after confirming the league title is all at the same time a) funny b) largely irrelevant but also c) slightly annoying.
We’re all of us bedevilled by recency bias and while of course Liverpool fans are mainly still celebrating their first league title in front of fans since 1990, there’s a part of all of us that knows were we in their position we’d still be slightly narked about the four-game winless run to end the season even though logically we shouldn’t give a sh*t.
This is very small beer, though, especially with the club already making statement moves in what is going to be a huge summer that will reveal whether Arne Slot can be as successful with his own side as he was with Jurgen Klopp’s.
Jeremie Frimpong and especially the seemingly imminent Florian Wirtz are hugely exciting moves. Wirtz in particular is a massive statement of intent and indicator of how big Liverpool’s pull now is. If you’re not getting giddy about that one, you’re in the wrong game.
3) Newcastle (1)
Newcastle absolutely should not, will not and do not care one jot, but it’s very funny to us that the English football media collectively wanked themselves so entirely dry at Newcastle finally winning a trophy only for two other conspicuous pot-dodgers to collect two even bigger prizes before the season was out.
Like we say, though: amusing to us, irrelevant to Newcastle. The cathartic release of all those long-awaited trophy wins was magical for those involved, and there really is no need for anything so gauche as comparisons or guff about who it meant more for.
Newcastle backing up that emotional Carabao success by claiming fifth place and with it Champions League football next season places this at the summit of Newcastle seasons in the modern era and there really is no obvious reason why it shouldn’t now be just the start of something even greater.
The mood is good, is what we’re saying here. Or it was until they realised they still couldn’t beat Manchester United to transfers.
2) Crystal Palace (4)
Fifty points and an FA Cup win? They really are glad all over. We know we’re probably the only ones on earth who would put those achievements in that order, but we’ve been very invested in the Palace 50 points story for the last couple of years and are absolutely delighted to see them do it.
But even we can acknowledge that getting 50 Premier League points in a season for the first time is not quite as good as winning major silverware for the very first time.
In a season of remarkable drought-ending trophy success, nothing was greater than Palace’s. These were supporters with powerful reason to think this was a day that might never come, at least not in their lifetimes.
The appointment of Oliver Glasner already merits discussion among the most astute managerial appointments any Premier League club has ever made. He came to a club with some compelling raw materials but has had a transformative effect few could have predicted.
Are we still talking about FA Cup wins or are we back banging on about getting 50 points? We prefer not to speak.
1) Tottenham (20)
They really are That Club, ending the trophy drought but absolutely not their banter era in the single most Spurs way imaginable.
It is ridiculous to even imagine a team that finishes 17th qualifying for the Champions League, but when you do give it any kind of attention it immediately becomes clear only one club could possibly do it and that’s the one that didn’t qualify for the Champions League when they finished fourth.
Only Spurs could achieve something like that after a decade of agony and then get about 10 days to fully enjoy and revel in no longer being the butt of everyone’s jokes – a mantle which, to make things even better, passed immediately to Arsenal – before going ‘Hang on, what do we actually do about a manager who won a trophy but also finished 17th?’
Other clubs just aren’t like this.
The genius of this Spurs season is just how long it’s been so clear that it had only two possible end-points. The miracle is which one has actually happened. We said this in March and apart from failing to mention Palace in the FA Cup it still captures the essence of the absurdity that is Tottenham’s 24/25 season:
There remains, somehow, the small but decidedly non-zero chance that Postecoglou pulls an absolute Homer and wins the Europa League. It’s impossible to overstate just how much that transforms everything about this season.
It might not be the most important thing about it, but we do think there are only two places Spurs can end the season in these rankings, and those two places are first and last.
This is a season that for Spurs really does appear to have crystallised and distilled down to two possible outcomes. First, and most likely, their worst season since before the Premier League And The Invention Of Football. When you consider just how utterly crap Spurs were for much of the nineties and early noughties, that’s a staggering achievement.
But not as staggering as the only alternative which is an end to their own trophy drought and with it qualification for the Champions League, which would genuinely make this Spurs’ best season for at least 40 years.
Spurs’ existential despair over that albatross of a trophy drought has already been exacerbated by Newcastle exorcising their own demons, and with every chance of Villa, Bournemouth, Forest, Brighton or somesuch also joining the ever-growing list of clubs to win a trophy more recently than Tottenham there is a profound sense that while it’s always true that whatever happens in football the joke is always on Spurs it may never have been more true, the joke never more entirely on them, than it has been this season.
Unless, of course, they can somehow defy history, logic and reason to land an unlikely punchline of their own. Mate.
And lo, it came to pass. And now we have to get this out quick before Spurs make a confirmed final decision one way or the other on Big Ange and p*ss off half the fanbase either way.