So then, the 2024/25 Premier League. Been an absolute washout, hasn’t it? Dreadful season. Here’s just 10 of the several million reasons why.
The total absence of a title race
Not the first time it’s happened and it won’t be the last, but while it’s obviously lovely for the team sauntering to the title without a care in the world, there’s no point pretending it’s much use to the rest of us.
We all enjoy a title race, don’t we? It’s the one thing that really doesn’t have to involve your team for you to become invested. The twists and turns of a season-long narrative combined with existing grudges and rivalries and irrational hatreds will inevitably lead to you settling on your favoured, or perhaps very often more accurately, least terrible choice for who wins.
A Proper Title Race is not much to ask and should be the very least a league that fancies itself the best in the world can offer. La Liga has a title race. Serie A has a title race. Even the Bundesliga is giving the idea a spin again. Ligue 1, sure, does not have a title race, but it is the only thing even approaching a major European league without one.
We demand a title race. And the distressing realisation that has dawned upon us is that the only time we ever get one is when Man City are in it. In the years when they can’t be bothered, somebody else just gets to p*ss it.
A totally dominant champion team that isn’t even that good
This is the real problem. Liverpool are a very good team, they have definitely been the best team in the country this year. This isn’t meant as glibly as it sounds given they are 12 points clear. There isn’t some grand mystery about how they are 12 points clear. They pass the eye test.
They look like the best team in the country, and they are the best team in the country. There is no danger here that the Premier League is about to crown an unworthy champion.
But are they really Manchester City in-their-pomp good? Are they even Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool in-their-pomp good? Do they look like a team with the chance to launch a new era of dominance? Do any of us really think Slot’s Liverpool are about to join Ferguson’s United or Guardiola’s City in that kind of chat.
Are they f*ck. They are an excellent team but they really shouldn’t be title-sewn-up-by-March good.
They are, and we do now have measurable proof of this, not even as good as PSG, meaning the Premier League doesn’t even have that excuse for being the only other top league to fail to deliver a title race this year.
Now a lot of this sounds like criticism of Liverpool. It isn’t, really. It’s a criticism of literally everyone else. It is not Liverpool’s problem that nobody has been able to live with them being slightly better than anyone expected them to be. They do not and should not care about that.
But Arsenal, City, Chelsea and the two clown-car f*ck-ups of the obliterated Big Six really should care, and should, frankly, be ashamed of themselves.
Mo Salah nailing down even the individual awards
And while we’re on the subject of Liverpool dominating everything, there’s Mo Salah showing off with six goals more than anyone else and seven more assists than anyone else.
Do we really care about the chase for the Golden Boot? No. But it would be nice if there were one, wouldn’t it?
We can at least here console ourselves that while there remains a suspicion that Liverpool shouldn’t really be good enough to be dominating to the enormous extent they are, there are no such doubts here about the quantifiably world-class Salah, whose disappearing acts in finals and big knockout games need not concern us in discussion of a Premier League that does not contain such matches.
Nevertheless, the criticism of everyone else involved for failing to make any kind of fight of it still applies. We are reasonable people, though, and will allow one and only one player a pass. And that player is Bukayo Saka whose 10 assists from 16 appearances suggests he would at least have managed to make Salah (17 in 29) work for the playmaker award that has definitely always existed and been talked about before the last few years.
He’s going to p*** the PFA award, obviously.
The earliest ever end to a relegation fight
The bottom three have, frankly, been a disgrace. Even Ipswich, who for a while there managed to give as good as they got without getting the results they deserved, are now getting the results they deserve.
Never in Premier League history have the bottom three been as bad as this. After 87 games between them, they have amassed one point more than West Ham managed in their 2002/03 relegation season.
The combined 43 points accrued by Southampton, Ipswich and Leicester is nine fewer than any other bottom three has managed at this stage of a season. And that was last season’s bottom three.
Worse still, the gap to 17th is now an absurd nine points. Wolves, still rumbling along at below a point a game, almost certainly already have enough points to stay up with a quarter of the season remaining. That can’t be right, can it?
Not only is nine points obviously the biggest ever gap between 17th and 18th at this point of the season, it’s only the second time in Premier League history that gap has been more than three.
And there’s not even any hint of the usual trick relegation battlers pull of starting to pick up more points as the season progresses. The bottom three have, if anything, got even worse.
Southampton have one win – against Ipswich – and 11 defeats in their last 12 games. Leicester, one win and 13 defeats in their last 14. Ipswich are the form side among the bottom three having managed five points in their last 13 games.
Wolves have managed to ease completely clear of trouble with a run of 11 points from 11 games.
The Spurs Chuckletime Clusterf*ck Variety Show
And the sheer, spectacular incompetence of that bottom three has meant that even the complete and utter collapse of two of the old Big Six isn’t the story it should have been, because neither of them have ever quite been in the relegation trouble they ought to have been.
Fair play to Ange Postecoglou’s ridiculous team, they gave it a heroic go. Keeping faith with Ange long after it was entirely clear it was never going to work. Losing at home to both Ipswich and Leicester really is above and beyond – and they still have the chance to complete that particular hat-trick of sh*t when Southampton come calling next month.
The Leicester defeat did briefly raise the genuine prospect of something truly hilarious coming to pass, but Spurs then accidentally won their next three league games in between going out of both cups and that, sadly, was the end of that.
Spurs have, to their enormous credit, now set about exploding the idea that their struggles were due to injuries by continuing to be monumentally sh*t even now all their players are back.
Their Premier League season is now done, with the remaining weeks spent sacking off league games – admittedly in a way that is quite hard to differentiate from all their earlier defeats – in the adorable yet surely wrong-headed belief that they might be able to win the Europa League.
The Man United Chuckletime Clusterf*ck Variety Show
See above, frankly. Had it come with a genuine threat of relegation then this might have been more entertaining but instead it’s just contributed to the general hollowing-out of the overall quality of The Best League In The World.
Having started the season with a weak and flaky squad, United are finishing it with a weak and flaky squad that is now also being forced to play a system that suits almost none of them.
It’s been quite funny at points, but – like Spurs – United have simply overdone it. You need to be a bit more Chelsea about your disastrous seasons. Spurs and United have gone too far, to the extent that their defeats no longer even catch the eye.
United losing at Old Trafford used to be an event of national significance. Now they can lose at home to, say, Palace or Brighton or whoever and literally nobody notices or cares.
Again, had this overegging of the sh*tty pudding been accompanied by a genuine prospect of relegation it might have been more tolerable, but the bottom three put paid to that. Specifically in United’s case, because 16 of the 37 points they have somehow managed to pathetically cobble together this season have come in their six games against the Doomed Three, with just 21 from the other 23.
Like Spurs, what was initially funny has just become too repetitive. Sure, it’s possible to just keep repeating the same joke again and again until it does become funny again, but there’s an art to that far beyond this pair of absolute wastrels. You’re not Stewart Lee. You’re not even Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.
And you never will be.
West Ham and being careful what you wish for
This one genuinely infuriated us for a good half a season, but does at least now show some signs of sorting itself out for the best.
There was always going to be uproar when West Ham dared to get rid of David Moyes for serving up miserably sh*te league football for two years, with the media’s belief that winning the Europa Conference should entitle him to a job for life not one shared by many Hammers.
We knew that the first sign of post-Moyes trouble would be greeted by a tidal wave to patronising tut-tutting Careful What You Wish For missives from the press, and lo it came to pass. Never mind that Julen Lopetegui’s West Ham were never really any worse than David Moyes’, the key thing remained that West Ham had committed the ultimate sin of replacing a proper British manager with a foreign and therefore less good one.
But the actual key thing is that this was never what West Ham fans had wished for. They hadn’t wanted Moyes out so they could replace him with a flakier Spanish version of him. They wanted something watchable, and that really isn’t much to ask.
There are tentative signs that they might now get it from Graham Potter, who is English which is good but also a bit of a nerd which is actually a bad and very foreign managerial trait, so he must still be treated with suspicion.
TL;DR: We will only in future be accepting Careful What You Wish For reprimands for fans of clubs who got what they wished for.
Having to pretend to care who gets the fifth Champions League place
The Premier League will get five places in next season’s Champions League, which is novel and quite interesting until you realise that the team who will benefit from this is probably going to be Chelsea or Manchester City and that instead of being something fun it has become a very boring get-out-of-jail-free card for a failing Big Club.
The flipside of that, of course, is genuinely interesting and new teams in the top four itself but don’t think about that too much right now because it doesn’t remotely fit our agenda okay.
Having to pretend 11th place might qualify for the Europa Conference League
Every season produces one of these scenarios, and this season’s is the most stupid yet. Yes, it is technically possible for the team that finishes 11th in the Premier League to qualify for Europe.
But it’s not going to happen. Chiefly because as well as all manner of perfectly predictable things like Aston Villa winning the Champions League or Bournemouth winning the FA Cup it also requires either Manchester United or Tottenham to finish in the top half. There’s hypothetical possibilities and then there’s taking the p*ss.
Chelsea being good enough for just long enough that everyone had to admit they were wrong about Enzo Maresca before he immediately proved them right
Let’s face it, absolutely none of us like being proved wrong. But being proved wrong by a manager who then immediately repeats all the late-season mistakes he made at Leicester the previous year to in fact prove we were right all along and didn’t need to feign graciousness and humility at all is irritating beyond belief.
Still, a valuable lesson learned. No more admitting we were wrong. We still be sticking rigidly to all our guns from now on. Therefore, Nottingham Forest are getting relegated and we will not back down from this.
