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The final day of the season, to a modern audience, can seem almost overwhelming: 10 games going on at once, each with their own rhythm and dynamic and storyline. It can be hard to imagine that at one time, before the advent of regular live television coverage, this is how it was every weekend. But from the mass of narratives, one key theme, one that has lurked in the background all season, emerged: that this is a brutally hard, extremely competitive, league in which any slip-up is punished.
There have been complaints this season about the style of many games, but then there comes a point towards the end of most seasons when a number of fans pronounce themselves bored and declare it a bad season; that tends to correlate quite strongly with how well their team has done.
Perhaps Arsenal have not been the most thrilling champions. It would be very hard to claim their football offered the same aesthetic thrill as Manchester City at their peak, but it is good that the prevailing model of football has been challenged. It is good that the Premier League has a champion who seemed constantly to be battling their own doubts, who did not bludgeon the league into submission with their wage bill. And it’s good that there has been significant bunching of the table: the days when champions gathered points tallies in the high 90s seem over and, hopefully, so too are the days when points totals in the mid-30s were enough to stay up.
Tottenham avoiding relegation at West Ham’s expense was the biggest issue to be settled. Although there was clear anxiety around the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in injury time as Spurs held on to their 1-0 lead with everybody well aware that West Ham were 3-0 up against Leeds, there never really was much prospect of Everton scoring the two goals they would have needed to send Roberto De Zerbi’s team down. Still, that Tottenham were in that mess in the first place suggests how badly the club has been run over the past couple of years. And that is the message of this season: nobody is safe.
West Ham learned that lesson even more painfully than Spurs. Given the advantages they should accrue from renting the 2012 Olympic Stadium on extremely generous terms (it may be a soulless place, but its capacity is almost 80% greater than Upton Park’s was, with far more corporate facilities), and given what might have been done with the £100m fee they received for Declan Rice in 2023, it has really taken spectacular mismanagement for them to find themselves in the Championship.
On the flip side, there were remarkable achievements elsewhere, perhaps most notably from Sunderland. Four years ago, they were winning promotion from League One. Two years ago, they were finishing 16th in the Championship. It was a year ago on Sunday that they beat Sheffield United in the play-off final. And yet victory over Chelsea combined with defeat for Brighton against Manchester United and Brentford’s draw at Liverpool allowed them to finish seventh, equalling their best finish since they were first relegated out of the top flight in 1958.
Just their second ever European campaign will be a tremendous, unexpected, adventure. It will require significant investment and will almost certainly have a negative impact on their league form, but that seems a far smaller hurdle to overcome than staying up this season did. More significantly, after two seasons in which all three sides who came up were relegated, they achieved the best performance in the Premier League by a promoted team since Ipswich in 2000-01. With Leeds finishing 14th, a comfortable eight points above the relegation zone, there should be hope for all sides coming up that, if they recruit wisely, they can do more than simply battle for survival.
Brighton may have lost heavily and slipped into the Conference League, which they will be firm favourites to win, but this will be only their second ever season in European football; they are not sated with it but their fans seemed happy enough at the prospect of more foreign trips, no matter the competition.
Bournemouth too endured a frustrating afternoon, drawing at Nottingham Forest, while the results elsewhere they needed to claim Champions League qualification rarely looked like going their way, but they too can hardly have dreamed of even Europa League qualification when they were threatened with closure 17 years ago. Their rise from the fourth flight is one of English football’s great stories, and for Andoni Iraola to lead them to sixth despite his goalkeeper and three of his back four being sold last summer, and Antoine Semenyo departing for Manchester City in January, is extraordinary.
Football remains too stratified, too determined by the wealth of a club’s owners, but the English pyramid remains a place, for now at least, where enlightened management can elevate a club, and where laxity and sloppiness is mercilessly punished.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition
