We were very, very rude about this Premier League season the other week. We were angry and we lashed out and we, well, we called it the worst Premier League season ever.
That was very mean of us and the fact it is 100% true and correct and accurate only slightly eases how guilty we feel about it. Poor 2024/25 Premier League season, just trying to go quietly about its business and we’re here calling it names. What an absolute prick.
So to try and redress the balance, we’ve thought really, really hard and just about managed to come up with 10 actual good things about this season.
The Novelty Value
Can’t go around complaining, as we are all sometimes guilty of doing, that the Premier League is a big dull closed shop where the same teams fight among themselves for the same rewards while everyone else has to live off scraps season after season and then also have a big tantrum when the top of the league looks funny with all weird and wrong teams in it.
Well we can – and did – do that, but you can’t do it without being an insufferable little tagnut. So let us acknowledge that there is undeniably a certain intoxicating quality to a league table where Nottingham Forest enjoy a six-point lead over Man City at this late stage, where Brighton, Fulham, Bournemouth and Brentford represent more plausible European qualifiers than Manchester United or Spurs and the relegation spots are a fascinating, unpredictable fight betw… oh. Well at least the top of the table is interesting. Don’t look at the bottom bit.
Big Final Run-in: Liverpool transfer prep, Arsenal, Nottingham Forest, Maresca, Foden
Bad Barclays Is Still Barclays
As ever, timing remains one of our very greatest strengths. Whinging like a bloody great baby about an unexciting Premier League season just before a yawning two-week abyss of an international break featuring the worst possible England action – two comfortable, routine, regulation wins that did absolutely nothing to get the blood up – was followed up by a weekend given over entirely to the FA Cup quarter-finals.
Now we’ve nothing against FA Cup quarter-finals, but four matches does not a top-flight football weekend make. Yes, yes, the FA Cup has ‘got its magic back’ very good, that’s lovely. Now give us Man United v Arsenal and four days of increasingly unhinged and bad-tempered fallout please.
The Salah Debate
There’s always been something about Mo Salah that has agitated people. We genuinely don’t know what it is and aren’t trying to be flippant or snarky about it, even though those are our default settings. It seems to us that when people talk about Salah in terms of Premier League greatness there’s always an ‘obviously’ yet then also a ‘but’ in there that is really hard to justify for a player who has such astonishing numbers and so clearly passes the eye test.
And now he’s put together just about the perfect season to heighten everything about this particular discourse. On the one hand, he is on course for a season of statistical greatnesss unmatched in Premier League history, winning both Golden Boot and Playmaker awards by huge margins (Current Salah PL goal contributions this season: 44; next best: 24) to deliver his team the league title by another huge margin. And his team is not one that has, in the Premier League era, made a habit of winning league titles.
Yet he has also gone missing entirely when his team needed him most in the Champions League knockouts and Carabao final.
And thus it remains – but somehow, ridiculously, even more so – ‘Salah? Great player, obviously, but…’
Is he really one of only two Premier League players with ‘star quality’?
Barclays: The Next Generation
One definite boon from so many of the big clubs being so many assorted flavours of sh*t for such vast swathes of the season has been the chance to see some new, young and exciting players take the chance to impress.
Even at the two biggest current clown-car operations in the league at Manchester United and Tottenham, the dark black clouds have had silver linings thanks to your Amad Diallos, your Archie Grays and your Lucas Bergvalls.
Arsenal also have not one but two young pups already seemingly destined for greatness. Especially Ethan Nwaneri, but especially Myles Lewis-Skelly, who, as well being obviously a good player, has even greater potential as an arch sh*thouse. And that really is something to get excited about because housery is one of those things – like being a centre-back or goalkeeper – that is notoriously hard for a player so young to master.
Proper Centre-Forwards
Dying out, weren’t they? Your Proper Centre-Forwards? With 4-4-2 considered embarrassingly primitive there was less and less call for Classic No. 9s in the modern Barclays.
But this year has produced a retort of sorts that extends far beyond the absurd Goalbot stylings of everyone’s favourite Leeds-born Norwegian.
Thirteen players are in double figures for Premier League goals this season – which is a quite pitiful number really, but we are struggling to find ways to make this look like a good season okay so cut us some slack – and nine of those 13 are unquestionably Proper Centre-Forwards. Forget about Salah and his absurd season for a minute, and the only other non-centre-forward interlopers in the double-digits gang are Bryan Mbeumo, Cole Palmer and Justin Kluivert. And both Palmer and Kluivert are at worst ‘second-striker’ types.
Smashing The Crystal Ceiling
Crystal Palace’s final points tally for each season since returning to the Premier League for the 2013/14 campaign: 45, 48, 42, 41, 44, 49, 43, 44, 48, 45, 49. Eleven straight seasons of 40-something totals. An almost sarcastic average total of 45.27 per season.
And now, with 39 points from 28 games, they stand on the brink of the unthinkable. Just 11 points from 10 games – a piece of p*ss on current form – and they will shatter the 50-point barrier for the first time.
And not just for the first time since getting back into the Premier League just over a decade ago, but for the first time in their Premier League history. Palace’s grim obsession with 40-something totals extends to contriving to get relegated with 49 and then 45 points during the early 22-team years of the competition.
The first of those remains a now surely unbreakable Premier League record for the highest points total for any relegated team, while the second singles Palace out as the only Premier League team to be relegated from fourth bottom as English football’s biggest beast assumed its final 20-team form.
Many people will say winning a first FA Cup is Palace’s main priority for the remaining weeks of this season. But many people are wrong.
Nottingham Forest And Yer Da
Been proved right, hasn’t he? Vindication at last for all those years he stubbornly kept Forest on the laminated list he keeps in his wallet of the 20 proper and correct Premier League teams despite them having only been in what he still calls the Premiership for five of its first 30 seasons – and relegated in three of those five.
He’s had the last laugh, hasn’t he? Classic Yer Da. Know your place, son, and respect your elders. Now if Sheffield Wednesday can just come good he really will be unbearable.
Tottenham Hotspur Or Spurs
The first law of football remains that whatever happens anywhere to anyone, the joke must always be on Spurs. But that has been taken to bold new heights this season.
We did, of course, include Spurs’ (and Man United’s) startling sh*tness as one of the sh*t things about this sh*t season due to its undeniable impact on the overall quality of the division, but there’s no point pretending it isn’t also very funny.
Newcastle ending their trophy drought has robbed Spurs of another canary down that particular mine, with every chance for Villa, Forest or Palace to follow suit in the FA Cup. But Spurs have very much boasted main character energy in their punchline status this season, all the way down (up?) to asking everyone to stop calling them ‘Tottenham’ when they should be prostrate in gratitude to anyone who doesn’t call them something far, far ruder at this time.
They are spectacularly, epically, heroically bad and, unless you have the misfortune to actually support them, an absolute guarantee of entertainment. They are the neutral’s friend this season to an almost absurd degree, with their only two apparent settings being ‘hilarious defeat’ and ‘goal-laden victory’.
Schadenfreude In General
And Spurs aren’t even the only ones, are they? Laughing at Man United hits different for those of a certain age. Those who had their childhoods ruined by Fergie and his relentless, joy-crushing, trophy-hogging teams.
They’ve been bad for a while now but, like Spurs, have taken it to astonishing heights never seen before from a single one, never mind a ludicrous pair, of the big boys in the Big Six era.
It’s even managed to almost entirely overshadow Man City going from title certainties to Champions League scramblers and whatever it is that Chelsea are currently up to.
Moyesiah
Sometimes it’s nice just to see something nice. Sometimes that’s enough. There’s revisionism aplenty around David Moyes’ West Ham reign now, but the facts remain a lot of it was grimly unwatchable for no particularly tangible reward in the results column. Not in the Premier League anyway. It wasn’t working for anyone, and it was right that it ended.
But that didn’t mean Moyes didn’t have something to offer someone, and his return to Everton – a club he knows and instinctively understands – has been lovely. He’s steered them well away from any relegation unpleasantness, allowed fans who have been through more than enough stress in recent seasons the treat of being able to just relax and enjoy the Goodison Park farewell, and there is no other plausible Everton manager more deserving of leading them out next season at their spanking new home.
There, surely that’s enough niceness now.