Aston Villa are in the Premier League title race whether Unai Emery likes it or not. He’s transformed the team in barely a year and, despite their fast finish to last season, few would have had them gunning for the title approaching the midway point of this season.
So here are 10 other unlikely title bids from the Barclays back catalogue, only one of which – and you already know which one – was actually successful and some of which were barely title bids at all. Ranked here with a very precise and extremely scientific algorithm taking into account both unexpectedness of title bid, on a scale from one to Leicester, and success of said title bid, again on a scale from one to Leicester.
10) Ipswich (2000/01)
Bit of a stretch to call this one a title challenge? Maybe, but it registers at around 97% of a Leicester on the ‘unexpected’ scale so we’re chucking it in anyway. It’s also a good one in that it relied on a brilliant recovery from a slow start rather than a misleading early run of form that is more usually the hallmark of these things. George Burley’s side had only been promoted via the play-offs and were favourites to return whence they came. The season started with a 3-1 defeat at Tottenham and by mid-September Ipswich had lost three of their first five games and were 16th to absolutely nobody’s great surprise or concern.
Then two strange things happened. Marcus Stewart started scoring goals in great number and Ipswich started winning an alarmingly large number of football matches. The Tractor Boys won seven and drew two of their next 10 games to catapult themselves into the top three by December.
Was it a title challenge, though? It’s debatable, but had they won at Old Trafford just before Christmas (and if that seems fanciful, they’d two weeks earlier returned from Anfield with all three points) they would have been clear in second place and just four points behind Sir Alex Ferguson’s side. It would have been on. United won 2-0, though, and a run of four defeats in five during January and February ended Ipswich’s challenge for top spot before it had truly begun.
There was no complete collapse, though; Ipswich won seven of their next nine to remain firmly in the hunt for a top-three finish and with it Champions League football but a 2-1 defeat at Charlton in late April proved hugely costly. Ipswich would finish fifth, three points outside the top three. The relegation that most had predicted duly arrived the following season. They’ve not been back since, but are currently having a very good go at putting that right.
9) Southampton (2014/15)
In the hindsight of a Premier League title race in which Chelsea spent all but the second week top of the table, there were no alternative runners. But in the heat of the season, Southampton put up a better fight than most, Ronald Koeman’s underrated side giving common enemies Newcastle and Sunderland some mutual ground by eviscerating them 4-0 and 8-0 as they rose as high as second by November.
Saints slipped somewhat with a five-game winless run that checked their credentials. Yet Sadio Mane, Graziano Pelle, Dusan Tadic and pals timed their form to festive perfection by beating Everton, Crystal Palace, Arsenal, Manchester United and Newcastle, while drawing with Chelsea, from December 20 to January 17.
It did not last. They won five of their final 16 games. But Southampton ended the season with Europa League qualification, the second-best defensive record of any side and the ultimate compliment for any team: a summer spent fending off asset-stripping attempts from elite clubs that cannot be bothered to properly scout for themselves in the first place.
8) Newcastle (2001/02)
Newcastle had one point from five games when Sir Bobby Robson took over in 1999. They recovered admirably to finish 11th but could only match that in Sir Bobby’s first full season in 2000/01. But a team that had been so brilliantly if ultimately too fragilely entertaining throughout so much of the 90s was back in its element the following season as they embarked on a doomed but once again magnificently entertaining tilt at English football’s biggest prize.
The summer acquisitions of Craig Bellamy and Laurent Robert took far closer to the Kevin Keegan sides of the 90s after the more functional, prosaic sides of the intervening years.
Within the first eight games of the season, Newcastle had thoroughly set their stall out by winning 4-1 at Middlesbrough, 4-3 against Manchester United and 4-0 at Bolton while also crashing to a 3-0 defeat at West Ham. They seemed to find some consistency in the run-up to Christmas, though, with a brilliant 3-1 win at fellow contenders Arsenal the festive centrepiece of a five-match winning run that took them three points clear of the Gunners and Liverpool at the summit by Boxing Day. Back-to-back defeats to Chelsea and Manchester United either side of New Year’s Day checked their progress, but they were right back in the hunt with five wins in the next six before another pair of successive defeat to direct rivals – this time Liverpool and most importantly Arsenal – proved far more telling.
That home defeat to Arsenal would come near the start of what would prove an unstoppable 13-game winning march to the title for the Gunners back when that was considered an extremely normal and Arsenal thing for them to do.
READ: Top 10 best teams who didn’t win Premier League has an obvious slippy No. 1
7) Tottenham (2011/12)
Good old Spurs. No other club has had quite so many unexpected and brief title challenges in the Barclays era as Tottenham. This season’s, for instance, lasted 10 whole games before going entirely to shit. There should be a word for it, really.
Loads to pick from with this bunch of jokers. You can go surprisingly far back, right into the days when they weren’t even Quite Good. On New Year’s Day 1996, for instance, Spurs spangled Manchester United 4-1 at White Hart Lane to sit just a point and a place behind the eventual champions. Six months later, they were seven places and 21 points behind them. There’s the 2015/16 third-in-a-two-horse-race effort of course, and the in many ways even funnier follow-up season in which Mauricio Pochettino’s side hit a peak where every week they seemed to be absolutely pummelling five or six goals past some poor sods yet somehow still ended up seven points behind Antonio Conte’s Chelsea. But that one can’t really be called unexpected after what had happened the previous year.
Back in 2011/12, Spurs really weren’t meant to be in contention, despite boasting a squad containing future Real Madrid stars Luka Modric and Gareth Bale as well as former Real Madrid star Rafael van der Vaart. And some young striker who played in the Europa League games but never really amounted to much.
Spurs had been famously rescued from disaster by Harry Redknapp and been on their famous Bale-inspired European adventure by this point, but an underwhelming summer had checked ambitions for the upcoming campaign. The ageless Brad Friedel proved a thoroughly canny bit of free transfer business in the end, but heading into the final week of August the only other signings Spurs had made were youngsters Cristian Ceballas and Souleymane Coulibaly. They did bring in Emmanuel Adebayor on loan and Scott Parker from a disgruntled West Ham before the clock ran down, but it still didn’t scream title challenge. Especially as August brought with it a pair of thumping defeats to both Manchester clubs.
But then something rather strange happened. Spurs started winning games. All of the games. For really quite an extended period of time. After starting the season with two defeats, Spurs won 10 and drew the other in an 11-game run that lifted them into the top three. That run ended with defeat at Stoke, but that didn’t check Spurs’ progress. A 2-0 win over Everton in January had Spurs right in a title fight alongside the two Manchester clubs who had humiliated them in August, level on points with United and just three behind City.
Spurs responded to this unlikely January opportunity as only Spurs could: by bringing in Louis Saha and Ryan Nelsen on free transfers.
Ludicrously, that looked like it might actually work. For one game. Spurs thrashed Newcastle 5-0 on a raucous February evening at White Hart Lane with Bale unplayable and Modric pulling all the strings. Could they really do this? Of course they couldn’t.
They won one of the next nine before recovering over the final weeks of the season to cling on to fourth place – they’d been 10 points clear in third after the Newcastle game – only to be denied a Champions League spot by Chelsea doing a madness in Munich. January’s title challengers were 20 points behind by the time AGUERRROOOOOOOO came along.
6) Wimbledon (1996/97)
Joe Kinnear? Nope, entirely serious. As 1996 gave way to 1997 in Cool Britannia a genuine Wimbledon title tilt was giddily plausible. You’re probably too young to understand this, but in Britain in the mid-90s it really did feel like absolutely anything was possible.
The Crazy Gang ended 1996 fourth, level on points with Arsenal and Manchester United and five behind Liverpool but with games in hand that, if won, would have put an unfancied side that had started the season with three straight defeats (and then seven straight wins) top of the lot.
Instead, a run of one win in 13 over the first three months of the new year put paid to those ludicrously possible hopes. Wimbledon ultimately finished eighth while exiting both domestic cups at the semi-final stage. It is perhaps one of the finest underrated seasons in terms of what almost was. Tony Blair and Britpop turned out to be quite disappointing too, in the end.
5) Everton (2013/14)
“We were probably a centre-forward away from being contenders for the Premier League,” David Moyes once said of his wonderful Everton side. It would take his departure for them to go closer than they ever did under his stewardship.
Roberto Martinez inherited a team with the defensive structure of Moyes and soon imprinted his attacking impulses upon it. For a while there, it was the perfect storm. Romelu Lukaku was the striker the Toffees lacked all those years, scoring eight goals in his first nine Premier League games after joining from Chelsea on loan. By late December, Everton had been beaten once in 17 matches and were just two points behind their Merseyside brethren, albeit down in fourth in a tightly packed table that saw the top seven teams separated by just six points.
Their slump was neither pronounced nor especially memorable, but a run of three defeats in four games at other members of that congested top seven – Liverpool, Tottenham and Chelsea – put any giddy title talk to bed, although a subsequent run of seven straight wins was enough for them to secure an entirely creditable fifth-placed finish.
They’ve finished no higher than seventh since, somehow contriving to end up 10th in 2020/21, a season that started with empty stadiums and for a couple of months the apparently real possibility of Carlo Ancelotti and Dominic Calvert-Lewin combining to perform a madness when victory at Sheffield United on Boxing Day took them briefly second in the table.
4) Arsenal (2022/23)
Easy to laugh at the idea of an unexpected Arsenal title challenge now, but it really is only a relatively short time since Arsenal were capitulating at Tottenham and Newcastle in laughably Arsenal fashion to toss away a Champions League spot and prove themselves yet again to be the most unreliable (or reliable, depending on your point of view) wastrels the league had to offer. We’re only going back 18 months here.
There was absolutely no suggestion then that this undeniably improving but apparently irredeemably fragile team under its unproven manager was about to do anything so daft as give the Manchester City juggernaut a proper run for its incalculably vast sums of money. Another – probably doomed – attempt to scramble themselves back into the Champions League was the order of the day for Arsenal’s 2022/23 campaign.
They ended it a laughing stock for finishing second, 17 points clear of fifth-placed Liverpool. Because football is brutal and shifting expectations change everything.
Arsenal really should have won it. They went top after the third game of the season and stayed there for pretty much the whole season until May. They were eight points clear of Manchester City in April. No matter how unexpected that position may have been – and it was very unexpected indeed – it is a position from which you simply have to win the thing.
Arsenal did not win the thing. A team that had dropped points in only six of its first 29 games then dropped points in six of its last nine . They managed only three wins and 12 points in that time, drawing chaotically from 2-0 up at both Liverpool and West Ham to sow seeds of doubt before an absurd 3-3 home draw with already doomed Southampton teed them up perfectly for a 4-1 thrashing at Manchester City. Further defeats to Brighton and Nottingham Forest sealed the Gunners’ fate but they have another chance now to put that pain behind them. Or magnify it tenfold. There are no inbetweens.
3) Aston Villa (1998/99)
The Premier League era has not, it would be fair to say, coincided with the most glorious period of Aston Villa’s illustrious history. They’ve had a couple of truly eye-catching seasons, mind, with their second-placed finish in the very first Premier League season an obvious contender. But 1998/99 was their best and perhaps unlikeliest tilt at the top, unless and until this season goes Full Leicester.
As with this year’s effort, it didn’t come entirely out of the blue. Villa finished the 1997/98 season in seventh, just as they did last year. But they were a fair way back in seventh, ending the season with only 57 points and only two more wins than defeats. Even in a season where 78 points proved enough to land Arsenal the title, Villa were more than 20 points off the pace. They were not among the favourites the following year.
But they started 1998/99 like a train. After 12 games they weren’t just top of the pile but also unbeaten having won eight and drawn four. Ten games into that unbeaten start they had also bolstered their attacking options with the signing of Dion Dublin back when you could do such a thing in November. Dublin scored five goals in his first two games as Spurs and Southampton were dispatched and a full-throated title charge appeared to be up and running.
Dublin scored two more in Villa’s next game but, alas, Liverpool scored four and Villa’s unbeaten start was gone. Draws against Nottingham Forest and Manchester United were followed by defeat to Chelsea and while Villa remained top the momentum had been lost. They recovered slightly with a run of four wins in six games, but top spot had been ceded and from there the wheels came well and truly off. After a 3-0 win over Everton on January 18, Villa didn’t win again until another 3-0 win against Southampton almost three months later. In all they won only three – and lost 10 – of their last 16 games to limp home in sixth, only one place higher but somehow two points worse off than the previous season. Manchester United would eventually pip Arsenal in a title fight Villa had long since departed and which nobody ever talks about much these days because it was of no great significance.
2) Norwich (1992/93)
One of the very finest unlikely title challenges came in the very first Premier League season. Before it was even Our League. Definitely before it was the Barclays. Norwich had finished just two places and three points outside the relegation zone in the last ever Old Division One season and, having sold Robert Fleck to Chelsea in the summer, they were tipped by many to be drummed out of the shiny new league in its inaugural season. Such talk was put to bed before August was done.
Norwich started the season with a daunting trip to Highbury and found themselves 2-0 down at half-time, but in what we assume was the very earliest evidence of The Conspiracy, four second-half goals saw the Canaries turn the game on its head. They again came from behind to beat Fleck and his new team four days later and came from a goal down to draw with Everton. By the end of August – and six games in 16 days – Norwich had four wins and a draw to their name to sit top of the table.
Their followed a truly baffling but enormously fun sequence in which thrilling wins were interspersed with thumping great defeats. Mike Walker’s side were not prone to half measures. They lost 7-1 at Blackburn and 4-1 at Liverpool yet still found themselves a dizzying eight points clear as December rolled around. They were still top at Christmas despite being in the midst of a six-match winless run. Spring brought another run of good form and a victory over fellow contenders Aston Villa in March – a fourth win in five with the odd game out of course being a heavy defeat at Wimbledon – set up a crunch title clash with Manchester United in which Norwich were the form team; United hadn’t won in four. Norwich lost 3-1, were thrashed 5-1 at what was in those days a properly rubbish Spurs side four days later and really slipped out of contention with a 3-1 defeat at East Anglian rivals Ipswich later that month.
There was still time for a 1-0 win over Liverpool in May, but the Canaries’ race was run. They would finish third in the end, 12 points behind champions Manchester United and boasting a truly magnificent goal difference of -4. Blackburn, a point further back in fourth, finished the season with a goal difference of +22.
1) Leicester (2015/16)
The undisputed king of all unexpected title challenges. Never to be repeated. Never to be bettered. A season that now, seven years on, feels too crazy to have actually happened. Did we all collectively imagine it? There’s no way it actually happened, surely?
Leicester. Premier League champions. That they were even in the Premier League in 2015/16 was something of a miracle itself. After a 4-3 defeat at Tottenham in March 2015, Leicester were rock bottom and seven points adrift of safety with nine matches left. They won seven of those matches to more than double their points total for the season and stay up with room to spare.
In hindsight that late-season form offered significant clues that better times were ahead, but it would still have been a crazy person who watched that late-season rush to safety and went ‘Probably win the whole thing next year tbh’.
But win it they did as loftier contender after loftier contender gradually departed the stage to leave Leicester the last team standing. Arsenal had a two-point lead by early January. Manchester City were right there. Spurs were loitering a few points further back. Arsenal fell away. City fell away. Suddenly and improbably, this had turned into a fight between Leicester and Spurs. But it was never even really that. Spurs never reeled Leicester in, never took top spot and in the end collapsed completely over the last few weeks of the season to hand second to a fast-finishing Arsenal.
As their rivals fell away, Leicester just kept on keeping on. They were never outside the top three from October onwards and when they reclaimed top spot in January they never relinquished it, losing just once – at Arsenal – in the last 20 games of the most extraordinary season the Premier League has ever witnessed.
Because the maddest thing isn’t that Leicester won the Premier League; the maddest thing is that Leicester absolutely pissed it. Nobody came anywhere near them. They won the Premier League by 10 points. Utterly, brain-meltingly, inexplicably ridiculous. Even if a lot of the explanation does come in two words, and those words are N’Golo and Kante.
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