Man United next? Ten Premier League teams who dropped 10 places in a single season
Manchester United weren’t always brilliant last season, but they did finish third. It was a distant third, a significant distance behind the two teams who actually were good for extended periods of time, but third nonetheless.
They currently sit 13th in the league after five games of the current season and, given the nature of the wins over Nottingham Forest and Wolves that make up their six-point haul thus far, you could argue they’re pretty lucky to be as high as that.
Now some would argue that five games into the season is far too early to be judging, but it’s Manchester United and judging them early means numbers. They’re currently 10 places lower than they were last season, and if they don’t pull out of this tailspin then that would mean a place alongside this merry band of assorted heroes who also dropped at least 10 Premier League places from one season to the next this century.
We’re more than ready for this to look ridiculous in a few months’ time, but for now let’s revel in the idea that United might soon be on this list. And even if they do turn it round, we’ll soon be able to wheel this out again for someone else who’s conspicuously shitting the bed. Fair warning, 11th-placed Newcastle: we have our eye on you.
There are loads of nine-place drops that just miss out on this list – including perhaps the nearest in scope and majesty and hubris to United’s current attempt from Chelsea (from champions to 10th and from third to last season’s miserable 12th) but it’s double-digits only to dine at the top table in this club. A presumably very collapsible table.
Sunderland – 10 places, 7th in 2000/01, 17th in 2001/02
A rare example of third-season syndrome here from Sunderland. If you’re guilty of conflating 1999/2000 and 2000/01’s consecutive seventh-placed finishes in your mind as ‘that time Kevin Phillips scored all the goals’ then, well, join the club. It was actually the first of those two seasons where Phillips scored 30 goals, but Sunderland were just as effective – if slightly less fun – the following year. Seventh again, but with Phillips’ tally slashed in half. They scored 11 fewer goals in all, but conceded 15 fewer and amassed 57 points to go with the 58 the previous year.
And then it went a bit wrong for Peter Reid and Phillips and everyone else. The goals dried up – Sunderland scored one fewer goal in 2001/02 than Phillips himself had managed two seasons earlier – and only Ipswich’s even more precipitous decline spared Sunderland from relegation. The stay of execution would last only a year, though: Sunderland were relegated grimly in 2003, bottom of the pile with a meagre 19 points and a truly staggering 25 from safety in a year West Ham contrived to get themselves relegated with 42.
Leeds United – 10 places, from 5th in 2001/02 to 15th in 2002/03
The infamously and legendarily mad spending of the Peter Ridsdale era around the turn of the century looks adorably quaint viewed from a world where the going rate for a competent defensive midfielder is £100m but a spending plan that relied entirely on qualifying for the Champions League every season was never sustainable and alas, qualification for the Champions League every season proved beyond an admittedly talented and fun side. Say what you want about Ridsdale-era Leeds, but at least they were fun. Todd Boehly, we look to you.
‘Doing a Leeds’ became a careful-what-you-wish-for shorthand to describe any team spending beyond its means in an effort to swim with the big fish, but it’s still quite something to see just how starkly their league finishes show the rise and fall: 11th in 1997, then fifth, fourth, third, fourth and fifth. Then 15th. Then 19th. Then 14th in the Championship. Then an outlying upward tick with a fifth-placed finish in the second tier. Then 24th and off to League One for three years’ penance.
Everton – 10 places, from 7th in 2002/03 to 17th in 2003/04
One of the fun parts of this is identifying whether either season represents a blip. And the great thing about this Moyesy effort from Everton is that you could make a case for both based on what went on before and after. The 2002/03 season was Moyes’ first full campaign in charge of Everton and marked a significant shift from what had gone before. Having steered them clear of relegation in 2001/02 to an eventual finish of 16th, which matched the previous year’s effort and followed consecutive finishes of 15th, 17th, 14th and 13th, Moyes led Everton all the way to seventh and only a point outside the top six and Europe after a run of four defeats in the final five games of the season.
That looked every inch the blippy season when the following year was another spent at the wrong end of the table, even if the more concerted travails of Wolves, Leeds and Leicester kept Everton clear of any truly serious relegation bother. To highlight precisely what a different league the Barclays was 20 years ago, Everton finished one place and two points behind Manchester City, and three places behind Spurs, none of which was considered unusual. Charlton, Bolton and Birmingham all finished in the top half. This is Barclays heritage.
Anyway, from the Moyes rather than Everton standpoint that was undoubtedly the blip. They sold Wayne Rooney, bought Tim Cahill and finished fourth the following year and in the top seven for seven of the next nine seasons.
Reading – 10 places, from 8th in 2006/07 to 18th in 2007/08
It’s a tale as old as time. Club gets promoted to the Premier League – in Reading’s case, for their first ever go at the top flight – and rides the crest of a wave through that first season before cruel, bastard reality comes and boots them hard in the arse and anus a year later. How many times have we seen it?
Reading served early notice they were going to be good Barclays value by coming from 2-0 down to beat Middlesbrough 3-2 in their first ever go at Our League and were joyously, chaotically streaky from then on. They won three games out of four – drawing with Manchester United in the other – in September and October before losing four on the spin. How do you respond to four straight defeats? Four straight wins, obviously. Then you lose four of the next six to round out 2006 and start 2007 by twatting West Ham 6-0 to kick off a six-game run of five wins and a draw. And so it continued: four defeats in five here, 10 points from four games there and before you know it you’ve finished only a point off European qualification in your first ever crack at top-flight football. Easy game, isn’t it?
No. Reading never hit the heights of the previous season in 2007/08 but were doing broadly okay as the end of 2007 approached. They were mid-table and five games unbeaten before heading to Tottenham and losing an enormously silly match 6-4 – which is the score of a tennis set not a football match – and had the wind taken entirely out of their sails. That defeat, for a team that had already lost 7-4 to Portsmouth earlier in the season, was followed by seven more to plunge them into a full-blown relegation scrap from which they would not escape.
West Brom – 10 places, from 10th in 2016/17 in 20th in 2017/18
The archetypal yo-yo club, West Brom accidentally spent eight straight seasons in the Premier League between 2010 and 2018. But they adapted and made the best of it, finding their own way to remain a yo-yo club within one division by skittishly flitting between upper mid-table and relegation battles. Fair play to them. They had a nine-place plummet from a Romelu Lukaku-inspired eighth in 2013 and Saido Berahino-hindered 17th in 2014 but that was just the warm-up for their work a few years later.
Tony Pulis’ side were cosy mid-table finishers in 2017, but finished abysmally. Seven defeats in the last eight games of the season cost them little in 2016/17, dropping them only from eighth to 10th, but a rot had set in.
A couple of 1-0 wins over Bournemouth and Burnley to start the 2017/18 season proved wildly deceptive. A third win wouldn’t come until January, by which time Pulis had been replaced by Alan Pardew via a caretaker stint for Gary Megson in the most West Brom series of managers imaginable, and their only other wins of the season would come after Pardew had been replaced by Darren Moore – now that’s the most West Brom series of managers available – by which time it was far, far too late.
Leicester City – 10 places, from 8th in 2021/22 to 18th in 2022/23
Not Leicester’s steepest Premier League decline but their costliest as the Brendan Rodgers era that had begun with Champions League challenges gave way to mid-table mundanity and ultimately to actual relegation after the great man had been given his marching orders.
In truth, Leicester were flattered by that eighth-placed finish in 2022. There were signs for much of the season that it was all going a bit wrong, but 10 points from the last four games of the season lifted them beyond much of the mid-table morass and a team as low as 14th in the second week of May ended up a deceptive eighth.
It helped them get a second entry on this list anyway (you can probably guess the other one…). The season started horribly, with a grim run of six straight defeats ending with 5-2 and 6-2 humblings from Brighton and Tottenham either side of the first international break.
Still the consensus was that this was very much a team too good to go down, and a run of five wins in the next eight appeared to right the wrongs of August and September. It was the very falsest of dawns, though, with Leicester losing 12 of their next 16 to slump right back into the relegation zone.
Consecutive must-win six-pointers against Leeds and Everton were drawn in April and May, with heavy defeats to Fulham and Liverpool leaving Leicester right on the brink. Victory over West Ham on the final day could not save them.
Newcastle United – 11 places, from 5th in 2011/12 to 16th in 2012/13
Newcastle are currently languishing in the bottom half after last season’s Champions League qualification heroics, but will have to go some to match the cliff they fell off a decade ago.
An 11-match unbeaten run to start the 2011/12 season had Newcastle as high as third in November and they never dropped below seventh despite a sticky patch around the turn of the year. A sparkling run of six straight wins in March and April followed by a 2-0 win at Chelsea in which Papiss Cisse scored a goal that defied physics, logic and all known laws of the universe briefly rekindled Champions League hopes, but the Magpies would have to settle for fifth after ending the season with back-to-back defeats to Manchester City and Everton.
There were no obvious signs of the ensuing collapse when Newcastle began the following season with victory over the Spurs team who had pipped them to fourth only to have Champions League football snaffled from them by Chelsea winning the Big Cup. Ten games into the season, Newcastle had lost only twice and sat cosy in mid-table. Then they lost 10 of the next 13 to tumble carelessly into relegation trouble. A run of four wins in six between January and March eased those fears, but it was nevertheless a disappointing and dramatic fall from the highs of the previous season.
Leicester City – 11 places, 1st in 2015/16, 12th in 2016/17
A case can be made for Claudio Ranieri’s sacking at Leicester just months after delivering the most astonishing storyline in Barclays history being the single most Modern Football thing that has ever happened. Never before or since has a manager been more powerfully punished for success.
They really were in genuine danger of following a title with relegation, though. When the painful decision was finally taken that Ranieri had to be replaced less than a year after celebrating the title win with Andrea Bocelli, Leicester had lost five straight games and sat just a place above the bottom three. In came Craig Shakespeare to steady the badly listing ship, and five straight wins meant that the astonishing double-whammy of title-relegation would at least be avoided but he could still lift them only as far as 12th.
Sheffield United – 11 places, 9th in 2019/20, 20th in 2020/21
Chris Wilder’s side with their underlapping full-backs and overlapping centre-backs had leapt from League One to the Premier League in three years and were bang in European qualification contention halfway through the season, sitting as high as fifth at Christmas after a 1-0 win at Brighton.
They tailed off slightly in the end, but only slightly, with European hopes only finally extinguished by a three-game losing run at the end of Project Restart.
The seeds were sown, though. That three-game losing run became a seven-game one before they got their first point of 2020/21, which they celebrated by promptly losing another eight games in a row. A first win of the season didn’t arrive until January by which time there was serious and gloomy talk of Derby’s all-time heroics in their 11-point season. That particular ignominy was avoided comfortably enough in the end, and there was a memorable win at Old Trafford to enjoy too but they never got themselves out of the basement and finished where they had been since October: last.
Ipswich – 13 places, from 5th in 2000/01 to 18th in 2001/02
The greatest collapse of the lot, though, belongs to the Tractor Boys. Marcus Stewart’s unlikely goals propelled an unlikely and newly promoted Ipswich side to an unlikely 66-point total and fifth place in 2001, finishing only three points behind third-placed Liverpool and Champions League qualification. In another example of how football is very different now, Manchester City were relegated.
George Burley was quite rightly named manager of the year, but never has second-season syndrome hit like it did here. They beat Derby 2-1 in August but didn’t win again until beating Tottenham on December 22.
Decent results around the turn of the year appeared to rule out the prospect of relegation at least, but Ipswich won just one of their last 13 matches to follow a truly great season with one so miserable they have never again dared to return to the Premier League. A record-breaking 17-year run in the second tier ended with exit out the wrong end, and it is only now having got promoted back to the Championship that they are daring to consider a return to the top flight. They currently sit third after six games.
READ: Liverpool among top 10 Premier League sides that were great and then went rubbish