Manchester City – again – won the English Premier League, but that doesn’t mean they’re only ones entitles to feel like they came away with something from this season.
Today we’ll look at the winners, with the season’s losers to be named tomorrow.
Erling Haaland
What is left to be said about Manchester City’s unholy combination of insatiable goal-bot and Vidal Sassoon model.
For a player that was supposed to take some bedding in, given the divergence in his playing style with the club he was joining, Haaland hit the ground running, taking only the inconsequential Charity Shield game to figure out his place in the grand scheme of things.
His 36 league goals (in 35 appearances) had pundits scrambling to bone up on their Dixie Dean and Tom Waring knowledge. Overall the Norwegian bagged an incredible 52 goals in 51 matches.
Powerful yet elegant, ruthless yet unselfish, Haaland is still only 22 years old. He’s just getting started.
Pep Guardiola
The City boss had to deal with losing a raft of important players: Joao Cancelo, Raheem Stirling, Gabriel Jesus, Oleksander Zinchenko, the retiring Fernandinho…that’s a lot of key men to lose when trying to defend your crown.
Sure, he added Haaland, but that precipitated a huge change in playing styles for a squad that had been drilled to within an inch of its life into certain methods; methods that were undoubtedly successful.
City’s other additions were a mixed bag. Manuel Akanji settled faster than most Guardiola signings and played a key role for the club. Kalvin Phillips far less so.
Yet Pep, the master tactician, managed to stitch it all together to storm home and claim a 3rd straight Premier League crown. In the process he became the only manager to win three straight leagues in England, Spain and Germany.
He’s a master of his craft.
Arsenal
It’ll hurt. It should hurt.
Finishing 2nd after sitting atop the Premier League table for 248 days out of 297 is, by any measure, a kick in the teeth. Yet, if you approached any Arsenal fan (yes, even those deluded nutters that make regular appearances on Arsenal TV) prior the season and offered them a 2nd placed finish, they’d have bitten your hand off!
The Gunners are young, talented and importantly have seemed to have developed a steel that had been missing within the fabric of the club for a good 15 years of so. Getting so close to the top of the mountain might have been too much of a burden for previous versions of Arsenal. This group, it would appear, are built of sterner stuff.
There have been ups and downs under Mikel Arteta’s stewardship but the general trend for the Gunners has been positive. Even if they regress a little next season, one would hope that the club keep the faith with their Lego haired Spaniard.
Brighton
What a season for the Seagulls!
There are a myriad of examples of clubs with formidable histories, impressive amounts of cash to spend and top notch facilities that continue to flounder. Then there is Brighton; a small provincial club from a holiday town that continues to punch well above it’s weight through extensive scouting, shrewd purchases (and sell-ons), inspired managerial appointments and a clear, shared vision for where they want to go as a football club.
To finish in 6th place, earning the right to play European football, is a remarkable achievement for a club of this size. Whilst it’s expected that they’ll lose key men in Alexis Mac Allister and Moises Caicedo over the break – presumably for something in the £100 range for the pair – you can be sure that Brighton’s scouting department have already lined up replacement options.
There is an inherent danger for a club of this size in that its borderline impossible to break through into the realms of the gilded elite though a model of self-sustained brilliance. Leicester and Southampton both gave it good shots. Both will play Championship football next season. Everton were there or thereabouts for the longest time before repeatedly stepping on rakes, Sideshow Bob style. Even Tottenham, a club with far greater resources that little old Brighton, keep tripping up as they approach that last step.
Surely every neutral hopes that Brighton can at least maintain this level of success, even if this is their ceiling.
Garry O’Neill
Once Scott Parker committed managerial seppuku after a 9-0 hiding by Liverpool, the Cherries tasked a 39 year old who had never been the top man at any club with restoring confidence in the dressing room and results on the pitch.
O’Neill started by not telling his players they were not good enough whilst in a public forum, which seems pretty smart. O’Neill also made some tactical tweaks, tightening up the Cherries passing game and with it their propensity to fall victim to swift counter attacks.
As for the man O’Neill replaced, it was remarkable that Parker managed to fall upwards into the managers role with Champions League club Brugge. He then of course proceeded to bugger that up, as well.
Eddie Howe
Howe was supposed to be, in effect, the caretaker manager of an oil-state’s plaything until they could bring in the high profile leader that their vanity project craved. Think Mark Hughes at Manchester City all those years ago. Despite that, Howe has only gone and led the Magpies to a Champions League spot, via a 3rd placed league finish.
Whilst Newcastle have made a smattering of higher-priced marquee adjacent signings, it stands to reason that the biggest transfer splashes around St James’ Park are yet to come. For sure, Kieran Trippier, Sven Botman, Alexander Isak and Bruno Guimares have been integral to Newcastle’s success, but the true measure of Newcastle’s success stems from Howe’s ability to coax new levels out the incumbents.
Miggy Almiron, Joelinton, Sean Longstaff, Fabian Schar and Callum Wilson, to name but a few, have all played career best football this season. Whilst playing in the company of better team mates certainly helps, Howe’s coaching acumen can’t be ignored.
Howe’s long stint at Bournemouth has perhaps seen him typecast as a batting British manager who doesn’t have the tactical nous for Champions League football. That may well be true, but Howe has at least earned the chance break out of that mould.
Eric ten Hag
The man deemed not good enough for Tottenham has stepped into Old Trafford and – terrifyingly for the rest of the league – started to reconstruct a fallen giant.
The Dutchman has none of the airs and graces of previous managerial appointees at Old Trafford but what he lacks in ‘United DNA’ or bombastic charisma, he more than makes up with such out of fashion qualities as ‘tactical nous’ and ‘man management’. It’ll never catch on.
In one season, ten Hag has shored up United’s porous backline, despite not having a keeper able to play the style he wants and restored good egg Marcus Rashford to his former levels. Most importantly, he was able to cleanly deal with The Ego that is Cristiano Ronaldo, dispatching him from the club as quickly and quietly as possible. Sure, it wasn’t seamless – it can never be when Ronaldo and Piers Morgan are involved – but it’s doubtful another manager could have handled it any better.
Unai Emery
Emery became – rather unfairly, it must be said – somewhat of a laughingstock among the British snobistocracy after his failure at Arsenal, when handed the impossible task of following in Arsene Wenger’s footsteps.
When Villa, sitting 16th in the Premier League, appointed Emery to take over from national hero Steven Gerrard, the same tired tropes were instantly rolled out.
Emery, to his eternal credit, simply hunkered down and took a team laden with high priced, slightly past their best mercenaries and turned them into one of the best teams in the division. Over his 25 game reign, Villa are 4th in the table, finishing 7th overall and earning European football next season.
He has also surely put the final nail in Gerrard’s hopes of managing his beloved Liverpool. A club that big would never hire a deeply flawed manager based purely on the misty memories of their glorious playing days. Would they?
Oh…hello there, Mr Lampard!
Fulham
For a team that was perhaps the most widely tipped relegation candidate (this writer certainly thought the Cottagers would go straight back down), winning literally all six matches against the three teams eventually relegated is one hell of a way to secure your own safety.
As an added bonus, Fulham fans get to spend the next few months flipping the collective bird at Chelsea fans, having finished eight points clear of their hated neighbours.
Everton
Everton? Surely they would be losers, right? Well, yes. Spoiler alert, they’ll also feature in our ‘losers’ column.
So why are the Toffees winners? Because despite serial and gross mismanagement at every level of the club (though it’s no coincidence that fortunes on the pitch changed a little once Frank Lampard was cast aside) the Grand Old Team live to fight another Premier League day.
For a club that could very well be pushed over the financial edge and cease to exist without that sweet Premier League lucre, relegation would not have just been disastrous, but potentially fatal.
Now, the club have a(nother) chance to right the ship, starting at the very top with incompetent majority owner Farhad Moshiri and meddlesome chairman Bill Kenwright. The sooner those two are replaced with a group that can demonstrate basic levels of competent governance, the better.
The survival not just as a Premier League club, but as a club in any sense, depends on it.
Roy Hodgson
The hero of Selhurst Park did it again. Consider his reputation restored.
