Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.
This was the weekend when Manchester City once again failed to record a victory, drawing 2-2 at home to Brighton, Nottingham Forest consolidated third place with a 4-2 win over Ipswich, Tottenham lost once more and Manchester United got a restorative victory over Leicester.
Here we will discuss Newcastle winning their first trophy in generations, Chelsea’s regression in the second half of the season and ponder whether this will be the worst group of relegated teams the Premier League has ever seen.
Is it OK to have mixed feelings about Newcastle winning the Carabao Cup?
In the recent film Conclave, about the selection of a new pope, Ralph Fiennes’ character, Cardinal Lawrence, gives a speech about the virtue of doubt, how certainty and dogmatism are not necessarily good things.
That sprang to mind at the end of Sunday’s Carabao Cup final, in which Newcastle had beaten Liverpool with a more convincing performance than the 2-1 scoreline suggests.
Liverpool were terrible, maybe their worst performance of the season, and it’s difficult to recall a time when they have played as badly in a final. The thought occurs that, while the added calm brought by new head coach Arne Slot since the summer is one of the reasons they’re going to win the Premier League title, could it be that these one-off occasions require a little more blood, a little more aggression, a little more… Jurgen Klopp?
Klopp did lose his first three finals as Liverpool manager, so it’s probably best not to lean into that theory too hard. Not least because they weren’t really allowed to play well yesterday, completely shut down, dominated and bullied by Newcastle.
It seemed like everyone in black and white was in tears at the end of the game, and with good reason: this was Newcastle’s first domestic major trophy since the 1955 FA Cup and their first significant trophy of any description since the 1969 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (a precursor to today’s Europa League).
Newcastle United fans celebrate victory (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Generations have known only disappointment, nine straight defeats in Wembley finals since that victory 70 years ago. For the fans who lived the ennui of the Mike Ashley years, this is what they’ve been dreaming about.
For the neutral, too, it’s undeniably a positive that someone from outside the usual crowd has won a major trophy. Since 2010, the only teams not named Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal to have won one of the Premier League, the FA Cup and the League Cup are Birmingham, Swansea, Wigan and Leicester. A break in the inevitability of the biggest clubs hoovering up all the honours is to be welcomed.
And yet this is where Cardinal Lawrence’s doubt is relevant: while it’s good to see emotion and a different team succeeding, this isn’t a fairy tale story. It isn’t churlish to wish that the team who have broken the hegemony of the big boys weren’t one owned by Saudi Arabia, a club being used by a state to further its own goals.
Every success that Newcastle enjoy is another piece of validation for a country that, just this week, established a government unit to police ‘immoral acts’. The sight of Yasir Al-Rumayyan, chairman of Newcastle and also governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) holding the trophy aloft on the Wembley pitch after the game, should be sufficient riposte to anyone who thinks the club has nothing to do with the Saudi state.
It’s possible to hold these two things in your head at the same time. As Cardinal Lawrence says in the film, embrace the uncertainty.
Newcastle chairman Al-Rumayyan with the Carabao Cup (Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)
What’s happened to Chelsea?
Back in December, it seemed as if Enzo Maresca had done the implausible even before the halfway point in his debut season as their head coach and had made sense of the broiling chaos that is Chelsea.
They looked like one of the only plausible challengers to Liverpool for the title, leaving champions City and their identity crisis in their wake and seeming even more convincing than Arsenal. Cole Palmer was tearing teams apart, Moises Caceido looked more like a £100million player should and Nicolas Jackson was scoring goals.
That all feels like a long time ago now we’re in the middle of March.
Chelsea’s season has been split into two extraordinary halves: the first saw them second in the table on 34 points, with just two defeats from 16 games. But since they drew with Everton just before Christmas, it has flipped entirely: in a table only of matches played after that point, they are 15th, below West Ham and Wolves, and perhaps most embarrassingly only above Manchester United on goal difference.
They have won just four of their 13 outings since then, and look incapable of creating chances. The performance at Arsenal on Sunday was perhaps a nadir, admittedly without the injured duo of Palmer and Jackson, yet it was still pretty embarrassing that they had 68 per cent possession but only eight touches in the home penalty area. According to Opta, the 0.35 expected goals (xG) they generated was their lowest total yet under Maresca.
Chelsea’s form has slumped since Christmas (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Perhaps this is just a bad run of form, exacerbated by injuries and fatigue. Or perhaps the first half of the season was the exception, that Maresca was overperforming with a poorly-constructed squad, and these last few months have been closer to Chelsea’s true selves.
Either way, it’s a troubling echo of last season: Maresca’s Leicester City started the Championship campaign in similarly rampant form, going 12 points clear at the top of the division in February.
However, the wheels came off after that, a run of six defeats in 10 meaning that, while they were promoted automatically with plenty of room to spare, the last third of the season was more of a struggle than it should have been. When Maresca then left for Chelsea, there wasn’t exactly wailing in the streets among elements of the Leicester support.
If Chelsea finish this season in the top four or five, Maresca will have done his job. But they have not looked like a Champions League team for a long time.
Are the bottom three the worst the Premier League has ever seen?
Last May, on the day when the 2023-24 season’s three relegated clubs were all-but confirmed, this column pointed out how historically bad those teams had been.
We wrote: “Sheffield United, Burnley and Luton Town have been just about as bad as many feared they would be… The teams coming up from the Championship for next season will have their flaws, but you just hope they will be better than this intake.”
As it has turned out, that was extremely optimistic. The relegated three last season were dreadful, but this lot have been worse.
After 29 games, Southampton, Ipswich and Leicester have 43 points between them: that’s the least the bottom three have cumulatively gathered in Premier League history at this stage. The next worst was 52 (which happened last season).
The gap between Leicester in 18th and Wolves one place clear of the relegation zone is nine points: again, that is the biggest gap at this stage of a season in the 33-year Premier League era. There’s only been one previous season where that gap has been more than three points: the relegation battle has never been over this early before.
Leicester slip to another defeat, this time against Manchester United (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
Southampton have nine points, which — and you’re probably ahead of us here — is the fewest a Premier League team have ever had after 29 games. Even Derby County, current holders of the record for fewest points in a full season when they ended with 11 in 2007-08, had more than that. If Southampton win all their remaining nine games, which feels a tad unlikely, they will still only have 36 points, a total which would have got you relegated in half of the Premier League seasons to date.
And they aren’t an outlier. The bottom three as a whole have taken one point from the last available 45. If Leicester and Ipswich collect points at the rate they have been all season for the remaining weeks, they will finish on 22 points each: that total would have had you bottom of the table in 23 of the Premier League’s previous 32 seasons.
They have been pathetic, and part of the reason the likes of Manchester United and Tottenham, suffering historically bad seasons themselves, can be absolutely confident that the worst won’t happen.
But it is more worrying from a broader perspective: once again, the three promoted teams will be relegated a year later, this time having barely competed. Last season looked a little closer than it was because of Nottingham Forest’s PSR points deduction: there hasn’t been one this term to partially obscure the deficiencies of the league’s worst teams.
Maybe next season will be different. Maybe the teams at the top of the 2024-25 Championship, most of whom have been in the top flight quite recently and thus have the parachute-payment cushion, will make a better fist of things.
The ‘middle class’ of the Premier League are now strong enough to disrupt the top half of the table, but those at the bottom are worse than ever.
Coming up
- If the prospect of men’s international football doesn’t fill you with joy, then good news: there’s some Women’s Champions League quarter-finals action this week to keep you interested. Tuesday sees Arsenal travel to Spain to face Real Madrid in the first leg of their tie, while it’s Bayern Munich vs Lyon in the evening’s other game.
- Then on Wednesday it’s round two of the Manchester City-Chelsea quadrilogy, after the WSL champions won the League Cup final on Saturday, with the first leg in Manchester, and in Germany, Wolfsburg host a Barcelona side chasing their third straight European title in a repeat of the 2022-23 final.
- But if you are a men’s international football person, then good news too: there’s loads of it coming up. It begins with a few decent Nations League games on Thursday, including Italy vs Germany, the Netherlands vs Spain and a repeat of the 2018 World Cup final, Croatia vs France.
- Then on Friday, it’s Thomas Tuchel’s first game as England manager, kicking off his tenure with a World Cup qualifier against Albania at Wembley, which you’d imagine would be pretty straightforward.
- Next weekend there’s domestic club action with Arsenal vs Liverpool and Everton vs Crystal Palace in the WSL, and a small sprinkling of more men’s international stuff… although if you can get hyped for Liechtenstein vs North Macedonia, then fair play.
(Top photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
