Arsenal win the title, Leeds survive, Liverpool’s new dynasty – a 2025/26 target for each Premier League club
Apparently Ruben Amorim has been given the target of steering Manchester United back into the top six next season. That is, frankly, a wild challenge for a team who were two places outside that last season, never mind this catastrophe of a campaign, and have all manner of other teams to try and get past beyond the decaying remains of the old Big Six. Possibly while also having to juggle Champions League commitments for which they are profoundly ill-equipped at this time.
But a target it undoubtedly is, and thus inevitably one that set us to thinking what an early next-season target for everyone else in the Premier League might be while this near-sorted season meanders aimlessly towards its provocatively unexciting conclusion.
Arsenal: Buy a striker, win the title
Is it as simple as that sounds? No, obviously it isn’t. But there really is no compelling reason – beyond standard ‘Arsenal bottle merchant nearly men lol’ banterings – why it shouldn’t look that simple in retrospect by next summer.
We’ve already made this our headline prediction for next season and we stand by it; if Arsenal get the summer right, which means bringing in at least one proper goalscoring striker and in an ideal world two, there should be more doubts about everyone else – including Liverpool – than the Gunners.
There really is no compelling evidence to suggest a De Bruyne-less Man City are going to suddenly destroy the field again, while Liverpool still have to prove this season was the start of something new and not the last hurrah of the old.
Yet with Arsenal, this doesn’t just feel like something that’s possible but something that has to happen now if it’s going to happen under this set-up.
There’s already renewed noise around Arteta and dwindling patience after another (likely) second-place finish and an impressive run to the semi-finals of the Champions League.
Patience with The Process grows more strained, and it really does feel like he would not be able to survive another season without tangible delivery on the undoubted promise and quality.
READ: Gyokeres too old, too big, too striker-ish for Arsenal? The nonsense debunked
Aston Villa: Cement status in new Big Six/Seven/Eight
Villa can’t control what the nonsense members of the old Big Six get up to, but they can ensure they establish themselves among whatever the new ‘big club’ order happens to be when the dust settles on this current period of flux.
Whether it’s six, seven, eight or whatever, next season feels like the one in which Villa can really secure their place with the big beasts. It would represent a fourth straight year of getting among the old big six if they have it in them and would mark them out as a different proposition to any previous interlopers since Spurs and City themselves got among the old Big Four.
Bournemouth: Keep hold of inspirational manager, finish mid-table
It’s been another fine season of demonstrable progress for a club establishing themselves in the Premier League’s new ‘middle class’ under an inspirational manager who will inevitably be courted by bigger clubs but whom we suspect is in fact in just the right job to maximise and highlight his strengths without any real attention landing on his weaknesses.
At their best, a team capable of stunning runs of elite form but also prone to spells in the doldrums. But when the going is good it really can look like anything is possible, and more of the same seems like a fine idea right about now.
Brentford: Keep hold of inspirational manager, finish mid-table
It’s been another fine season of demonstrable progress for a club establishing themselves in the Premier League’s new ‘middle class’ under an inspirational manager who will inevitably be courted by bigger clubs but whom we suspect is in fact in just the right job to maximise and highlight his strengths without any real attention landing on his weaknesses.
At their best, a team capable of stunning runs of elite form but also prone to spells in the doldrums. But when the going is good it really can look like anything is possible, and more of the same seems like a fine idea right about now.
Brighton: Bother the top six again
Harsh to the point of ridiculous to criticise a club like Brighton for mainly finishing in the middle of the Premier League pack given the endless churn of players and managers they have to embrace to keep the plates spinning.
They are the best at what they do, sniffing out talent on the cheap and then selling it for huge profits often only one or two years later.
But this is now the third season in the last four that will end in mid-table when at various points it has promised so much more. Ninth in 2021/22, 11th last season, and somewhere between 8th and 10th this season. It’s very much fine, but it would be lovely to see them kick on again in Fabian Hurzeler’s second season and do something just a little bit more 2022/23.
Burnley: Try not to embarrass yourselves like last time
This also applies just as much to Sheffield United should they be the silly sods to emerge from the play-offs facing the dread prospect of a year of ritual Premier League humiliation.
Chelsea: Reach the end of the season with genuine confidence the right manager is in place
Chelsea are an absurdity and quite unlike any other football club knocking around. They spend insane money tying players to insane contracts, but have made themselves so shambolic that they simply cannot be judged by conventional methods.
Anyone else spending that kind of money would pretty clearly be expected to be in a title race. When Chelsea accidentally found themselves in one this year they weren’t happy about it at all, shouting about how they weren’t in fact in a title race until they’d successfully manifested it.
So yeah, they should have a stretchier target than ‘have a convincing manager’ but here we are. We are not remotely convinced at this time that such a manager is or can be Enzo Maresca, but we don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask that by this time next year there is some kind of reason to believe that whoever is in fact the manager might be worth sticking with. So that the following season’s target can actually reflect what should be happening at this club.
Crystal Palace: Top-half finish
That 50-point target, so elusive for so long, is so close now that Palace can almost taste it. One point from their last two games will be enough to reach the promised land.
Weirdly, some of their fans seem to think winning the FA Cup might actually be more important than an arbitrary round-number points target but that’s up to them, we guess.
What that 50-point effort almost certainly won’t do this season is deliver a top-half finish, with Bournemouth four points and a far better goal difference away in tenth.
So there’s next season’s requirement, then. Complete what would itself be only their third top-half Premier League finish since promotion back in 2013.
Everton: Enjoy the new digs in a stress-free campaign
David Moyes’ new-manager bounce and the travails of the bottom three have given Everton the luxury of being able to enjoy the second half of the Goodison Park farewell season in relatively stress-free fashion. That’s been enormously welcome.
The next challenge is to ensure the first season in their stunning new home is one that can also go by without fingernails chewed to the quick.
Everton’s change of address will in time be one that requires more than mere comfortable survival, but for now that does feel like enough. It will likely take a while for Everton – fans, players, everyone – to get used to the new environment and that loss of the familiarity that’s so important to the idea of home advantage could easily counter or even outweigh the sheer buzz of it all.
Seems fair, then, with the scale of that upheaval and the inevitable unknown quantities involved that a smooth ‘more of the same’ on-field transition be the primary target here.
Fulham: Keep going for a full season
History is going to be kind to what Fulham have done in recent years. Every team promoted since they came back up in 2022 has gone straight back down, while the Cottagers themselves had to snap a four-year yo-yo streak when staying up.
And when yo-yos come to rest gravity generally takes over. Fulham are already an exception and a praiseworthy one.
But one thing their three absolutely and entirely fine Premier League seasons since re-establishing themselves in the top flight have had in common has been a stumble over the finish line that has made the final picture look slightly less impressive than it otherwise might.
They’ve finished 10th, 13th and are currently 11th so absolutely nothing is f*cked here. But they have finished each of those seasons slowly.
Since the international break this season Fulham have lost five out of seven. From the same point last season they managed only two wins in the last nine games.
In 2023 the rot set in even earlier, with just 14 points from their last 14 games and their only wins in that run coming against the bottom four.
The challenge then for next season is to do everything the same for the most part…but then finish the job off properly and see where that might take them.
Leeds: Survive
The sands have shifted for promoted teams in recent years. This obvious baseline goal has now for the most part been replaced by ‘just don’t embarrass yourselves’. And in some cases ‘don’t be worse than Derby’.
Leeds are too big for that kind of nonsense, though. A plucky season-long survival fight would be welcome enough after this year’s efforts from the promoted three but in the case of Leeds that still wouldn’t be enough were it to end in relegation.
The difficulty lies in identifying the clubs they can overhaul, and this is where the growing gulf becomes such a problem. Leeds have been the best side in the Championship, but a look at the clubs just above the relegation zone this year should terrify them.
Fine, Spurs and Man United will probably be less stupid next season and can surely be ignored, but above them are your West Hams and Wolves and the Evertons of this world. And Leeds have an awful lot of work to do before their squad is anything like ready to compete with what those lads already have.
READ: Man Utd, Chelsea starlets three of 10 Premier League youngsters ripe for loan
Liverpool: Prove this season was the start of something, not the end
Will obviously start the season as favourites given the way they’ve destroyed the competition this year, but rightly or wrongly we still have our nagging doubts about Liverpool’s ability to turn this season’s domination into a team that defines a Premier League era and hoover up multiple titles.
It’s undeniable that this season’s success was Arne Slot winning with Jurgen Klopp’s team – all due respect to the sizeable contribution of Federico Chiesa – and while that does in so many ways make the achievement all the more impressive it does also raise questions.
Was this just a wonderful coming together, a bottling of lightning in which Slot’s coaching style and Klopp’s squad were able to achieve the spectacular? Can Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah go again or will the years start to catch up with them? And who picks up the slack then? And we’ve not even started on TAA.
There will, obviously, be more comings and goings this summer than last and while it isn’t necessarily as straightforward as Liverpool MUST defend their title to prove they are here to stay, they absolutely do need to be right in there and involved to the end to convince us this is the start of a Liverpool dynasty and not just one stunning season.
Manchester City: Title challenge
Weird for City’s target not to just be as straightforward as winning the league, but it does feel like they might need to walk, or at least jog, before they can run here.
City being City and Pep being Pep, it still wouldn’t entirely surprise us to see them 12 points clear this time next year, but right now it would be enough just to see them in genuine contention again and with Guardiola looking willing and able to build another great team.
Manchester United: Top six
Not what we’d have gone for, because there currently appear to be – at a rough estimate – 15 teams better placed to achieve this but it is apparently the target United’s brains trust has set Ruben Amorim and his merry band of dafties, so there it is. No point us making up our own target when the actual club has already set one.
We’d have to be quite the insufferable little tagnut to think our target is more important than the club’s own. All we’ll say is this: the very best of luck to you all.
Newcastle: Remain in Champions League qualification mix, make better job of Champions League itself
Winning a trophy and now almost certain to be back in the Champions League next year – possibly even as Premier League runners-up – makes this a wildly successful season of target-hitting jubilation on Tyneside.
The silverware was just so absurdly overdue that it mattered not one bit that it was ‘only’ a Carabao; now it’s a question of whether a Newcastle freed of that particular albatross can really kick on.
For the short term next season, it seems reasonable to suggest that maintaining their position among the upper echelons of the Premier League would suffice as long as it’s accompanied by making a better go of the Champions League itself.
Newcastle were, in truth, a touch unlucky on their last go at it a couple of years back as events and circumstance transpired against them. They were always competitive in a tough group, but they did still finish bottom of it.
The new format should help, and something akin to Aston Villa’s run this season provides a fair benchmark.
Nottingham Forest: Don’t be one-season wonders, make decent stab at whichever lesser European comp they’re in
Among the more interesting teams next season, because what happens next has such a wide range of possibilities. Has this season been a bit of a rogue one? One in which the sheer scale of the fallibility pretty much everywhere outside Anfield – and Forest won there anyway – has serendipitously combined with Forest’s xG-baiting, p*ss-boiling counter-attacking game?
Or have they actually cracked a code that will allow them to compete at the top end for multiple seasons? We don’t need to see another genuine tilt at Champions League qualification, necessarily; just enough to confirm this season hasn’t been, to be unnecessarily harsh about it, a fluke.
Comfortably top half would be enough for that, while Forest also have the chance to turn (likely) Champions League disappointment this season into something more positive next season. This season has starkly shown the gulf that exists between those European competitions and the potential for even the very daftest of English clubs to have their fun in the lesser ones.
Tottenham: Restore sanity
Only Spurs. Only Spurs could have such two obvious ambitions as ‘win trophy’ and ‘qualify for Champions League’ and find themselves one win – against a team they’ve already beaten three times this season – away from achieving both and yet also find themselves entirely mired in mortifying existential crisis.
Even at Man United, an even bigger and at this time even stupider football club, the sense of crisis is not so all-pervading. The Europa League final feels far less like a pivotal sliding doors moment for them than it does for Spurs.
United don’t have the same desperate, yearning hunger for a trophy – they win them all the time regardless of how sh*t they happen to be at any given moment. And they are still Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. They’ll still attract players, they’ll still have the chance to build what they want to build under Ruben Amorim, even if losing the final mires it in greater early uncertainty.
Spurs are completely f*cked if they don’t win the final, and might be quite f*cked even if they do. Even if they do win it, they probably need to thank Ange Postecoglou profusely for delivering on his second-season-trophy promise in the most absurd manner imaginable and move on.
What they definitely need to be next season is just less utterly, repeatedly and predictably mental.
West Ham: Don’t give promoted clubs any reason to be optimistic
We’re currently of the view that West Ham’s current level of sh*tness – worse than absolutely everyone bar the cast adrift relegated clubs and the two idiots who aren’t even trying in the league anymore – is not particularly reflective of where they can or should be.
Appointing Graham Potter when they did was both a shrewd move, one that reflected a reality in which the trajectories of both parties had pulled them into each other’s orbit at an opportune moment where it didn’t look like an embarrassing option for either, yet also one that conceded the current season was being written off.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Julen Lopetegui idea had proved a bad one, and there was no point persisting with someone serving up Moyes-lite dullness with no obvious way out of the doldrums.
Potter has not necessarily improved results or performances, but he does offer at least the prospect of better and above all more watchable things to come.
When we think of Good Potter, of Brighton Potter, we think of a meticulous manager with carefully crafted and well-drilled plans. He is a manager who absolutely needs a pre-season. And if anything is left of that Potter, and we really think he’s still in there, then it is only when next season is firmly under way that we can even begin to assess where he and West Ham are at.
The vital thing to do at the start of the season, though, is to avoid offering any encouragement at all to those promoted clubs looking for someone they might be able to drag into a fight. There are few contenders for that role, and West Ham shouldn’t really be one either, but circumstance places them as one of the few for whom a noticeably poor start would offer genuine succour to the newbies.
Wolves: Start properly, don’t require managerial change by November
Wolves have a recent habit of allowing the sloppy end to one season to bleed into a difficult start to the next, often accompanied by rushed or half-baked managerial change.
They lost four of their last six games in 2020/21, and then four of the first five in 2021/22. That season ended with a seven-match winless run, followed by one win in the first nine of 2022/23.
The 2022/23 season then ended with four defeats in their last seven games, and one win in six started the 2023/24 campaign.
That season ended with seven defeats in the last 10, mirrored by seven defeats (and no wins) in the first 10 games of this season.
The fact Wolves have pretty comfortably remained a Premier League club throughout all that tells you that in the middle part they’re generally doing fine.
But these stumbling finishes and slow starts feel like an unnecessary frustration.
It did look like they might be about to buck the trend this time with a six-game winning run through March and April raising genuine hopes of approaching the summer with momentum and optimism.
May, though, has brought a pair of defeats and with games against Palace and Brentford to come there is no guarantee Wolves do snap back out of it before the summer. And as with West Ham above, and Wolves’ own early struggles this season, it would appear a particularly bad time to be offering early hope to newcomers.
Wolves also have a fine manager on their hands; it would be deeply careless should a continuing trend for slow starts leave them feeling the pressure to switch to a tried-and-tested firefighter by November.
Someone like Gary O’Neil, maybe.