The 10 most depressing one-time Premier League clubs to support in the last decade
Sometimes it’s nice to write about miserable things, isn’t it? Just abject, relentless misery. That’s where the clicks are. So we hit upon a formula, one that by sheer happenstance allows us to slightly mischievously shoehorn in Manchester United for clicks.
The criteria for entry are thus: the misery level of the last 10 years for any football club that has at any time been in the Premier League. Make sense? Good.
Plenty of contenders who narrowly missed out here having carelessly had upticks in the last couple of years. Your Sunderlands, Your Coventrys, The Ipswich Towns of This World and so forth. Anyway, here’s our 10.
10) Manchester United
Sure, they’re an incongruous addition here alongside these other tales of genuine woe and misery. This nightmarish, horrible, miserable decade for Manchester United fans has brought them only an FA Cup, a couple of Carabaos and a Europa League title. It’s a haul that would sustain most football clubs through an entire century-plus history and absolutely sustains almost anyone across a mere decade.
Almost. This, though, is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. We can all scoff and laugh when we read things like “long-suffering Manchester United fans” but it’s also perfectly reasonable for expectations to colour fans’ perception of events.
In 2013, Manchester United won their 13th and still very much last Premier League title. Of the eight seasons they’d failed to win the league in the Barclays era, they’d been runners-up five times and third in the other three. They also picked up four FA Cups, a handful of League Cups and, reasonably memorably, a pair of Champions League titles along the way.
The post-Fergie decade has to be viewed in the context of those astonishing numbers. Unmatchable, certainly, but the drop-off is still insane.
Only twice post-Fergie have United even finished in the top two of the Premier League, and on those occasions they’ve been a distant 19 and 12 points behind those noisy neighbours. From 13 titles in 21 years to not even a single proper title challenge for 11 years is quite something, and all while the blue half of the city is enjoying success on a scale not even Fergie’s United could manage.
They’re about to chew up and spit out another manager who succeeded elsewhere but couldn’t get to grips with the toxic combination of a top-six-standard squad at a club that demands titles. Maybe in time the new ownership structure will deliver meaningful improvement but it’s going to be a long road. We don’t really expect any fans of anyone else on this list (or those not on the list) to give a single shiny sh*te, but there were fully grown adult United fans for whom, only a decade ago, the worst imaginable season was finishing third and losing the FA Cup final.
You can see why it makes watching Antony spin around in circles hard work.
As James so famously almost put it, ‘If I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being, while still enormously wealthy in comparison to most, still notably poorer than I had become accustomed to’. Their version scans better, probably.
READ: The top 10 best Premier League sides of all time
9) Bradford City
West Yorkshire really doesn’t pull its footballing weight, frankly. Given the size of the place, and the towns and cities therein, and the fact that even the biggest of them are one-club cities, a couple of years of Huddersfield striving and a briefly exciting Leeds United really is a poor Premier League show in recent years.
Back at the turn of the millennium, there was also Bradford, who had a couple of years in the top flight but have never remotely looked like bothering with that since. After relegation from the Premier League they spent a couple of years in the bottom half of what was then still called Division One before sliding confusingly into what was by now League One and they’ve never since got out of that division at the right end.
It’s quite striking when put like that: a team only relegated from the Premier League in 2001 has never played in the Championship.
Limiting ourselves as we must only to the last decade, and it’s a near textbook 10 years of misery. Happily, we don’t even need to bother ourselves with the unlikely run to Wembley in the 2013 League Cup and promotion via the play-offs as the inevitable passage of time sees it fall outside our remit.
In the 10 years we’re concerned with, Bradford have achieved zero promotions but suffered three play-off heartbreaks and a relegation.
The good news for the Bantams this season is that there is absolutely no danger of play-off heartbreak this time around, sitting as they do 15th in League Two.
8) Everton
Like United, Everton have shown it doesn’t take relegation to make things miserable and depressing. They are also a football club in the north-west of England with a long and proud history in the game. That is really where the similarities end. Coincidentally, Everton is also where a lot of Manchester United waste product goes to die.
Anyway, a decade ago, Everton were in the process of finishing fifth in the Premier League under Roberto Martinez. It was their ninth top-eight finish in 10 seasons and suggested the post-Moyes future at Goodison was bright.
They’ve finished no higher than seventh since, and are now to be found right back where they were in the early years of the Premier League, desperately scrabbling to stay in the top flight and preserve their long and unbroken run of doing so.
To make things worse, Liverpool have spent much of that decade being conspicuously good which was at least something Evertonians didn’t have to worry so much about in the 90s.
Bright spots on the horizon include potential new owners and what really does look like being another magnificent new stadium. Going to be quite something when the first season in it ends up being Everton’s first outside the top flight since the 1950s.
You know things aren’t great when the highlight of your season is having a 10-point deduction reduced to a six-point deduction on appeal, especially when the Sword of Damocles still hangs over you with further punishments to come still decidedly possible.
Even with Burnley and Sheffield United throwing in historically abysmal seasons, Everton remain in relegation trouble and could still be sent down by their off-field shenanigans while Manchester City celebrate another league title. The game may very well have gone.
Perhaps cruellest of all in a decade of near constant misery was that brief six-week spell at the start of the weird, Covid-shaped 2020/21 season when all things seemed possible and it really did look like Dominic Calvert-Lewin and James might propel Carlo Ancelotti’s side into a title race. In a season where Manchester United could lose 6-1 at home to Spurs and Liverpool could go down 7-2 at a pre-decent Aston Villa on the same day it really didn’t seem entirely ridiculous to imagine Everton going all the way.
They finished tenth in the end, and Ancelotti f***ed off back to Real Madrid.
7) Sheffield Wednesday
Still to be found in yer da’s list of the 20 Proper Premier League Teams that he has point-blank refused to update since 1997, with Nottingham Forest’s recent return all the vindication that stubborn prick could ever need, but haven’t actually kicked a single ball of Barclays in the 21st century.
That time has been spent mainly kicking around the middle of the Championship with the occasional play-off disaster and mortifying drop into League One for a club that really should be far better than this.
Did lose points for this table by carelessly getting themselves promoted from League One via the most absurdly unlikely play-off comeback of all time against Peterborough, but their commitment to misery sees them well on course for an instant return to the third tier, so fair play to them for that.
6) Derby County
They haven’t been back in the Premier League since that 11-point annus horribilis, a season whose sheer awfulness has been thrown into even sharper focus this season when you realise Sheffield United and Burnley are both already guaranteed to be less sh*t than that.
READ: The Premier League’s five worst ever teams
But a decade ago, things looked reasonably promising. There was cause for renewed optimism. They narrowly missed out on promotion in 2013/14 via the play-offs having finished third under Steve McClaren.
Then Mel Morris took over and started spending all manner of money on a scale the club had never seen before with a return to the Premier League a clear goal. The club’s transfer record was broken four times in three years, but such spending also demands instant results and Morris also got through nine manager in six years from 2015 to 2021 when it all unravelled.
There were three further play-off agonies in that time, with Derby twice losing in the semis and in the most sliding doors moment of all in the 2019 final to Aston Villa.
A couple of years later, with Villa establishing themselves in the Premier League, Derby were to be found narrowly avoiding relegation and being placed under a transfer embargo for alleged financial fair play breaches, leaving manager Wayne Rooney with a squad comprising nine senior professionals.
In September 2021 the club went into administration and copped a 12-point penalty. Any realistic hopes of managing to avoid relegation despite this were dashed a couple of months later when they had a further nine lopped off for breaching EFL accountancy rules. A further three-point penalty was suspended, so that was handy.
The club barely survived but they now do at least have a fighting chance of getting back out of League One. But warnings from history abound. They currently sit second, level on points with third-placed Bolton, and you can already smell the play-off disappointment.
5) Stoke City
Sure, they were perfectly capable of spending a decade in largely trouble-free, Arsene Wenger-baiting mid-table comfort in the Premier League, but can Stoke do it on a wet, Wednesday evening in Stoke?
The answer now is sadly no. Relegated as recently as 2018 after 10 years of mischief-making and big-club-bothering in the Barclays, they have never truly adapted to life back in the Championship. They’ve not even finished in the top half of the bloody thing in five years post-relegation and are now locked in a relegation battle with fellow former Premier League clubs turned misery-sufferers Huddersfield, Birmingham and QPR.
QPR are probably, for what it’s worth, the unluckiest – if that’s the word – side to miss out on this list. Next year’s update, though, when the 2013/14 promotion to the Premier League no longer counts to their score, should look very different.
4) Reading
A top-flight side as recently as 2013, the following decade was spent locating all the misery the Championship has to offer, from relegation battles, to play-off heartbreak, to narrowly missing out on the play-offs heartbreak and then finally, relegation to League One last year.
And all of it set against the backdrop of tinpot owners, points deductions and fan protests, culminating recently with a fans’ group responding to the latest punishment from the Football League with a withering statement that quite brilliantly contained the very slightly hidden phrase ‘Fuck the EFL’ in the first letters of each line.
3) Swindon Town
That solitary Premier League season in 1993/94 may be an outlier but it’s still been a miserable last decade for Swindon. They do lose points for managing to sneak in a promotion for winning League Two in 2019/20, but that’s an asterisked, Covid-curtailed title and they went straight back down anyway.
They lost on penalties in the play-off semi-final the following year, then finished 10th and are not going to match that this year.
And behind the scenes it’s been messy as hell. Lingering existential threat to your club’s very existence is always a fun part of the misery isn’t it? When you can’t live with your football club but also can’t bear the prospect of living without. Ownership wrangles and unpaid wages pockmarked the 2021 summer and three years later the on-field trajectory shows little sign of improving.
2) Charlton
It’s grim enough if you merely consider the on-field endeavours of a club that spent the first seven years of the 2000s in the Premier League. Two relegations and one promotion have left them mired in League One.
But like so many on this list, that’s only one part of the misery. The mere mention of the name ‘Roland Duchatelet’ will forever bring Charlton fans out in cold sweats and lengthy swears after his disastrous mismanagement of the club triggered multiple protests and a flurry of managerial changes, broken promises and eventually, inevitably, relegation.
Duchatelet was eventually run out of town in 2019, since when Charlton have gone through owners the way most Football Clubs go through managers. They’re already no their third new set of owners since the Belgian’s disastrous five-year reign, and have in the last month appointed Nathan Jones as manager and matched a club-record winless streak of 18 games. That run ended, fittingly, with victory over fellow misery-sufferers Derby.
1) Oldham
Not been a great decade for teams called Athletic. Charlton have had it tough. Wigan narrowly missed out, and Oldham take top spot with a decade of woe that began with high-profile attempts to sign Ched Evans, ultimately abandoned but not before dignity and reputation had been shredded, sashayed through various winding-up orders from HMRC and a slow, steady decline in on-field results.
In 2018, Oldham were relegated to League Two and faced a first season in the fourth tier of English football since the early 70s. Don’t worry, though, because things soon got even worse. The next couple of years featured more winding-up orders and the threat of administration or worse.
In April 2022, after a 2-1 defeat to Salford interrupted by protests against the latest owners, Oldham’s relegation out of the Football League was confirmed, sealing their fate as the first former Premier League side to tumble all the way out of league football.
They stumbled to a 12th-placed finish in their first attempt at getting back in, but are at least in with a fighting chance of a play-off spot this time around.