Euro qualifiers, the daftest final ever, Golden Glove and the 20th team: 10 things still on line
The big stuff has already been settled this season. We’ve known for months now – long before mathematical confirmation belatedly rolled in as it so often does – who was winning the league and who was being sent packing back to the Championship.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to sort out in these closing days of the 2025/26 season. Here are literally 10 things of varying levels of importance that are still to be decided.
Some of next year’s Champions League qualifiers
Sure, Liverpool have got the league wrapped up. And yes, Arsenal are going to be in the Champions League having successfully now (barring mathematical absurdities) avoided the ‘third in a two-horse race’ whimsy.
We do know the top five will all qualify for the Champions League this year, but which three of Newcastle, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Man City and Nottingham Forest make it alongside Liverpool and Arsenal remains very much TBC.
And if Man City don’t beat Bournemouth tonight then we have the very delicious prospect of the five teams scrapping over third to seventh going into the final day separated by a single point.
It’s a better climax to the season than we thought we were getting a few weeks ago, anyway.
Some of next year’s Europa League qualifiers
And if we don’t know who all the Champions League qualifiers are, then we obviously can’t know the Europa League qualifiers either, can we? One of those who misses out on the Big Cup are joining FA Cup winners Crystal Palace in the Europa League, which is so easy to win even Spurs or Man United can do it.
Crystal Palace London-bussing their way to a second trophy so soon after their first is a fun prospect, and there’s a very plausible chance that they too could do so in a London-Manchester final to match this year’s, against the team they’ve just beaten at Wembley. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Next year’s Conference League qualifier
Or even if there’s going to be one at all. It’s possible England won’t even have a team in next year’s Conference. We don’t pretend to understand the science of it but if Chelsea finish sixth and Newcastle don’t finish seventh and then Chelsea win the Conference League then we end up with six English teams in the Champions League and three in the Europa League! And none at all in the Conference! Because reasons!
Golden Glove: Raya v Sels
Alexander Isak’s untimely injury has denied us the chance to pretend the Golden Boot is still up for grabs this season, with a malfunctioning Erling Haaland needing seven goals in two games to pull level with long-time clear leader Mo Salah atop the charts. It’s not happening, is it?
But Isak’s absence against Arsenal may well have helped gives us a neck-and-neck Golden Glove fight, because David Raya’s hard-won clean sheet against Newcastle – one that required him to make five saves in the first 20 minutes as Newcastle started much the brighter – allowed him to pull level on 13 clean sheets with Matz Sels.
Sels looked like moving to 14 for most of Sunday afternoon’s game at the London Stadium, but while Jarrod Bowen’s late goal proved to be nothing more than consolation nerve-jangler for the result, it has left this fight going down to the wire neck and neck.
And if you were a betting man you’d have to now favour Raya, with Arsenal up against Southampton on the final day and Sels facing the altogether trickier task of keeping out Chelsea.
The match that will determine once and for all which club is the greatest on earth: Tottenham or Manchester United
We know England will have six teams in next season’s Champions League. We know who two of them are. We know the other three will be some flavour of competent. And then there’s the piss-boiling sixth, which is going to be one of the two stupidest teams in the league at this time because one of them is going to win the Europa League.
A lot of people are unhappy about this. Arsene Wenger is so cross about it all that he’s briefly stopped trying to destroy football entirely with his batsh*t non-solution to toenail offsides. People who have absolutely no problem with the team that finishes fifth in the Premier League being in the Champions League are foaming at the mouth at the very idea of Spurs being there, people presumably in for the shock of their lives when they find out how Spurs qualified for the Europa League in the first place.
We have a strong inkling about how Wednesday night will pan out based on years of evidence that tells us two things: one, Manchester United can always pinch a trophy no matter how abject they appear to be, but more importantly two, the joke is and always must be on Spurs.
‘Only Spurs’ is an overused expression in these pages but there really is no other club quite like them and it really does feel like Only Spurs could carve out a situation where this season is either a) their best season in 41 years or b) their worst season in 48 years, with there being absolutely no middle ground and the whole thing settled by one game in Bilbao.
And again, recent history tells you one of those options instinctively feels far more likely. But at the same time United are simply so bad that even the apparent formality of beating Spurs in a final cannot be taken for granted.
What we do know for absolute certain is that by 11pm on Wednesday night X-formerly-Twitter will be awash with cry-laughing emojis and people saying ‘Can’t believe these are in the Champions League’. The loser is going to get absolutely cooked and the winner is going to boil more p*ss than has ever been boiled before.
Can Antony win two European titles in one season?
The Europa League final is the most obvious example of how no matter what happens everyone wins yet also somehow everyone loses, but let’s not forget the humble Europa Conference League final because that is not without its charms.
If Chelsea have been kind enough to finish seventh in the Premier League, then them winning it as everyone has just assumed all season long is what will happen means that England will have 10 teams in Europe next season and that’s just plain nutty.
But if Real Betis win it on the back of a Man United win in the Europa League then Antony will have won more European trophies in one season than Arsenal have in their entire existence, and you have to say that’s magnificent.
The race for eighth
This is the kind of thing we should all be able to get behind: a final-day barney for one place that probably won’t matter. And even if Chelsea do the necessary on the final day to make eighth potentially matter, it won’t be until three days later and the Conference final that we actually know for sure.
This is Barclays heritage. Brighton are in pole position now after beating unapologetically beach-based flip-flop-sporting cigar-puffing Liverpool on Monday night, knowing that a final-day victory at Tottenham – who are either going to be too happy or too sad to care, surely – will be enough even if Bournemouth win both their remaining games.
Brentford are still in the mix as well, but that Brighton win over Liverpool has taken Fulham out of the equation.
The race for 17th
West Ham, bless them, have managed to stay involved in this dignity-shedding contest despite not having the excuse of a Europa League final to possibly get them out of jail, but they face Ipswich on the final day and thus this surely will come down to a fight between the stoppable force of Manchester United and the movable object of Tottenham Hotspur.
Sure, it’s perhaps not the most significant contest between the two that remains to be played out this season but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all just stop and take a moment to marvel at what we’re actually saying here. Spurs. Man United. Seventeenth place.
One way or another we can’t imagine either of them getting anything out of Sunday’s final game after what will for both teams whatever happens be the season-defining emotional extreme of Wednesday night.
And in any case both find themselves up against demonstrably superior teams who actually have something to play for in the league, a quaint concept Spurs and United abandoned months ago. United play Villa, still in the Champions League hunt, while Spurs host a Brighton side in pole position for the uncomfortably Chelsea-dependent but nevertheless potentially significant eighth place.
If we’re being very greedy indeed, we do want whoever wins the Europa League to finish 17th because it is slightly funnier than a Champions League qualifier finishing 16th even though that is already very funny indeed.
Crystal Palace’s maiden half-century
Some might argue that Crystal Palace have already achieved the biggest thing they’ll do this season having won the FA Cup and thus the first major title of their entire history. To that we say tish and fipsy because that will pale into rank insignificance if they can secure a 50th point for the first time ever in any Premier League season.
They are currently on 49 points with two games to go, the second of which is now set to be a rare old occasion at Anfield in which everyone is just having a big old party as Liverpool collect their Premier League trophy and Palace revel in their new-found status as trophy winners.
It’s one of the games we’re most looking forward to on the final day purely because such a vibe is so rare in your toxic, tribal, online modern football warfare. A game where everyone in the stadium will just be having a lovely old time celebrating a successful season. ‘Snice.
We’re thinking double guards of honour. We’re thinking both teams cavorting about with their trophies. We’re thinking everyone celebrating a late Eberechi Eze equaliser that takes Palace to the promised land of 50 points. We want to go to there.
The sacrificial play-off winner
We did genuinely almost forget this one, which is slightly embarrassing but also revealing of how the land now lies for teams promoted from the Championship.
But in terms of formalising things we don’t yet know about this season, we do need to stop and consider that we don’t yet in fact know the full line-up for next season’s Premier League until it is confirmed which poor sods are setting themselves up for a season of Derby-bothering ritual humiliation.
It’s going to be Sheffield United or Sunderland, so it’s going to be a big club that in days gone by you would absolutely think had every chance of giving survival a red-hot crack. Now you assume they’re doomed unless they decide to just break all the rules and accept a points penalty in their second season is probably worth the risk if they’ve already managed to stay up at the expense of, oh, let’s say, West Ham.
More likely, though: the winner of Football’s Richest Game instead condemns themselves to a season of being patronised very nearly as much as we’ve just done here while desperately scrambling to cobble 20 points together before dropping back down to the second tier to try and do it all again.