Arsenal bottle the lot, Spurs relegated, Liverpool glory: The 10 best/funniest outcomes this season | OneFootball

The 2025/26 season is already shaping up to be the best/funniest on record.

With all apologies to both sides of the North London divide, we’re sure you understand but just how funny this season ends up being is going to largely depend on just how much despair you two must suffer over the next couple of months. Sorry about that.

Spoilers be damned: obviously the funniest outcomes to this season involve Tottenham going down and Arsenal bottling absolutely everything.

But that’s not to say there aren’t – sometimes, admittedly, related – opportunities for funny outcomes elsewhere. There are, in total, precisely 10 amusing things that can happen. Amazing how often that happens.

These are they.

Tottenham relegated

In almost all circumstances, these ‘best/funniest outcomes’ pieces rely on an absurd series of outlandish or unlikely events to occur. It makes sense, of course. Almost by definition, the best or funniest thing that can happen isn’t actually that likely to happen.

But this is not most situations, and Spurs are not most football clubs. Having already done the funniest thing possible last season by winning the Europa League and finishing 17th they really are going to go one better this season and get themselves actually relegated for real.

It’s an astonishing outcome – surely the single most stunning end-of-season outcome to hit the Premier League since Leicester’s 2016 title – and also objectively hilarious.

Yet Spurs are still so incredibly Spurs that even that isn’t enough. They’ve even found an astonishing way to achieve the already astonishing feat of getting relegated.

Think about it. Spurs are, very obviously, going down. They are quite comfortably – to both the eye and, across the second half of the season, by results – the worst team in the Premier League. They will go down. They know they are going down. Their rivals know they are going down. Nobody now doubts that they will go down.

And yet, they are not in fact in the relegation zone. More than that, they have never once been in the relegation zone all season long. How does that happen? How can you have a team that everybody knows is definitely getting relegated when we’re going to get as far as April without them ever actually being in the relegation zone?

It is the present and future of the Tottenham.

Arsenal remain potless

Until Sunday, Arsenal ending a trophy drought by winning literally everything loomed as an undeniably funny but also very obviously nightmarish possibility.

Now, alas and alack, the only funny outcome for Arsenal’s season is for them to win nothing at all. It’s far less likely than Tottenham’s relegation as well as less harrowing on the grand scale of North London woe. But suddenly very possible. Fair to say some of the more skittish elements of the Arsenal fanbase have got a serious case of The Fear after watching another trophy opportunity go awry.

We’ve all perhaps been guilty of just assuming Arsenal would obviously win something this season – and it will still take something extraordinary for them not to win the Premier League at the very, very least – but Sunday offered a reminder that Arsenal are absolutely at their best and funniest when not winning things.

Keeping faith with the ultimate Carabaoman Kepa Arrizabalaga was always a monumental gamble, and banter is the absolute last of the fates you want to be tempting.

Especially when you’ve got entirely out of the habit of winning trophies at all.

Arsenal’s kindly paths in both the FA Cup and Champions League also offer the most delicious of all possible outcomes on the red half of North London. They could absolutely finish second in all four competitions.

Liverpool win Champions League

Not the most original thought, because Liverpool ending a difficult and challenging league season by winning the Champions League wouldn’t even be a novelty for them.

But it would also throw all the currently straightforward Slot Out positions for a loop. And given it was already funny to see Slot match Klopp’s tally of Premier League titles when he was doing a good job, it would logically be even funnier for him to also match Klopp’s tally of Champions League titles when not doing a good job.

Man City win domestic treble

We really wanted them to win the quadruple but in a way this is actually better. The quadruple would actually have got Man City some attention, and that won’t do. But for them to win a second domestic treble – an achievement previously considered essentially impossible – that nobody either cares about or notices would be a sensational bit of business.

Especially if the above trio of events have come to pass. Spurs going down, Arsenal somehow winning nothing having strutted around all season with main character energy – albeit anti-hero, Walter White-type energy – and Liverpool ending a dismal campaign with their seventh Big Cup success would genuinely relegate City doing another treble to a footnote in the season.

Nobody will ever talk about City winning the league if they do so this season, will they? They will talk long and hard and with great joy about Arsenal losing it. It would become even less about City than their 2013/14 title, one that is now so exclusively remembered through the prism of Liverpool’s collapse against Chelsea that we still think a sizeable percentage of really quite keen football fans will have a rock-solid false memory of Chelsea in fact being the league winners that season.

Spurs and Arsenal launch joint legal campaign against Man City

With Spurs finishing 18th and Arsenal second behind Man City yet again, the two rivals set aside well over a century of mutual loathing to embark on a mortifying and desperate joint legal battle with the aim of getting the 60-point punishment that everyone now agrees seems just about spot on for whatever squiffy business City were up to for all those years applied to the season just finished because reasons.

Fans of both Spurs and Arsenal will unanimously agree that this whole sorry attempt at an AFCON-style retcon shows just how embarrassing the other club really is.

Forest win Europa League and finish 17th

An absolutely brilliant bit last season. In our view, the Premier League should go full Stewart Lee with this one. Just keep on having teams win the Europa League while finishing 17th every season until it stops being funny and then continue having teams win the Europa League while finishing 17th until it becomes funny again. And then keep on having teams win the Eur… well, you get the idea with that.

Bonus points to Forest, of course, for winning the Europa League at all when they didn’t even qualify for it. Not even Spurs managed that.

Next season their challenge is to pretty much win the same number of Champions League games as Premier League games. We already know they’re perfectly happy to appoint former Tottenham managers with comically disastrous recent Premier League records, so getting Thomas Frank in to oversee proceedings shouldn’t be an issue.

Forest winning the Europa has the added bonus of extending Aston Villa’s absurd trophy drought and once again placing their fans atop a tightrope where they must attempt their delicate, awkward balancing act of insisting Villa are simultaneously a very big boy who should be taken seriously but also too teeny and tiny to be expected to ever actually win anything.

Crystal Palace win Conference League

Oliver Glasner going out with a bang as a third London team win a trophy the rest of England couldn’t care less about.

Another European trophy in the hands of an English club that shouldn’t actually have been in that competition. The prospect of all three European trophies landing in Premier League hands to once again set the Premier League Ruining European Football, Actually pendulum swinging anew.

All of it the very ideal kind of thing. And the more trophies teams like Palace win during the Arsenal trophy drought (that, if you remember, we decided earlier does somehow get extended for another year) the better.

Liverpool, Chelsea and Aston Villa all finish outside top five

Unlikely, yes, but suddenly not impossible. Liverpool and Chelsea appear determined to f*ck their Premier League seasons directly into the sun for unknown reasons while Aston Villa have looked awful tired any time they’ve faced semi-competent opposition in recent weeks.

It does seem like Villa will hold on, but the fact these three have allowed Manchester United to lock down a top-four finish at this point should shame them all.

We’ve also at this point lost track of how many English teams are qualifying for the Champions League here, but it’s got to be like seven or something if Forest win the Europa League and Liverpool win the Champions League while finishing sixth? We don’t know the precise details, but we do know it’s a funny number and therefore to be encouraged.

All seven of them – if seven indeed it be – will duly finish in the top eight of next season’s league phase before going out in the last 16, in accordance with the prophecy.

Brentford and Sunderland qualify for Champions League

If we’ve got all those lads finishing outside the top five, then by definition we’ve got to have some others finishing inside it.

Any of the teams currently within six points represent great options. So we trust that Everton, Fulham and Brighton won’t take it too personally when we say Brentford and Sunderland are the very best of those options.

Sunderland reaching the Champions League as a newly-promoted club on the back of bantering Newcastle off every derby day surely needs no explanation.

Brentford in the Champions League as Spurs get relegated is also an entirely obvious source of hilarity, and one that most obviously makes the media’s job of protecting Thomas Frank’s reputation at all costs that much harder.

We’re fully braced for them to collectively excuse Frank from meaningful blame once Tottenham’s inevitable fate is confirmed. There will be mention of injuries, and board incompetence, and feckless players, and Ange’s record, and the plain and simple fact that Spurs are essentially unserious and ungovernable, and none of it will be entirely without basis.

But while none of it could ever really excuse the fact he took just 12 points from his last 17 Premier League games in charge without ever showing any apparent concern about that, the actual thing that makes it impossible for his adoring fans in the media to save him has nothing to do with Spurs and everything to do with Brentford getting better after losing him, their captain and about 40 goals last summer.

Liam Rosenior launches a podcast and starts selling a course and/or supplements

We don’t really actually want this one to happen, but it occurs to us that if we carry on with whimsy we might only end up with a 10 per cent hit rate (thanks, Spurs!) so we do need another absolute nailed-on banker to get the numbers up.

The podcast/course/supplements will be called something like ‘The Limitlessness of Limitlessness’ or ‘The Ceiling Myth’ or ‘Protecting Your Ball in the High-tempo World of B2B Sales’ or, in a rare moment of clarity and honesty, simply ‘Spoofer’.