Every team to have come top of The Athletic’s Hope-O-Meter – was their optimism justified? | OneFootball

Leeds United have topped The Athletic’s Hope-O-Meter ahead of the 2026-27 season, the annual fan survey that has become a staple of the build-up to a new football season.

For Leeds supporters, however, this might be cause for concern rather than celebration. The mood around Elland Road is seemingly better than ever, so naturally we’re expecting everything to go horribly wrong. It would be classic Leeds to have their most optimistic pre-season in years before serving up an absolute stinker.

But, for the superstitious among us, is topping the Hope-O-Meter a blessing or a curse? We’ve gone back through every survey since The Athletic launched it in 2020 to see how the most optimistic fanbases fared once the football actually started.

Chelsea (2025-26)

A whopping 98% of Chelsea fans polled described themselves as optimistic last summer. Finishing 10th, behind Bournemouth, Brighton, Brentford and newly-promoted Sunderland, probably wasn’t what they had in mind.

Hindsight’s 20/20 and all that, but given how the season went it seems odd that more wasn’t made of Chelsea not having a summer off and being completely cooked once the season arrived.

You can understand some positivity, given how comprehensively they outplayed European champions PSG in the Club World Cup final. Looking back, that looked more of an outlier in Enzo Maresca’s reign and the wider BlueCo project as opposed to – as hoped – a statement-making corner turned.

Liverpool were second with a 97% optimism rating. They didn’t fare much better, but at least they qualified for the Champions League. Sunderland’s 91% optimism rating ended up the most well-founded.

Nottingham Forest (2024-25)

Fair play. You wonder if those 5% negative Nanceys felt a bit daft while enjoying Forest’s push for Europe.

Forest spent big in the summer of 2024 and made some excellent signings, including Elliot Anderson and Nikola Milenkovic.

Nuno Espirito Santo had done a solid job to steer the club to safety after coming in midway through the previous season, and a strong end hinted at a project taking shape.

But not even the most optimistic Forest fans would’ve envisaged them up in the top four for most of the season and gunning for Champions League football come the final weekend.

It says everything about how spectacularly good they were that season that an eventual seventh-place finish actually seemed underwhelming in the end.

Aston Villa (2023-24)

Ninety-nine per cent of Villa fans were optimistic going into Unai Emery’s first full season at the helm. And with good reason.

The direction of travel looked very promising after sacking Steven Gerrard in November 2023.

Had they sustained that form throughout the whole season, they’d have comfortably qualified for the Champions League, while Youri Tielemans, Pau Torres and Moussa Diaby (remember him?) were exciting additions to the squad.

Optimism fully justified and vindicated in the end. Villa were superb in 2023-24, qualified for the Champions League at the expense of Tottenham and Chelsea, and rubberstamped Emery’s standing as one of the best managers in the country.

At the other end of the scale, West Ham fans were 92% pessimistic following Declan Rice’s departure to Arsenal. They needn’t have been, ending up a respectable ninth place in the end. Things would get considerably worse once David Moyes left.

Arsenal & Tottenham (2022-23)

The two North London rivals were joint top of the optimism scale going into the 2022-23 season – 97% each.

They’d just finished fourth and fifth respectively, with Spurs qualifying for the Champions League at Arsenal’s expense.

There were solid reasons for believing that the good times were around the corner after Antonio Conte and Mikel Arteta had made their marks. But there’d be a sharp contrast with what came next.

Conte didn’t see out the season with Spurs, having thrown an almighty strop on his way out in trademark style. The Italian actually still, somehow, had them within reach of a top-four place when he departed in late March, but they nosedived after his departure and finished eighth.

Arteta, meanwhile, continued building at Arsenal. They made a colossal stride forward, with Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko bringing some title-winning experience to the Gunners squad.

Arsenal’s title challenge fell away in the end, but for two-thirds of the 2022-23 campaign they were sensational. The fans’ trust in the process was well placed.

Chelsea (2021-22)

With a 98% optimism rating on the Hope-O-Meter, Chelsea edged out Crystal Palace (95%), Liverpool (95%) and Aston Villa (94%) to top the chart.

Palace and Villa languished in the bottom half, without ever really looking like going down, while Liverpool chased down a quadruple and ended up on 92 points, just one off the champions Manchester City.

Reigning European champions Chelsea, meanwhile, were fine. They didn’t really push on under Thomas Tuchel, ending up a long way off the top two, but they won the UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup before losing both domestic cup finals to Liverpool.

About par, probably, but the last season of the Roman Abramovich era was probably not what the most hopeful fans were envisaging.

Southampton (2020-21)

Saints were comfortably midtable in Ralph Hasenhuttl’s first full season at the helm, and in that weird lockdown summer there was reason to believe the Austrian coach was building something sustainable at St. Mary’s.

Might they kick on and challenge for Europe after signing Kyle Walker-Peters and Mohammed Salisu? A 98.9% optimism rating, beating out Chelsea, Arsenal and newly-promoted Leeds, suggested that would’ve been the hope.

A run of seven wins and just one loss from 10 between September and December suggested that might be the case, but their strong form wouldn’t last.

Southampton fell off a cliff after New Year’s Day, with a run of 10 defeats from 12, and the nadir of a 9-0 mauling away to Manchester United in early February.

Hasenhuttl stuck around for another season, but they finished 15th again. Looking back, that period was the beginning of them circling the plughole and becoming a yo-yo club.

West Ham fans were 91.2% pessimistic going into that season. David Moyes led them to sixth, with their best points tally of the Premier League era. Funny old game.