F365’s top 10 pricks of 2025 features Infantino, Trump, Man Utd and fans… | OneFootball

The end of the year means best-of lists and awards, doesn’t it?

Gongs and baubles and flowers for the great and good. Well tits to that. We’re interested not in who’s been good but who’s been bad. And not even bad as in ‘not good’ but bad as in complete and utter pricks.

This list is an absolute hive of scum and villainy, with the worst thing about it the sure and certain knowledge that the top two pricks are going to be even worse and even more prominent in 2026.

Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich

Managed a pitiful 24 points between them from 57 Premier League games in the first half of 2025, denying everyone the chance to enjoy any kind of relegation fight.

A pathetic effort all round and one put into context by even the weakest of the latest batch of promoted clubs this season. Burnley have more Premier League points this year from a game less than these three sorry individuals.

The utter failure of these three to even put up a fight allowed certain clubs who shall remain nameless (not really, we’re going to name them literally immediately in this list) to completely sack the league off with no consequence. Well, no relegation-based consequence anyway. Infuriatingly bad.

Manchester United

The trio of promoted clubs who adhered to the Homer Simpson principle that if something’s hard then it’s not worth doing meant that while a historically bad season for Manchester United was still funny, it wasn’t as funny as it could or should have been had it contained even a sliver of actual relegation peril.

But mainly they get on this list for the unspeakable crime of being This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About and putting every single one of your eggs in a basket labelled ‘Simply beat the sport’s most notorious trophy-dodgers in a major final’ and then somehow managing to not even do that.

Sure, everyone took the p*ss a bit but we still feel like this just isn’t talked about enough. Manchester United should be too embarrassed to leave the house after something like that. But it didn’t even cost anyone their jobs.

And now they’re bumbling around being kind of halfway competent but not really. Unacceptable. They are no longer bad enough to be consistently amusing, nor good enough to be interesting. Because they’re only ‘good’ because standards have been allowed to fall so desperately low.

Not one other post-Ferguson manager would have been able to get away with ‘Maybe nick a top-six spot with a following wind’ as an acceptable stretch goal. Ruben Amorim might be a genius; it might actually be the only way for Manchester United to escape the Fergie Era once and for all.

Recalibrate the club so entirely that sometimes qualifying for Europe is good, actually.

Tottenham Hotspur

One of the single most absurd calendar years in Premier League history from this complete pack of pricks.

Finally won a trophy, which was prickery in itself because Spurs’ only job is to make other clubs who don’t win trophies feel better about themselves. What are your Evertons and Villas supposed to do now? Well, as it turns out it’s ‘move into spectacular new stadium’ and ‘challenge for the actual title’ but that doesn’t give Spurs a pass.

But what Spurs did in order to win a trophy was to completely abandon everything else. They stopped even pretending to try and get Premier League points – again, the pricks at the top of this list have a lot to answer for here – in order to win the Europa.

And then decided that actually that wasn’t okay, that finishing 17th (albeit chasms clear of actual trouble) in order to win a trophy wasn’t acceptable. So they sacked the manager. And then got rid of the man who sacked the manager.

And now they might finish 17th without even competing for a trophy anyway. There is a complete pointlessness to Spurs at the moment.

Say what you like about trophy-dodging, at least it’s an ethos. At least the trophy drought provided some clarity of purpose; it’s now impossible to ascertain what Spurs are even trying to achieve.

They’re not really trying to compete with the rest of the Big Six anymore, they’re not really trying to win trophies anymore because they’ve ticked that off and don’t really need to bother again apparently.

Nobody knows what constitutes a good season for Spurs now, or more importantly who is actually in a position to decide. At least when Daniel Levy was around we all knew where we stood, but now he’s toddled off to spend more time with his CBE.

David Sullivan

A proud and storied football club is being allowed to rot. West Ham have been outside the Premier League for only four seasons in all, but relegation is looking increasingly likely after another wasted summer and unsuccessful manager sacking.

Nuno Espirito Santo will likely soon go the way of Graham Potter as scapegoats are sought for why things are going so terribly wrong for a club whose owners decided that there was money to be saved by limiting ambition every year to simply being better than whichever poor saps got promoted every season.

The problem with making ‘Just stay in the Premier League’ the ceiling rather than floor of your ambitions, though, is that there is no margin for error when things go wrong. Or when Leeds and Sunderland turn up with unexpected confidence and a bit of actual ambition.

West Ham have been sleepwalking towards this situation pretty much from the moment they moved to the London Stadium. If there was any point at all in giving up everything they had at Upton Park for the soulless, cavernous bowl that is the former Olympic Stadium then it was surely about increasing income and becoming more competitive on the pitch, not less.

The Hammers aren’t the first or last team to give up an atmospheric old ground full of history and palpable energy, but they are definitely the ones who f*cked it the most. At least Tottenham and Everton got brilliant stadiums out of it, if not yet in Spurs’ case much evidence of the on-field improvement.

West Ham fans have been asked to give up an awful lot that was precious to them, and ‘For what?’ is becoming an increasingly relevant and angry response.

It was unacceptable when mere top-flight survival became the target; now they won’t even have that.

Conspiracy-addled fans

Not a novel observation, but it really has grown exponentially more exhausting this year as more and more fanbases allow themselves to be sucked down the conspiracy rabbit-hole with Liverpool and Arsenal.

Every Premier League club now has a sizeable and loud coterie of supporters who are of the unshakeable belief that a conspiracy exists against their club. No refereeing decision can ever just be a refereeing decision now, it must always be part of the grand plan in which every governing body within English football is risking it all to conspire together to ensure Brighton remain tenth.

And of course that nonsense now extends to other teams’ games, so there is never any escape. Matches not involving your team are scoured for incidents that would definitely have been treated differently “If that were us…”

Fixture lists are scoured for evidence of bias. Referee appointments are considered important. The entirely ludicrous idea that referees from the north-west of England will always favour the teams from the north-west of England, because if there’s one thing we know for sure about football fans it’s that they definitely like all the teams from their local area rather than hating all but one of them more than anyone else.

Which then in true cake-and-eat-it style means that those referees are then obviously biased against the north-west clubs, actually, because they are bitter rivals of the team they actually support. Like all the best conspiracy theories, everything is evidence that you’re right if you try hard enough.

We imagine there must have been some pretty high-level meetings between shadowy figures from the PGMOL and the FA and the Premier League this week ahead of Arsenal v Aston Villa. We can’t wait to find out whether the conspiracy this week is the old favourite of making sure Arsenal don’t win the league because reasons, or putting Aston Villa back in their place because the Big Six must be favoured.

Apart from Arsenal, obviously.

Conspiracy-addled managers

Yes, you know who you are. You can stop egging on your most hard-of-thinking supporters as a deflection tactic please. It doesn’t end well for any of us to continue propagating the idea that none of this is real and everything is being controlled by a shadowy cabal of bastards.

Craig Hope

Broke the first rule of journalism by becoming the story and then revelled in rolling around in the big sh*t he’d left on the floor.

By the end of the October international break it was already clear that The Media had made the decision that what was by then a low-stakes November break for England was going to be all about The Jude Bellingham Situation.

But for one journalist in particular everything is always about The Jude Bellingham Situation. And absolutely not in a good way.