Ten Premier League fanbases with far more reason to be upset than table-topping Arsenal | OneFootball

We remain staunch defenders here of fans’ rights to express themselves however they want in stadiums. As long as you’re not breaking actual laws or basic human decency, crack on. You’ve paid your money, you can do what you want.

There is simply no such thing as ‘over-celebrating’. If you want to boo your own team, you go right ahead and boo them. Call them silly sods and bottling frauds. Celebrate in a way that gets a clout-chasing influencer to quote-tweet a video with the simple descriptor ‘#limbs’ and casually harvesting 5000 likes.

But also, you know, we will arch an Ancelotti eyebrow when you’re booing your team when your team is nine points clear at the top of the Premier League and with one foot in the semi-finals of the Champions League.

We understand. We get the dread fear that is engulfing Arsenal fans. It does look like it really might be happening again. It does look like you might have to eat a lot of banter sh*t at the end of the season. But come on, guys, you’re not even the club in your local area that is going to spend this summer and beyond eating the most sh*t.

By our reckoning there are at least 10 Premier League clubs with far more reason to be actually p*ssed off with their team than Arsenal. Handy that, given the top-10-based nature of the Topical Top Ten. Really is handy when serendipity strikes like that.

Tottenham

I mean, just obviously Tottenham. They won’t like us saying it, but Spurs fans’ complaints and boos and harrumphing have in the past carried a good deal of the Arsenal about them. Not the ‘nine points clear at the top of the league’ part, sure, but a general sense of entitlement and inflated air of their own worth and expectations.

What’s happened this season has, in its way, made that observation feel even more accurate. While also making this season’s at-times-unbridled fury entirely understandable.

The speed of Spurs’ descent from if not quite the top table then something very, very close to it, to what now appears inevitable relegation is staggering. To get a true idea, it’s barely three years since Antonio Conte’s infamous please-sack-me rant after Spurs blew a 3-1 lead to draw 3-3 at Southampton. We all remember it, don’t we.

But here’s a fun little question. Where do you think Spurs were in the table that night, with Conte desperately trying to get himself sacked and most Spurs fans happy to pack his bags? They were fourth. Fourth! That’s what Spursy used to look like. And we still all took the p*ss then!

Back then, Spurs fans may have indeed come off as a bit entitled and up themselves when booing and complaining that they might not be in the Champions League every season. But when their team is careening towards relegation and nobody really looks like they care that much about the fact, then it does seem like yeah, fair play, you can definitely be quite annoyed about that.

There have certainly been more boos than points at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium this year and, despite Thomas Frank’s claims and the unstinting support of his inexplicably large and devoted fan club across this country’s football media, those dreadful results are not, were not and never have been because of the fans.

That’s a fact borne out by the defeat against Nottingham Forest when, out of pure desperation and no real idea what else to do, they decided to go entirely the other way and happy-clappily support the team quite literally to a fault. Then get criticised for that, too, because maybe it spooked the players and made it all feel too big for them to handle.

If anything, for me, Clive, they’ve almost supported these good-for-nothing wastrels too well.

Spurs fans right now are well within their rights to be absolutely furious about absolutely everything, from ticket prices, to the way this season’s omnishambleclusterf*ck has made Daniel Levy look like a genius despite his starring role across most of the decade of negligence, arrogance and hubris that has led Spurs to this point of utter catastrophe, to the boardroom overpromotion of assorted Lewis Family nepobabies, to the constant transfer-saga mugging-offs, to the self-satisfied nature of Johan Lange’s “we didn’t panic” January fiasco, to the ongoing fascination with appointing Arsenal fans to senior roles, to the inexplicable failure to see what everyone else could see about Thomas Frank until it was far too late, to the never-ending injury crisis and, finally, to Brian Brobbey.

Next season is going to feel so weird without Spurs while they go about their business of doing the only two things that are possible for them next year: racking up over 100 Championship points or fewer than 50.

Liverpool

Now Arsenal fans might point here to the fact that at least Liverpool fans got a league title to celebrate last season and having a league title to celebrate is all that Arsenal fans are asking for and really is that so much?

But Liverpool fans were sold a much bigger dream than a single title. Last season was supposed to represent the start of a new dynasty, of the country’s greatest club knocking Manchester rivals old and new off their f*cking perches and reclaiming a place firmly atop English football that is essentially their birthright. It was the start of the Arne Slot Era, but it’s turned out to just be the last stand of the Jurgen Klopp Era. Who also definitely isn’t coming back as manager as well, no matter how many times people insist on Lloyd Christmassing their way to a “So you’re telling me there’s a chance” conclusion from those quotes off that podcast.

What is real and happening is that Liverpool have this season very often been very sh*t. And in the cruellest possible way, because that sh*tness has come after an entirely misleading start that, on the back of last year’s success and the megabucks summer spending spree, had us all fooled despite in hindsight being an obvious illusion that relied on a clearly unsustainable diet of late goals and absurd good fortune.

It turned out the late goals weren’t actually that unsustainable, but after that initial five-game burst they would mainly come for the opposition.

Are also the only Premier League club since February 1 to play Spurs and emerge without three points, which is absolutely f*cking mortifying.

Aston Villa

Hammering their heads against a ceiling they are simply not allowed to break. Stymied by rules designed to pull the drawbridge up and leave a closed club that Villa aren’t invited to and have no plausible way to break in.

There is still every chance that the glorious period in which Unai Emery has defied gravity to restore Villa to a Premier League force on if not off the pitch is coming to an end. He might know better than most how the grass isn’t always greener on the Big Six side, but you do wonder whether at some point quite soon he might fancy having another go at succeeding without one arm tied behind his back.

This summer’s increasingly inevitable book-balancing sale of Morgan Rogers feels like it might be the time.

Meanwhile, Chelsea and Manchester City continue upon their merry way without any apparent imminent consequence. At least, other than Chelsea’s self-inflicted consequences. And those can’t really count here.

Newcastle United

Imagine selling the entirety of your soul in the hope that you become the next Man City only to find to your horror you are instead on a timeline where you finish 14th, lose home and away to Sunderland, and get hammered in the last 16 of the Champions League.

Of course you’d be raging. Has any of it really been worth it? At least Chelsea and Manchester City fans got way more than one poxy Carabao out of swallowing down all those uneasy feelings and ignoring the small, nagging voices in the back of their heads.

Chelsea

You don’t have to feel sympathy for Chelsea fans – which is just as well.

But it’s not hard to understand the anger at what has become of a once-proud football club now reduced to the status of a get-rich-quick player-trading empire for the most cartoonishly ghastly Americans imaginable, while they bin off capable managers who won’t blindly follow the definitely foolproof strategy in favour of a wildly out-of-his-depth company man from the Strasbourg Office who has never met a LinkedIn post he didn’t find inspirational and motivational.

Cole Palmer isn’t even good anymore. The biggest cheer at Stamford Bridge on Sunday was before the game against Man City even kicked off when the result came through from Sunderland.

Sure, laughing at Spurs has been a core plank of the Chelsea supporter’s strategy for the longest time. But it’s come to something when it starts to look like the only remaining plank.

Crystal Palace

Still fighting the good fight this season and may well walk away from the season with another trophy. Given their history, that’s not to be sniffed at. At all.

But if there was ever a season to highlight the ‘know your place’ realities for smaller Premier League clubs it’s been this one at Palace

Since having the temerity to win the FA Cup last May they’ve lost their best attacker, their best defender, their Europa League place and, at the end of the season, the manager who has made unprecedented success possible.

Of course it wouldn’t be better if the FA Cup win had never happened. Of course the very possible winning of a European trophy would be another momentous and joyous occasion. But it also feels very much like the end of something never to be repeated.

There is no sense here of Palace being able to use any of it as a springboard to lasting success. It’s just a tantalising glimpse of the good life before going back to the 50-point grind.

In the timeless words of James, if I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor.

Manchester United

Just cannot escape their banter era. Michael Carrick has now been neither good enough nor bad enough to make the next step obvious or decisive, with danger lurking in whichever option they choose.

Have endured the ignominy of a bare-minimum 40-game season that will make Champions League qualification look less of an achievement than it is and have suffered through multiple humiliations.

It was bad enough just being in the second round of the Carabao, never mind losing at Grimsby.

They’ve taken a total of two points from their home games against West Ham, Wolves and Leeds, while also managing to draw at West Ham away to allow the great haircut grift to continue with the idea of five wins in a row and an end to that particular line of embarrassment once again as far away as ever.

Tottenham again

Seriously, Arsenal, some perspective please. Look at these poor bastards.

Burnley

Imagine being significantly worse over the course of a season than this Spurs team. How could you not be fuming?