West Ham, Spurs, Chelsea, Newcastle and Slot among the Premier League 25/26 season losers | OneFootball

West Ham might not be back for a while, Chelsea and Spurs are a mess, and Arne Slot and Eddie Howe are already in a sack race.

The Premier League season winners have been decided, but who are the big old losers?

Fairly obvious, really. But no less fun to point and laugh at them.

Wolves

Not enough is made of how, in the process of becoming the first team in Premier League history to start successive seasons with ten-game winless runs, Wolves signed two managers to long-term contracts.

Both Gary O’Neil and Vitor Pereira have just over two years left of those Molineux deals to run. If Rob Edwards makes it that far he should consider his already tainted tenure a success.

It has been a masterclass in how to gradually surrender one’s Premier League status. Wolves finished 7th, 7th, 13th, 10th, 13th and 14th as an established and respected top-flight club, but it is a membership that requires annual renewal rather than an automatic lifelong subscription.

Wolves became complacent, arrogant. The sustained shedding of any player of even vague worth, with replacements sourced through speculating to accumulate on cheap, unproven gambles, was never a viable long-term approach and could only really end one way.

The good news is that former chairman Jeff Shi said “relegation or staying up is a kind of technical word” about a week before he stepped down, so it doesn’t actually count.

Scott Parker

That is probably that. In 86 games as a Premier League manager, Parker has 13 wins, 21 draws and 52 defeats, with more than twice as many goals conceded as scored across four spells with three different clubs.

There is no shame in becoming a hired gun who is immediately dismissed upon promotion. It is his calling. But anyone foolish enough to let him coach inside those fine top-flight margins again is asking for trouble.

Which brings us to…

West Ham

It doesn’t half feel fated. The shortlist to replace Nuno Espirito Santo at West Ham might well consist solely of Parker and Slaven Bilic, two individuals daft enough to inextricably tie themselves to past iterations of a dumpster fire that has raged too long.

And that is as good as West Ham deserve. The archetypal Too Good To Go Down Premier League team seemed to think itself instead too massive to suffer such a fate more than two decades later, despite resounding and ignored proof to the contrary.

“I just think we feel like a big club. Not a tinpot club,” chairman David Sullivan said in December 2017. But his and their actions have transmitted a completely different message.

Back then he described relegation as “very damaging if it happens,” but added: “We’d have to do whatever it takes to keep the club afloat. If we go down, we’ll come straight back up. We always come straight back up. We had to put £30m in the last time.”

West Ham lost £104.2m last year and recent accounts suggested there would be “a liquidity shortfall” in the summer. There is a far greater chance they emulate Leicester with successive relegations than they earn promotion at the first time of asking, as they did last time.

Sullivan, simply, should not be in any position of power or consequence. His failures are too numerous to list but the recent ‘declaration of war’ around fan protests neatly sums up a fundamentally broken club at every level.

With the manager likely to leave too and any player with a semblance of value in the squad sold in a panicked fire sale, the final vestiges of West Ham’s identity will be shed too.

Former vice-chair Karren Brady did not see this slide to the Championship through to the bitter end, but the ultimate manifestation of her promise to see “a world-class team in a world-class stadium” with a “world-class watching experience” was for supporters to chant about the hierarchy selling the club’s soul for a sh*thole as their relegation was confirmed.

It should shame those in charge to see Brentford, Brighton, Sunderland and Bournemouth thriving, considering just how many systematically destroyed in-built advantages West Ham have over each.

Only a fool would bet against them looking up at Lincoln in the same jealous, baffled way next season.

If you really, genuinely want 3,000 words on the absurdity of a club sleepwalking towards relegation twice, becoming the first team in Premier League history to finish 17th in consecutive seasons, and winning a European trophy in between before ending up with a better coach than when they started, then go for it.

Chelsea

Nothing underlines the inherent indemnity enjoyed by the elite more than Chelsea’s permanent managerial appointments in the summers after their lowest Premier League finishes this millennium: Antonio Conte, Mauricio Pochettino and now Xabi Alonso.

There is something deeply regrettable about a club which can consistently make the worst possible decisions, treat managers and players like commodities and fall laughably short of even their bare minimum objectives, before simply appointing one of the best coaches in world football as the latest solution.

It’s the equivalent of trying to teach a child that actions have consequences, before punishing bad behaviour with an expensive new toy.

But then that is Chelsea under BlueCo, and suggestions of a shift in strategy towards buying more ‘proven talent’ inspires precious little faith.

It is a step in the right direction in terms of helping solve their rank indiscipline and shoddy game management. But for as long as the structures behind the scenes are as they are and Chelsea are insulated from their own mistakes through financial loopholes and a historic lure, those are steps made on foundations of amortised quicksand.

Newcastle

“One of our targets this season was to be the first Newcastle team to have back-to-back Champions League campaigns,” said Dan Burn recently, clearly unaware that such an achievement has been forbidden.

Quite fittingly under Eddie Howe, they have become an elite Burnley: a yo-yo team contained entirely within the confines of the Premier League, shifting seamlessly between the best season in many a Magpies’ lifetime, and the painful mundanity of mid-table.

The crushing reality of the genuinely exceptional twin achievements of simultaneously winning a trophy and qualifying for the Champions League was supposed to be the start, but might actually have represented the peak of Howe’s reign.

He has probably just about earned a little longer to prove otherwise, with a better than atrocious transfer window and the return to a less pressing fixture schedule behind him.

But this season has almost entirely eradicated any and all goodwill Howe had stored at St James’ Park. No manager faces a more critical summer. Hopefully he or any of his family members won’t be put in charge of it this time.

Arne Slot

On second thoughts, Slot might provide ample competition on that important summer front, as ludicrous as that sounds when discussing a team which shattered the world record for biggest single-window transfer spend last year.

The Dutchman has settled on his excuse for a dreadful title defence this campaign. “If you asked me one word to describe this season,” he said last week, “I would describe that with the word ‘injury'”.

And there have undoubtedly been plenty, but not especially more so than any other club, and categorically not enough to justify or rationalise such a harsh drop-off.

Perhaps the Diogo Jota caveat – tragic and unquantifiable – has had a greater impact than could possibly have been imagined or measured. Maybe the fruits of their £450m investment will only truly be ready to pick next season. Liverpool might even sign a decent right-back.

But again, Slot went deep into his overdraft in terms of time and patience this campaign and will not have fresh memories of a title win as insurance if these issues are not sorted by August.

Everton

That “happily dissatisfied” line from Angus Kinnear was cute but it does feel destined to be used against him and Everton as a whole for as long as this regime is in place.

‘The progress is clear but we have not achieved anything yet,’ he added. ‘We were able to stop looking over our shoulder by Christmas with relegation fears all but extinguished and, as we enter the last two fixtures, we still have something to play for, with European qualification continuing to be fiercely contested.’

That ‘progress’ turned out to be remarkably modest: a place and a point higher than last season, but with more defeats, a worse goal difference, and even fewer signs of a cup run breaking out from the monotony of a league campaign the efficacy of which is based solely on survival.

There is plenty to be said for that after consecutive seasons of fighting against the Championship tide, but Everton needed eight points from their final seven games to guarantee European qualification and their version of a ‘fiercely contested’ fight was to barely scramble together three instead.

If they expect supporters to be happily dissatisfied at watching newly-promoted Sunderland leapfrog them to secure a place in the Europa League, the Everton boardroom might be in for a shock.

Nottingham Forest

Perhaps the most difficult season to delineate. The highs of reaching a European semi-final, thrashing Liverpool, Spurs, Chelsea and Sunderland, and keeping Morgan Gibbs-White were undoubtedly lofty. But those relegation-battling, manager-sacking lows were positively abyssal.

This was patently not the plan, the back-up plan, nor even the alternative to that.

It is absurdly Forest’s second-best Premier League points tally since the mid-1990s, but if Mr. Marinakis considers it anything more than a step sideways at best then he’s gone soft.

Fulham

Four Premier League seasons since promotion, finishing anywhere between 10th and 13th with 47 to 54 points, makes Marco Silva the preeminent top-flight floor and glass ceiling installer at a time his Fulham contract is coming up for renewal.

Only five clubs in Premier League history have had longer streaks of finishing between 10th and 15th in consecutive seasons: Spurs (1996-2001), Middlesbrough (1999-2004), Stoke (2008-2013), Newcastle (2017-2022) and, brilliantly, Crystal Palace (2013-26).

The frustration for Fulham, especially this campaign, is that European qualification was theirs for the taking. The last few months, with the pressure on and the finish line in full view, has been characterised by the usual carelessly dropped points: the draws at Wolves and Nottingham Forest; the Brentford stalemate; the West Ham defeat.

A new manager might not solve that. It does have all the hallmarks of a classic Be Careful What You Wish For if Silva leaves and takes these foundations with him. But a formerly thriving marriage does appear to have gone stale.

Manchester City

There is a wonderful irony in Guardiola stepping down in part because he lacks the energy required to destroy a monster he helped create. It is a testament to his undying legacy, but also proof of his apparent mortality.

He leaves behind a trophy-winning team having overseen at the very least the start of a difficult transition.

But ultimately Manchester City had the title in their control in May, with many absolutely guilty of thinking the race was won with victory over Arsenal, before they summarily bottled it and failed to stay humble.

Ruben Amorim