Great Football Teams Who ‘Just’ Win the League Lose or Draw Lots of Football Matches

Dips, slip-ups, blips, mini slumps – they’re all normal

Whatever you feel about the last few weeks, Liverpool have lost just one league game all season.

They also lost just one meaningful game in Europe all season (winning eight of the nine important ones). They lost a domestic cup final.

For those clubs in Europe (or those afraid of relegation, or trying to get in or back into the top four), domestic cups are often B-team or U21-team games, until maybe the semis or even just the final.

By this point in 2022/23, Man City’s treble-winners had lost four league games, and in all competitions, failed to win many more more.

Proportionality, it seems, is a thing of the past.

It’s one of the greatest missing abilities of modern life. Lots of things get in the way of good analysis, and often people go on instant reactions, or a lowly number of incidents or issues that get distorted by something recent, or shocking.

Across the globe, in amongst the genuine horrors, molehills become mountains a million times a day.

Equally, nostalgia, another form of mental bias, is essentially the whittling away of real experience into just the best moments; a distortion, giving the impression that the past was better.

(And in many cases, we all enjoy our ‘coming of age’ years the most, and love the music and footballers from our teens, when things are so vibrant and new – to us – and nostalgia is not uncommon.)

Thus, any great football team from the past gets distilled into distorted highlights; all the boring or bad parts get forgotten; which is fine, but becomes a problem if you think that’s how things work in football (and life).

Great teams lose games. Draw games. Play badly. Get lucky. Get unlucky. Across 60 or so games, so much happens.

Misery and anxiety are contagious, and social media and WhatsApp are superspreaders. The noisiest and most emotional people create all the unrest.

Algorithms amplify and further contaminate. People react, and reactions are often emotional and not logical. But this filters into daily life. You don’t have to be on X or other platforms if people spread it to you via WhatsApp.

Schadenfreude, a currency of social media, is an escalating two-way street like gang warfare, where people give and take, and it ramps up.

Anyone involved in such actions are often concerned with saving face. Some love to laugh at others, but find being laughed at (or their team being laughed at) an unbearable, oppressive destruction of their sense of self.

The fear of even losing just a single game is to then have to face these people, and the humiliation; and the fear of losing the chance to get back at them, and gloat over their failure.

A such, the world is increasingly unable to think properly. Some people will get driven so insane by being ‘owned’ on social media, and its cutting-to-the-core humiliations and shamings, that they buy the company, to ‘own’, well, everything and everyone.

I fear that a lot of younger people know even less history than in the past, as modern life is so instant, and disposable. Everything moves faster. Nothing stays in the memory long.

While there are also a hell of a lot of smart young people, social media itself stupefies everyone, young and old; and given that negativity ‘sells’ better than positivity, negativity gets more clicks, on social media and in the mainstream media. Crises sell. Stability does not.

But as you get older, you naturally learn more about history, and you also see patterns repeating from things you’ve lived through.

Booms and busts, successes and failures, multiplied by thousands, across countries and time, from economies, political parties, sports teams, musicians, filmmakers, to every type of business. Empires come and go.

They rise, they fall. They rise again, or they go kaput.

This happens with football clubs, but also within football seasons.

Sometimes it happens within football matches, and even within first or second halves. Sometimes it can all happen within five or six minutes; see Istanbul.

But what struck me was, in researching back through (and remembering where possible) all Liverpool’s great teams, and the seasons they had, there were – shocker! – bad results, bad runs, mini slumps, and even some pretty big slumps. And it’s not just Liverpool.

In the last 20 years, the league has gone from four ultra-dominant teams two decades ago (2004-2010, before Man City emerged and Liverpool fell away); and then the recent era of the near-100 point champions (and runners-up!) as two teams were über-strong, and the rest of the Big Six would jostle for which ones finished in the top four. This season feels more like how football used to be, with a greater spread of the talent and strength across the league.

As I keep saying, this is proven by 12 of the Top 25-ranked teams in Europe being from the Premier League (as I write, late March 2025, but it’s been true for weeks now), including clubs like Brighton, Bournemouth, and even Crystal Palace.

Liverpool still rank #1, with Arsenal 2nd. Man City are still just in the Top 10, and Chelsea, Newcastle and Aston Villa pushing close, to comprise a staggering six of the Top 15, as well as that 12 of the Top 25.

The big gulf in the English game now is pretty much between the 17 perennials and the three promoted-only-to-be-relegated clubs (while struggling Spurs and Man United are waltzing through the Europa League, despite being below mid-table in England).

Which again, shows how strong the league has grown, as the richest in the world. Now, everyone else is so good that promoted teams just sink, and teams who can’t win games in the Premier League find the Europa League a doddle.

As such, given the nature of 2024/25, I thought it’s worth remembering how football used to be, when there were more ‘dropped points’.

However, perhaps like then, I’d argue that getting draws at places like Aston Villa and Forest in 2025, both ranked above all but three Italian teams, and all but three Spanish teams, and all but two German teams, and just a single French team, are not dropped points but points gained.

In seasons when there’s far more meritocracy, because the distribution of talent (including managerial and coaching, as well as ownership and recruitment smarts) is broader, the parallels should not be with two teams getting 99 and 97 points respectively, where such points tallies briefly became close to the ‘norm’, but further back.

The increased difficulty of most away games, in particular, stands out. I’ve said it a few times, but some of Liverpool’s away draws (and wins) this season have been amongst the most gruelling, brutal games I’ve seen, in terms of end-to-end, often agains teams who are suited to hit Liverpool on break, and so Liverpool had to pile back, and then Liverpool, in needing (or trying) to win, had to flood forward.

This was true of games at Newcastle, Everton, Villa, Forest, Brentford, Bournemouth and others, and I can’t express to any neutral who hasn’t seen all those games, mostly under floodlights in hostile stadia, how much impressed I was with the Reds (as with the 10-men for virtually the whole game with 10 men versus Fulham in a 2-2 draw). At Villa, Liverpool missed some huge chances, and at Forest, the hosts repeatedly saved or blocked on the line.

Most of these teams have rapid attackers faster than Liverpool’s defenders, so it took a ton of effort for the Reds to get back in numbers to snuff out the counter, then turn and go at the home team. None of these games felt cagey. Teams like Bournemouth and Forest and Brentford were trying to beat Liverpool, rather than just sit off for 90 minutes.

Now, of course, the elite clubs will perhaps then cull those clubs.

Think of all the players at Bournemouth, Brighton, Forest, Crystal Palace, Fulham, Brentford, West Ham and even struggling Wolves, that, due to how good these players clearly are, are constantly linked to bigger or richer clubs. Those smaller clubs often tend to need to sell, so they may sell. But equally, they themselves are also now richer than most clubs in Europe.

So they may sell, but not cheap, and those who make the Champions League will have less need to sell. Yet even then, some won’t have to sell.

Many may also want to sell, as it’s their model; so as to then go and do the same to more “famous” clubs in Europe who are now much weaker than them, such as Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord; Benfica, Sporting CP and Porto; Fiorentina, Roma and Lazio. Or maybe they raid clubs in Brazil or Argentina.

So this article is a look at how football worked before the unusual situation of the dominant, +95-point champions, that may become the norm again, but also, may not.

It’s important, to put Liverpool’s season into context, as – as I predicted, given the shithead nature of much modern “fandom” – people use failures in three cup games to downplay the brilliance of the season, and the achievement of being so far ahead in a strong, demanding league.

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