Starting to look like this season simply cannot be saved from itself, isn’t it? But we can’t be that gloomy about things. Not when spring has sprung, the sun is shining, and all things seem possible.
Namely, these five things, any one or more of which could have a transformative effect on how what does for now appear to be a somewhat moribund final couple of months of the season might pan out.
Everton beat Liverpool
So, yeah, good chance we lose one of our five desperate season-saving Hail Marys very quickly indeed. But it’s too obvious an option not to include.
This is nothing against Liverpool, because Lord knows nobody wants Arsenal to actually win the league and their fans to start Stay Humbling all over social media like an unstoppable swarm of bastards. No, that would be awful.
But we would quite like something halfway approaching a title race, and if the form book were to be sufficiently defenestrated at Anfield for Everton to ride their David Moyes wave harder than they’ve ever ridden it before and snaffle three points at their old rivals then we will once again have that, at least.
Liverpool would still win the title, obviously. They would still need only 16 points – even if Arsenal go flawlessly through the rest of their season, which if anything looks less rather than more likely after the manner of that win over Fulham on Tuesday – and they’ve still got games against Leicester, Spurs and West Ham who are all just awful.
But it would be enough to give everyone pause. It would be enough to get everyone going ‘Okay, but if…’. It would have people looking differently at Arsenal’s trip to Anfield in the third-last round of games.
It would, above all, have everyone talking about the possibility of an all-time bottling as a 15-point lead dwindled to just nine.
If absolutely nothing else, it would start The Discourse. And frankly we’re now desperate enough that this would be enough.
READ: Liverpool vs Everton prediction, expected line-ups, how to watch and stats
Enormous Points Deductions
Wolves’ win over West Ham has once and for all finished off the long forgotten relegation fight.
The gap from 17th to 18th is now, absurdly, 12 points. The bottom three have just… stopped. In their last five games each they have between them managed one single, solitary point from those 15 games. The next worst team over the last five games – Bournemouth, weirdly – have four points on their own.
And a look at the bottom of the Premier League table this time last year is just now very depressing. Far more exciting down at the bottom, it was.
At this same 29-or-30-game stage, a mere five points separated 18th-placed Luton from Brentford all the way up in 15th. Nottingham Forest were level on points with Luton, and Everton were only three points better off. The relegation fight was alive with possibility.
Didn’t happen in the end. The promoted three just went straight back down, just like they will this year. But there were still possibilities. And that’s all we ask.
Now one of the main reasons there were still such possibilities was because both Everton and Forest had been docked a whole bunch of points for reasons that are boring and now irrelevant. What matters is that made things exciting, didn’t it? For everyone else? For us, basically?
So let’s do that again. The most obvious option here is the Man City FFP elephant that’s been sitting patiently in the Premier League room for years now, largely ignored and pointed out only occasionally by Liverpool or Arsenal fans whenever it coincidentally suited them to suddenly position themselves as acting for the good of the entire game, or by us when we needed some #content and #numbers from hypothetical #bumgravy.
SEE: Man City FFP: Liverpool, Man Utd, even Spurs among new winners of reallocated trophies on alternate timeline
The question here then becomes how many points do we need to knock off City (325?) to make an interesting relegation fight? Harder than you might think, that is. Take too many and they’ve no chance, but given the bottom three have all collectively decided they don’t want any more points thanks very much we are going to need to take an awful lot to avoid even this halfway calamitous iteration of City simply easing back past them.
City have managed only a fairly miserable 1.65 points per game this season. Across nine remaining games, that amounts to roughly 15 points. And that’s actually not far off what we’re looking for, given Ipswich and Leicester each currently have 17.
Let’s say we want to challenge City to overperform their season-long record to escape and the answer is fairly simple after all. Dock them all 48 of their currently accumulated points and challenge them to reel in those three teams who have all simply stopped running.
Come on, you have to admit that would be genuinely exciting. Like one of those novelty races you get at baseball games where Joe Public gets a big headstart to try and outrun some mysterious Stig-type fella wearing a full skintight bodysuit for some reason.
Other options including just knocking a bunch of points off Spurs and/or Man United as punishment for being so unforgivably wretched despite all their inherent advantages. Just 25 each or so would be enough to make things at least vaguely interesting for a while there.
Arsenal knock out Real Madrid
We’re not greedy here at F365. We’re not asking or expecting Arsenal to plough through Real Madrid and then PSG and then either Barcelona or Bayern Munich to actually win the Champions League. That would be absurd.
All we’re asking is for them to just knock out the single greatest Champions League knockout team in history. Not much to ask, is it? If Arsenal can just do that, we can get all the way to May pretending they might actually win the whole thing. That’ll help us feel something, at least, we’d imagine.
They’ve got Bukayo Saka back, haven’t they? That’s good. That’ll definitely help, what with him being brilliant and such.
Sure, this is Arsenal 2024/25 and wherever there is an up there must be a down, and thus as payment for welcoming Saka back from hamstring twang Arsenal have had to watch Gabriel Margalhaes go down with hamstring twang.
You could make the case that this is sub-optimal ahead of facing Your Kylian Mbappes and Your Jude Bellinghams and the Vinicius Juniors of this world and you could make that case because you’d be absolutely right. But we are going to need Arsenal to just rise above and do the necessary on this occasion.
Your country needs you. The season needs you.
Postecoglou Sack
How about a late-season manager sacking to distract from the futility of the football itself? That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Yeah? Make us all forget about the bad things that happen for a joyful split second, or so?
Only possible place it can really still happen is Spurs, and the only possible way it can still happen is if they crash and burn in the Europa League quarter-finals against Eintracht Frankfurt. So we’ll have that, please.
Good news about this one is that, unlike the mainly theoretical possibilities on the rest of this list, this one actually feels if anything probable rather than merely possible. Spurs really are very, very bad, and Big Ange, bless him, still doesn’t really show any hint of being able to find a solution to that problem. And quite often we’re not actually sure he’s even aware of the very existence of the problem.
Clear now that Spurs have backed themselves into something of a corner with Postecoglou, and (point two above notwithstanding) the sheer lack of the terrifying relegation fight in which they deserve to find themselves means no amount of further league woe can see him off until the end of the season. If falling to 15th hasn’t done it, hard to see how falling to 16th shifts that needle.
No, while there remains even a single uncracked egg in the Europa League basket, the Australian is safe. Time to blow up the basket.
Man United win the Europa League
Just because it would be funny, wouldn’t it? Grimly funny. Annoyingly funny. Grossly unfairly funny.
But definitely and undeniably funny.
United’s latest predictable calamity – having all of the ball and most of the chances and none of the goals at Nottingham Forest – is important for two reasons. First, a reminder of just how bad United actually are. But secondly, it robs us of another potential source of excitement on the run-in: will Forest qualify for the Champions League?
The answer to that, with a 10-point cushion to sixth-placed Newcastle, is now surely yes. Superb achievement, and we’re delighted for them, but they’ve done the unthinkable so easily that there isn’t even excitement left in that. It’s done.
So we have to turn back to United themselves.
SEE: The remarkable Premier League table since Forest appointed Nuno
They have been absolutely abysmal this season, no question about that, yet we find ourselves impossibly drawn to the idea of United’s last three seasons each continuing a marked downward trend yet ending with an even better trophy in the overflowing Old Trafford cabinets at their end.
In 2022/23 they were quite good and won the Carabao. In 2023/24 they were quite bad and won the FA Cup. In 2024/25 they have been very bad and might win the Europa League.
If that comes to pass there will only be one place that trend can go next. United will get relegated and win the Champions League in 2025/26. And who wouldn’t want to see that? Feels like everybody wins there, a little bit.
Also, United winning the Europa League has another neatness to it. It would mean that since Fergie left them in such a terrible state that they’ve endured a decade and more of untold misery and despair and awfulness and non-stop bad times they would also have won two FA Cups, two Carabao, and two Europas.
In other words, United’s Banter Era would contain more pots and pans than most clubs’ most cherished golden eras of success.
Even without the addition of this year’s still hypothetical bauble, United have been the fourth most successful side in English football in the post-Fergie bleakness. Only Liverpool, City and Chelsea have won more. United’s five major trophies in that time is more than Arsenal and Spurs combined.
A good bit is a good bit. Let’s all just lean into it and get through to the end of May.
A reminder: Man Utd or Spurs could still qualify for Champions League!
