18 hours ago
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They’re calling it the worst Premier League game in history. They’re calling it El Chaffico. El Crapico. The Derby Della Mediocre. They’re calling it the first Premier League game in which both teams somehow manage to lose. They’re posting memes of old men playing walking football and Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.
They’re mentioning the fact that none of the three relegated teams have won more games against Premier League opposition than Paris Saint-Germain have. The fact that since Leicester scored their last league goal at home, Southampton have sacked a manager, appointed an interim, appointed a permanent replacement, sacked the permanent replacement and re-appointed the interim from earlier.
And of course on the whitewater banter rapids of social media, Leicester v Southampton exists largely as a punchline, or perhaps two punchbags. Leicester have not scored at home in the league for five months. Southampton, in danger of equalling the lowest points total in Premier League history, have not kept a clean sheet in their past 17 league games. Something, either way, is going to have to give here.
Leicester’s Ruud van Nistelrooy has urged his players to treat this as preparation for facing Southampton in the Championship next season. Simon Rusk, the aforementioned interim, reckons that turning around Southampton’s fortunes this season will be a job akin to being “able to bring world peace”. But then no amount of soaring oratory or boosterism is going to put a positive spin on a combined total of 29 points and 51 defeats from 67 games.
Even so, as all the promoted teams summarily disappear down the chute for the second successive season, it is worth asking: are Leicester and Southampton really that bad? In common with Burnley and Luton last season, there has been no great implosion here, no mass downing of tools, no training-ground punch-ups, precious few rumblings of internal revolt. Are either of these clubs any more dysfunctional than, say, Manchester United? Harry Winks wanted to commute from home. Jannik Vestergaard brought his dog to training. By and large, the centre has held. It’s just that the centre hasn’t been very good in defensive transition.
All things are relative, of course, but the first point to note about Leicester and Southampton is that these are good teams with proper footballers. Between them the two squads boast 36 full internationals, 24 players with Champions League experience, champions and ballers with league titles in nine countries. Leicester have players who won the FA Cup four years ago and one – Jamie Vardy – who won the Premier League in 2016.
Meanwhile Southampton’s Tyler Dibling, Taylor Harwood-Bellis and Bilal El Khannouss will almost certainly attract decent fees on the open market. And increasingly, relegated clubs are having little trouble finding suitors for their tarnished goods. Burnley sold seven players to clubs in “Big Five” leagues last summer. Southampton in 2023 reaped more than £150m from the sales of Roméo Lavia, Tino Livramento, James Ward-Prowse and Nathan Tella (who went on to win the Bundesliga with Bayer Leverkusen). Even Luton, a Championship-level squad at best, were able to get some money for Chiedozie Ogbene and Ross Barkley.There have been mistakes. There have been mis-steps – Leicester’s squandering of their golden 2016-21 inheritance remains a colossal failure of management – but fundamentally these are not wildly different clubs from the ones that got promoted from the Championship last season with 97 and 87 points, respectively.
The bigger problem is that the rest of the league has got significantly better. The financial gap between the top two divisions has been growing steadily since 1992.
But 2020 and Covid appears to have been an accelerating factor, allowing Premier League clubs with the safety net of immense broadcast revenue to consolidate and invest while clubs further down the pyramid scrambled to plug the gaps from empty stadiums.
The result has been increased stability for middle-class clubs like Brighton, Brentford, Bournemouth, Fulham and Wolves, while clubs on the wrong side of the divide – Southampton, Burnley, Sheffield United, Leeds – find themselves cast increasingly adrift.
The divide is still bridgeable: Nottingham Forest’s rise over the last three seasons has been one of the more remarkable underdog stories in English football, and yet even this has required a miraculous alignment of circumstances: a big existing fanbase, brilliant coaching, a little luck with recruitment.
Even so, surviving with 32 points and breaking Premier League spending rules is not exactly a model that could easily be replicated by a club like Ipswich or Bristol City.
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Perhaps, on a brighter note, the real miracle here is the resilience of the supporter base. Southampton are on course to register their highest average attendance at St Mary’s for more than 20 years.
The King Power Stadium, too, has been pretty close to full all season: a remarkable effort to keep turning up and watching, in the face of rising prices, defeats and derision, despair and declining returns.
And perhaps there is a lesson here that we should all heed: even at the highest level, football is about more than winning and losing, that devotion and sacrifice is not a results business, that fans are not consumers, that for the vast majority of people who follow the game it is a form of ritual and community, an expression of individual and collective identity that endures through promotions and relegations, summer clearouts and spending sprees, buzz and column inches, owners both engaged and aloof.
So yes, for all the gags and sniggers, this does matter. There is basic professional pride at stake, of course, but more too: the chance to give Vardy a fitting sendoff, the chance to beat Derby’s 2007-08 points record, the chance to reward some of the most long-suffering fans in the country with a small island of joy in what has largely been an ocean of pure misery.
It may not be world peace. But at the fuzzy end of the Premier League lollipop, you have to take your grace where you can find it.
