Who has made just the biggest mess of 2024 as a whole? There are obvious embarrassments at Spurs and Manchester United, but let England not be forgotten.
It is right that we find ourselves considering 2024’s greatest footballing sh*tshows at a time when especially Tottenham but especially Manchester United are sh*t-showing at their spectacular best (worst?) – but they are far from alone in having soiled the football bed this year.
There really has been a lot of sh*t on show.
10) The churning mid-table shod sh*tshow
This is very harsh on certain teams, because the vast mid-table morass currently clogging up the Premier League by definition contains a combination of over-achievers, under-achievers and… achievers. But it’s still a great big churning sea of mediocrity with all turds in it.
We’re going to slightly let City off their recent nonsense for their years of anti-nonsense and assume based on factors that they’re not going to be sh*tbone awful for that much longer and will ease away with the other currently less stupid members of the top four.
Below that we have from fifth-placed Nottingham Forest to 14th-placed West Ham a bunch of 10 teams separated by seven points who could finish in literally any order and it wouldn’t now be a surprise. Only two of them have scored more than 25 goals, and only two of them have conceded fewer than 20. Tottenham have managed to do both those things to absolutely no discernible benefit because of course they have.
Tottenham, Newcastle, Man United sitting forlornly between 11th and 13th should shame them all, and while misery loves company there really shouldn’t be any lasting excuse in the fact some other teams who should also know better also don’t.
The calendar year table tells a similar story. It’s kinder to some and harsher on others, but there are still the current top four, then a 15-point gap, then 10 further teams separated by just 10 points. And yes, there again are Spurs and Man United sitting level on points with Bournemouth and one ahead of Fulham.
9) The Southampton copying both Sheffield United and Burnley blueprint sh*tshow
We have some sympathy with the idea that Russell Martin might if anything, Clive, have got promoted too well at Southampton.
But having foolishly got Southampton into the Premier League, Russell Martin has then set about keeping them up by following not one but two wildly successful blueprints from last season.
Really is worth stepping back and marvelling at the sheer majesty of not just going “Let’s do what Burnley did” or “Let’s do what Sheffield United did” but going balls-out double-down “Let’s do what Burnley AND Sheffield United did”. In come Cameron Archer and Ben Brereton-Diaz, alongside a crazed PFM-baiting commitment to playing out from the back like prime Manchester City even when you have to deploy Alex McCarthy in goal against Liverpool.
It’s worked roughly as well as you might expect, with one win, two draws and 31 goals conceded in 15 games, although we of course join you all in giddy anticipation of Sunday evening’s visit from Dr Tottenham.
8) Newcastle’s summer sh*tshow
Dan Ashworth’s departure wasn’t the only thing that went wrong for Newcastle. What a shambles of a summer that was.
In essence as fans, if you’ve decided to row in fully behind your club selling the entirety of its soul and abandoning all your principles in return for unimaginable riches and unending success, then you do want to at the very least get some Chelsea or Manchester City success out of it.
You don’t want to realise a couple of years down the line that you’ve thoroughly debased yourself like that in return for spending £20million on a back-up keeper from Nottingham Forest and bringing in defenders from Bournemouth on a free and all with the net result of being stuck in the hilarious yet dispiriting mid-table mass of incompetence sandwiched in 12th between the main clusterf*ck clubs themselves: Spurs and Manchester United.
Newcastle fans can and will grumble about the actual effect of profit and sustainability rules being to in effect pull the drawbridge up behind the teams who had managed to buy their way into the elite before the Magpies got the chance.
And they’re not even really wrong. But what they will have to accept is that in their very specific case it is very grimly funny to watch the way an entire club and a huge chunk of its support sold themselves out for what really does look like now like it might amount to one failed Champions League campaign. Especially with the Saudis already clearly growing weary of coming up against brick walls at Newcastle and already turning their attention to other shinier, newer and gaudier baubles in their sportswashing collection.
7) West Ham and the Spanish Moyes sh*tshow
The press boys didn’t like it one bit, but David Moyes and West Ham was a marriage that needed ending. Nobody was happy there. They wanted different things. It had gone really very stale.
We fully supported West Ham’s decision to move on at the time and still do. But we did think they were going to actually go in a different direction, rather than appointing a decent coach who is nevertheless essentially a Spanish Moyes. But a Spanish Moyes with a proven tendency to huff off if he isn’t happy with how things are going.
And nobody is happy with how things are going. Because the 2024/25 Premier League season is, as previously discussed, completely batsh*t, West Ham’s disastrous, sack-accelerating start to the season now sees them in dire straits yet trailing Manchester United by one point and Newcastle and Spurs by two. But what’s increasingly clear this season is that everyone needs to be making judgements of their team on its own merits rather than comparing it to what assorted other basket case clubs are up to.
Monday night’s game with Wolves was billed as El Sackico and fair enough. It ended perfectly, with a narrow and deeply unconvincing West Ham win that showed precisely why neither Lopetegui or Gary O’Neil is likely to survive much longer.
READ MORE: O’Neil red-hot Sack Race favourite after El Sackico defeat to major rival Lopetegui
6) The England almost winning Euro 2024 sh*tshow
Genuinely, what – and indeed how – the f***? It still freaks our nut out that England started the tournament still experimenting with key positions and vital roles – Trent in midfield! Kane as a Haaland type! Someone to play on the left! – and got all the way to the final without ever really coming up with any compellingly convincing solutions to any of them. But imagine if they’d actually won the bloody thing. The rest of the continent would quite rightly be hanging its head in shame.
Europe as a whole owes Spain an enormous debt of gratitude for getting them all off the hook. Nobody need feel any shame for that excellent new and exciting Spain side coming out on top. But if Southgate’s confused and confusing Sufferballers had prevailed the shame across every nation would have quite rightly been vast. Because England were absolutely dreadful.
And while Spain thoroughly outplayed them in the final, it’s still worth remembering that the result was still far too close for comfort. Spain’s winning goal came dangerously late, and there was a good 90-second period after Cole Palmer’s wonderful equaliser where it really did seem like it was a continent-wide mugging was well and truly on.
It’s a tournament that already occupies a curious spot in our football consciousness. It’s weirdly blurred and fuzzy in the mind’s eye already. It doesn’t feel quite real somehow. Did England really get to a final playing like that? We’ve just spent five minutes trying to remember who England even played in the quarter-finals of a tournament five months ago, yet we could give you a minute-by-minute rundown of the Cameroon game from Italia 90.
And yet we do still vividly remember those fleeting moments at 1-1 in the final when England suddenly had all the momentum, until Kyle Walker decided to launch an attacking throw-in all the way back into his own half for literally no discernible reason. We think about that at least twice every single day.
5) The PSR-appeasing transfer circle-jerk sh*tshow
Perhaps naively, we do think PSR was introduced with at least some good intentions. We certainly don’t think it was introduced to create the unedifying spectacle every June where teams with a black hole in the finances and facing possible points penalties set about conducting mutually advantageous transfers among themselves to get out of the mire.
But it is actually a very obvious loophole once you look at it for even a second. With players coming through the academy counting as ‘pure profit’ for the PSR accountants, the temptation to cash in on those assets is obvious. Beyond that, there’s the fact that the entire fee for a player’s exit can be chucked into the latest accounts, while money spent on players coming in can be amortised across a number of years’ worth.
And so, inevitably, as the June 30 deadline for the end of the PSR year approached, came a raft of absurd transfers. Most of which involved clubs at risk of punishment doing suspiciously convenient business directly with each other.
Premier League clubs spent almost £250m between the end of the 23/24 season and June 30, and it’s fair to say that not all of that money was spent with the intention of maximising on-field improvement.
Aston Villa, Everton, Chelsea and Newcastle were all busy bees in those crucial days of scrambling, and my word did they get some interesting business done. What glorious serendipity it was that Villa so admired Everton’s Lewis Dobbin while Everton were so impressed by Tim Iroegbunam that each agreed to give the other £9m and say no more about it.
What merry happenstance it was that Chelsea had seen enough in Omari Kellyman’s six Aston Villa appearances to pay £19m for him while in an entirely unrelated development Villa themselves saw fit to hand the Blues £35m for Ian Maatsen as backs were scratched and quids pro quod.
We’re still not precisely sure what arcane accountancy benefit Chelsea got out of spending £30m Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall but we’re sure there is one.
MORE ON THE SUMMER PSR NONSENSE FROM F365
👉 Ranking transfers between Chelsea and the rest of the panicky six by how much they’re taking the PSR
👉 PSR deals dominate list of five transfers with £80m of unaccounted value
4) The Cootegate sh*tshow
Just a grimly depressing spectacle from start to finish. It has ultimately and inevitably cost a man his livelihood, made life harder for every other referee in the land, and given succour and fuel to the worst kind of very online, tinfoil-sporting fans (of all stripes) around.
David Coote was obviously done for the moment it all came out. Especially as one’s first thought was that he was so unbelievably stupid as to have allowed himself to be filmed calling Jurgen Klopp an arrogant German c***, there was almost no chance that a) this was a freak one-off error of judgement and thus b) the tabloids wouldn’t find more.
Coote has lost everything, but has perhaps learned who his actual friends are. There is a Partridgeian tragedy to some of the stories that have emerged. The aborted Travelodge Drugs Party is a harrowing tale of loneliness and middle-aged despair, while by the end of it his apparent need to impress people online led to him managing to get in trouble for correctly booking a player who collected 32 yellow cards in 171 games for Leeds.
While that highlighted how daft things had got, it also showed why he was done. It didn’t actually matter whether he’d done anything specifically wrong professionally. It didn’t matter that every referee in the world will think at least some of the far better paid people who scream at them and call them names and blame them for their own failings, in public, every week for 40 weeks of the year are c***s, actually.
What mattered is that nothing he could ever do as a referee could now ever be removed from his own daft stupidity at an afters with some tw*ts. Give a decision that hurts Liverpool? Off goes the internet. Well we all know why, don’t we. Give a decision that benefits Liverpool? Over-compensating.
There’s no point pretending it wasn’t funny to hear a referee speak the way he did. It was like hearing your teacher do a swear.
But what a genuinely pitiful way to lose absolutely everything you’ve worked for.
3) The Spursy sh*tshow
Lads, it’s Tottenham. Really, really, really Tottenham. Like you look at Tottenham in 2024 and ask how much more Tottenham it could be and the answer is ‘none’. None… more Tottenham.
Fans can and are arguing and debating who is to blame for it all, from Daniel Levy to Ange Postecoglou to Micky van de Van’s twangy hamstrings to James Maddison’s goal celebrations to leaving themselves perpetually in dread fear of one key injury sparking utter chaos in a season that was always likely to involve well over 50 matches and a playing style that appears custom-built to increase the risk of tissue injuries.
Spurs have crystallised and distilled Spursiness to the extent that we do now think we’re witnessing the very peak of it. Steven Chicken rightly noted after the latest nonsense against Chelsea that this season in particular has seen Spursiness extend far beyond its traditional N17 boundaries with all manner of daftness involving all manner of clubs. Yet still there Spurs are, right in the thick of it all and still the absolute best/worst nonsense creators in the sport.
And it’s been going on for the whole damn year, too. They’ve lost as many Premier League matches as they’ve won in 2024 and as previously noted have only managed to accrue the same number of points as Bournemouth and, even more damningly, Manchester United.
They are currently at the very peak of their powers, though. Across all competitions they have won only three of their last 10 matches. Two of those were against Man City, the other Aston Villa. Their two league wins in that wretched run have been 4-1 and 4-0 thrashings. They have also handed both Crystal Palace and Ipswich their first Premier League wins of the season, thrown away their second 2-0 lead of the season, conceded an injury-time equaliser at home to the 11th-best team in Italy, lost to Galatasaray and Bournemouth and somehow managed to avoid doing so after being thoroughly outplayed by Fulham.
Their next Premier League match is away at Southampton, a game in which there are quite literally only two possible outcomes: a 2-1 defeat that tells us everything, or a 4-1 win that tells us nothing.
1=) The Man United Ten Hag sh*tshow
Even by Manchester United’s recent standards, this has been quite the year. There are so many inevitable and easy contrasts to be drawn between Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s relentlessly grim penny-pinching in some areas and the wasteful incompetent profligacy in others.
While the great man has been LinkedIn-ing his way around laying people off, complaining about flexible working and mucky offices and ignoring the women’s team and removing concession ticket prices for minimal financial gain and all manner of terrible optics, United have also been giving Erik Ten Hag a new contract and hundreds of million pounds’ worth of new footballers and then realising what literally every other person on earth knew to be true and sacking him at ruinous expense a few months later.
1=) The Man United Ashworth sh*tshow
And then there’s Ashworth, a nonsense cherry atop a nonsense cake that absolutely demands its own entry. One, because This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About and two, because it is very funny.
From Ashworth accidentally CCing Newcastle in on an email that confirmed United had tapped him up, to the months on gardening leave before his grand entrance, to his eventual appointment within a structure that gave Jason Wilcox far more power than any football fan in the 1990s could ever have predicted, to the bungled summer and his – again and undoubtedly ruinously expensive – departure this week after just five months of actual employment, it’s been a rollercoaster ride of complete ridiculousness from a club that was supposed to be moving past all this sort of caper now because the grown-ups were in charge.
The possibility of Ashworth may very well emerge from this ludicrous chapter that demeans all involved by stumbling upwards into a similar job at Arsenal would be a lovely coda.
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