Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday this season The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s football.
This was the gameweek when Arsenal beat Bournemouth and had a few hours of tantalising hope in the title race, before Manchester City steamrollered Wolverhampton Wanderers, Jurgen Klopp’s penultimate home game as Liverpool manager ended in a suitably madcap 4-2 win over Tottenham Hotspur, and Nottingham Forest took a big step towards safety by beating Sheffield United 3-1.
Here, we will ask if Chelsea’s good form actually means anything, what impact Tottenham’s limp end to the season will have on their future and whether big American sports stars might think twice about investing in English football after a rough weekend for Tom Brady and JJ Watt…
Chelsea are one of the Premier League’s form teams – but what does it mean?
Would you like to guess the identity of the form team in the Premier League, other than the top three, over the last 12 games? The team who have won the joint-most home games, along with the top two, since mid-December? The team who have scored the joint-most home goals in 2024?
Well, the clue is in the sub-heading of this section. Implausibly, Chelsea are finishing the season pretty well, especially after their 5-0 thrashing of West Ham United.
| Position | Team | Played | GD | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 13 | 35 | 34 | |
2 | 13 | 25 | 33 | |
3 | 13 | 13 | 27 | |
4 | 12 | 12 | 23 | |
5 | 12 | 11 | 23 | |
6 | 13 | 1 | 21 |
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: this season has been a mess at Stamford Bridge, with an ill-thought-through transfer policy ensuring that Mauricio Pochettino’s side were never going to challenge for the Champions League places, never mind get anywhere near the title race. They have mostly looked moderate at best, actively bad in many instances.
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And yet, they could finish in the European qualification places. Sixth is a live possibility, particularly given at least one of the two other main candidates for that position, Newcastle United and Manchester United, will drop points when they face each other in their penultimate game of the season.
There is a bit of hope for the future. You don’t need reminding how good Cole Palmer has been, but Mykhailo Mudryk and Moises Caicedo have shown signs of life in recent weeks — at one time, they looked like £200million flushed down the toilet.
Nicolas Jackson now has 16 goals in all competitions: Didier Drogba only got more than that in two of his nine seasons at Chelsea. That’s a slightly disingenuous comparison because Drogba’s legend was built on when and against whom he scored his goals, rather than the volume of them, but it does at least illustrate that, despite the criticism, Jackson hasn’t been the disaster you might think.
How would Chelsea’s season be viewed if they do take that sixth spot? A success? Probably not. A failure? That would feel harsh. Would it even be a good thing if they got into Europe? Could the current hierarchy decide it means they’re doing everything right? Does this mean anything at all?
If nothing else, it shows that the narrative around a team’s season can be more important than its actual final finishing position.
Breaking down Cole Palmer’s astonishing season at Chelsea
- An expert’s guide to his all-round brilliance
- Do Manchester City regret letting him go?
- England have a star made for the big moments
Will Spurs’ desperate run have greater consequences?
You would have to be pretty obtuse and/or extremely negative to argue that Ange Postecoglou’s first season in charge of Tottenham has been a failure.
But arguing in favour of it being an outright, unambiguous success is becoming more and more difficult. That’s four league defeats in a row after the 4-2 loss to Liverpool, their worst run since 2004. As Adam Bate of Sky Sports pointed out on X, if they don’t beat Burnley next weekend, Postecoglou will have an almost identical win percentage to Nuno Espirito Santo — Postecoglou has won 50 per cent of his 38 games in charge, Nuno won 47 per cent of his 17 games in 2021.
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The point has been made that if Tottenham’s season had been reversed — ie, if their good run had come at the end of the season rather than the start — things would look much rosier going into the summer. That’s true enough, but had their season been reversed then, much like Nuno, Postecoglou might not have made it past November.
The significant caveat to any conclusions based on this run is that these have been four pretty tough games. Newcastle and Chelsea are enjoying their best spells of the season, and Arsenal and Liverpool are two of the three best sides in the division.
It’s not the results themselves that are concerning, but their nature. Had Spurs lost while playing the dynamic, freewheeling, sometimes irresponsibly entertaining football that Postecoglou preaches and has delivered at times, that would be one thing — but they have been mostly flat and uninspired, scoring goals against Liverpool and Arsenal when it was too late.
Their last win — and last convincing performance — against a team not scrapping against relegation was at the start of March, when they walloped Aston Villa. That makes it the better part of two months they have been in a funk, which isn’t ideal.
The question is whether this slump will harm Postecoglou’s work in the summer and next season. The last manager of a north London club to ask everyone to trust the process turned out to have a point, but Mikel Arteta won the FA Cup in his first season at Arsenal, showing tangible evidence that he is worth sticking with.
The tailing off of Spurs’ campaign might just be a symptom of growing pains, fatigue showing at the end of a season when they have suffered significant injury woes and the manager is working with a squad that isn’t quite to his liking yet.
However, they have looked truly desperate in these past few weeks. The concern must be that it will harm the faith — from players, fans, everyone around Spurs — in Postecoglou to get things right later on.
Will the failure of Tom Brady and JJ Watt’s teams make other U.S. stars think twice?
It’s not been a great weekend for famous Americans who have invested in English football.
On Saturday, Birmingham’s relegation from the Championship was confirmed, capping off a calamitous season in which six managers have taken charge of a game, their demotion confirmed despite a ‘too little, too late’ victory over Norwich. The highlight of their day was this fan scoring an absolute screamer after the game.
Relegated, but our sense of humour remains 😂 #bcfc pic.twitter.com/TFucdiSbTw
— Mr. Greedy (@RockyKL) May 4, 2024
The whole thing is made even worse by the fact that they were in the play-off places in October, and had survived against the odds last season. That wasn’t enough to keep John Eustace in a job, replaced based on a “misalignment with the leadership of the club” by Knighthead, the American group that counts Tom Brady among its investors.
It feels like a long time ago now that Brady was charming the locals in The Roost, a pub near Birmingham’s stadium. “I like being the underdog,” said Brady, a seven-time Super Bowl winner and three-time NFL MVP, at the time. “Maybe you’re asking, ‘What do you know about English football, Tom?’. Well, let’s just say I’ve got a lot to learn. But I do know a few things about winning, and they may translate pretty well.”
We’ll call that a work in progress.
Elsewhere, JJ and Kealia Watt’s first season among the co-ownership group at Burnley almost certainly isn’t going to end well. Burnley’s 4-1 defeat to Newcastle means it’s pretty unlikely that they will survive, and their relegation could be confirmed this week if Nottingham Forest’s appeal against their points deduction is successful. Sent down by a committee somewhere would be a deeply unsatisfying way for any season to end, but it is worth pointing out that Burnley would already be gone had Forest not fallen foul of the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR).
Nobody is directly blaming Brady or the Watts (although in Brady’s case, he is loosely part of a group that has made some truly catastrophic decisions) for these failures, but is there a broader lesson to be learnt?
If there is, perhaps it’s that succeeding in English football is not as easy as it may appear from watching Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s documentary series Welcome To Wrexham. Watt and Brady are famous faces, PR for the people actually making the decisions, and perhaps in the longer term their influence will be positive — but for the moment, if there is anyone else of similar stature looking to get involved in the often perilous and unpredictable world of English football, they might think twice.
Coming up this week
- Drink in these last few rounds of Premier League games while they’re still here: the final game of this round of fixtures takes place on Monday, as Manchester United travel to Croydon to face Crystal Palace.
- Then it’s time for football to put on its big boy pants: the second leg of the Champions League semi-final between Paris Saint-Germain and Borussia Dortmund takes place at the Parc des Princes on Tuesday, with the Germans holding a slender 1-0 advantage over Luis Enrique’s garcons.
- And on Wednesday, the other one: we’re legally obliged to refer to Real Madrid vs Bayern Munich as ‘finely poised’, which is fairly accurate given it’s 2-2 going into the second half of the tie at the Bernabeu.
- Wednesday also sees a rogue Europa Conference League semi-final in the shape of the second leg between Club Bruges and Fiorentina, with the Italians holding a 3-2 advantage from game one.
- That game isn’t on Thursday to avoid a clash with something called the Procession of the Holy Blood in the Belgian capital, but the winners will play either Aston Villa or Olympiacos, with Unai Emery’s gang needing to overturn the 4-2 deficit from last week.
- Then we have the Europa League semi-finals: Bayer Leverkusen will aim to go a frankly bonkers 49 games unbeaten for the season when they take a 2-0 lead over Roma into the second leg, at home. Between Atalanta and Marseille, it’s all square after the first leg.
- You also have a bunch of other semi-finals dotted throughout the week via the English Football League play-offs, which are always buttock-clenching encounters. Enjoy.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
