Unexpected Delirium End of Season Review: Awards, Kinda
It's time to look back over the course of the season and pick out some bests and worsts.
It is a long enough time ago for me to not be able to remember which specific years, but I’m certain I used to do something like this at the end of the year on 200% so here we faharkin’ go. Once more round the block. Obviously, since the FA Cup final hasn’t been played at the time of writing, I’m just going to as the FA do and act as though it doesn’t matter. The same will have to happen for the EFL play-off winners who haven’t played yet. Well done, whoever you turn out to be.
I essentially divide my football watching into two specific areas. Premier League, Europe, all that stuff for work; lower divisions, non-league and the like for fun. The divide was sharper when I was in my previous employment, but that mental divide remains with me a year on, and the sum total of this is that I am barely able to take the upper echelons of the game terribly seriously, on the whole. It feels more like a soap opera these days. Trust me; the Premier League really does make more sense if you hum the theme to Crossroads at the end of each match. Dow dow-dow-dow dowwww!
But I digress.
This has been an awful, predictable, yet at times highly entertaining football season. The Premier League has been won by the same team for the fourth time in a row and the sixth time in seven years. The two teams playing in the FA Cup final are exactly the same two as played in last year’s final. The three promoted teams went straight back down and two of those replacing them will be bouncing straight back.
Yet there have been times this season when I have howled with laughter, at the misfortunes of massive clubs soiling themselves with surprising regularity, including the one I support myself, who found themselves in an end of season argument among themselves about the ethics of throwing a match to ensure that your local rivals have a substantially reduced chance of winning the league. As if they weren’t going to lose that match anyway.
So bearing all of that in mind, this is how I think 2023/24 played out in England.
Player of the Year: Cole Palmer
It felt like a strange decision at the time, for Manchester City to offload a young player who’d come through their academy to a club who were seeking to become their rivals. But Palmer did want to go to Chelsea, and there can be little questioning the extent to which he’s influenced their season.
He scored almost a third of their league goals from midfield and contributed the second most assists as well. Furthermore, he’s done this against a backdrop of a Chelsea team who were as dysfunctional this season as they were last time around for much of this season. An impressive end has masked a little the extent to which Palmer was hauling an otherwise malfunctioning team along; sometimes, it almost felt, by himself.
This one would probably make the best contender for best signing of the season as well, wouldn’t it, but I can’t just repeat myself, can I?
Manager of the Year: Unai Emery
On the 20th October 2022, the day that Steven Gerrard was sacked from his inexplicable position as their manager, Aston Villa were 17th in the Premier League and separated only from the relegation places on goals scored.
Their transformation to a team who will be playing Champions League football has been little short of miraculous. It’s difficult not to feel pleased for Unai Emery. Chased out of Arsenal in 2019 and treated as something of a laughing stock in this country, Emery returned to Spain with Villareal the following year. In 2021, they won the Europa League, the fourth time he’d won that particular trophy.
But under his managership, Villa coasted to fourth place in the Premier League this season, and all with a team that has been getting results at a significantly higher level than you’d expect from the sum of their parts. He plays entertaining, progressive football, he wins trophies and gets teams playing above themselves, and, let’s face it, you’d kinda like to give him a cuddle too, wouldn’t you?
Team of the Year: Ipswich Town
Predictable, but it’s difficult to overstate what an achievement it is to get two successive promotions from League One to the Premier League in these financial calcified times. It has happened before, and it never quite seems to get the recognition that it deserves.
Consider what they had to get through to manage this. League One in the 22022/23 season was an absolute bearpit, with Sheffield Wednesday, Barnsley and Bolton in pursuit in a division that was competitive enough to see big hitters such as Derby County, Portsmouth and Charlton pushed out of the play-off places altogether. Yet for all this, they ran up 98 points.
And then they had to go through the same thing in the Championship, except in this division there were a bunch of teams getting Premier League parachute payments as a cherry on the cake. The Championship, we can all agree, is a desperate division to the extent that you can almost smell it.
So what did these newly-promoteds do? They ran up 96 points, finishing second behind Leicester City and ahead of bigger-hitters such as Leeds United, Southampton and West Bromwich Albion. They’re not going to, obviously, but just imagine if they managed anything like that again next season.
Worst Team of the Year: Sheffield United
Well, where to begin. Sheffield United finished last season having been bottom of the table since December. Over the course of last season they were in the bottom three from the 24th September on, and the only reason they weren’t prior to that was three other teams having even worse starts than them. That ended pretty spectacularly when Newcastle beat them 8-0 at Bramall Lane. They never remotely recovered.
This certainly didn’t end on the pitch. Rumours of the extent they’d needed to get promotion to the Premier League to avoid some sort of financial catastrophe remained persistent. There were renewed allegations regarding their now former women’s team manager.
***
And then there was poor, dear Maddy. I hope you’ve found peace.
***
Perhaps the best that can be said for Sheffield United’s season is that they ended up not getting involved with Dozey Mmobuosi, who turned out to be—as widely predicted at the time, though we had to pull our punches in terms of what we could say for obvious legal reasons—a colossal fraud.
Best Run Club of the Year: Luton Town
You do have to remember where they came from. A decade ago, Luton Town were winning the National League title, writing one of football’s bigger injustices of the 21st century, the case of the club relegated by savage points deductions. They’d had spent five years in the non-league game by this time.
Fast forward a decade, and they came closer than many imagine they would to hanging onto a place in the Premier League. They ended up six points adrift of Nottingham Forest but were in touch until the closing couple of weeks of the season. They will return to the Championship financially enriched and having given a good account of themselves in the top flight.
But this isn’t even really about this. When it became evident that a new stand was going to have to be built to replace the executive boxes that ran the length of one side of Kenilworth Road, they got on with it and had it ready by the first week in September.
Furthermore, they have finally delivered on the new ground that the club has been crying out for for the last four decades or longer. Much as we will miss its charm, we don’t have to live with Kenilworth Road and it is understandable that the club needs to leave. It could be argued that this might have happened at any point over the last forty years and under far shadier owners than the current custodians. They should be in their new ground by around 2027.
Worst Run Club of the Year
A tightly packed field as ever, but the best that can be said about Reading’s season is that at least they avoided relegation. But until Dai Yongge has gone from the club, their prognosis remains as grim as ever and there hasn’t been much movement on the sale of the club over the last couple of months. A grim situation.
Goal of the Season: Alejandro Garnacho for Manchester United vs Everton
This, we can all agree, has been a pretty disastrous season for Manchester United. Jim Ratcliffe now has a minority shareholding in the club but is running the club something like on a day-to-day basis. Their Premier League season ended with them in 8th place in the table, but they did at least get to enjoy Alejandro Garnacho’s Rooney-esque bicycle kick at Goodison Park at the end of November. It kind of sums up their season to add that they lost four of their next six matches. Inconsischester United.
Miss of the Season: David Fofana for Burnley vs Brentford
What is impressive about David Fofana’s remarkable miss for Burnley against Brentford is the extent to which all the stars align for him. The ball across the six-yard box is perfect. There is literally no-one anywhere near him. He is probably less than two yards from a completely open goal.
And then he puts the ball about fourteen yards wide. Not even close. A beautiful moment.
Match of the Season: Spurs 1-4 Chelsea
I was, of course, on the receiving end of this one. But all I can really do is consider the evidence. Five goals, five further disallowed goals, two red cards, one hat-trick, thirty minutes of stoppage-time, and a nine-player team playing a line so high while losing that it looked as though the entire defensive line may have been suffering the effects of hypoxia. If Spurs want people to stop calling them ‘Doctor Tottenham’ and variations thereupon, they really need to stop doing things like this.
Best signing of the last twelve months: Declan Rice
£105m is a lot of money and there were a lot of people on tenterhooks to start the ridicule, but Arsenal have been excellent this season and Rice has stepped up his game to demonstrate that the potential and blossoming that he underwent at West Ham was the real deal. Surely also a potential Arsenal and England captain in-waiting, Rice has proved that even the really crazy money can make something approaching sense if spent extremely wisely.
Worst signing of the last twelve months: Kalvin Phillips
It would, of course, be easy to lean into a form of dismissive criticism of Phillips or West Ham around this loan from Manchester City, but this doesn’t really look like a transfer that has worked out for anyone. An error on his debut which gifted Bournemouth an equalising goal set the tone for his brief stay at The London Stadium, and at 28 years of age it does feel as though his career may already be in a decline from which it will never fully recover. West Ham only got eight Premier League games out of him, and goodness knows what’s happened to his value to Manchester City as a result of this little escapade.
One thing the governing bodies should change about the game
Just one?
Okay, just one.
If I only have one—and who knows whether any of us will be around by this time next year?—then I need to go large, and very tempting though it is to chuck VAR into a bin and then fire the bin from a cannon into the Sun, by going higher level than this and getting rid of every last damn person administering the Premier League, the EFL and National League. The rest may fall into place from then. Now, if we can start collecting up those cameras, I’ve got a bin to fill, and then a cannon to fill with that bin.
Back in the 70s ( I am properly old), Luton had a plan to move the club to Milton Keynes. I always associate that plan with Barry Butlin - I expect the Evening Post used his photo with the story to show the readers what a footballer looked like. Where would Pete Winkleman have set up his "Dons" then?