Liverpool will win the Premier League this season. That’s a statistical and practical inevitability. We don’t know when that might happen, but given the size of the lead they have and the number of games remaining, there’s no way anybody else can stop them. When they do, it will be the first time that the Anfield side has walked away with English football’s top prize in thirty years. So long as they don’t lose too many of their stars players and they hang on to manager Jurgen Klopp, it might be the first of many.
Liverpool’s eventual triumph will stop Manchester City from picking up a third consecutive championship trophy, and they will, in fact, be the first ‘new’ team to win the Premier League since 2016. After almost thirty years of operation, only six different teams have won the competition. Liverpool will be the seventh.
The Premier League is something of a closed shop just as many major leagues in Europe are, and the lack of real contenders for the title is sometimes pointed to as a reason that the division can sometimes be too predictable.
There are several obvious reasons why some teams can never content for the top prize. Most of them are financial. Without money, a team cannot buy the best players. Without the best players, a team cannot contend for top honors. That makes it hard to break into the top four, and even harder for a team outside that top four to come and steal the championship away unexpectedly. Nevertheless, it can happen – and we’ve seen it happen before.
When Leicester City won the championship in 2016, they did it against almost unimaginable odds. Some bookmakers listed them as five thousand to one. To put that in context, you’d get better odds of hitting the jackpot at the first time of asking on some UK Online Slots. You’d almost certainly have considered spending $10 on an online slots games as a better investment than putting money on Leicester to win the league, and yet they did it. That’s the whole point of online slots, though – sometimes they pay out, and that’s what keeps people playing.
We’ve been thinking about who the next Leicester City might be – and these are the teams we’ve come up with.
Tottenham Hotspur
Spurs have been on the cusp of winning the Premier League so many times in recent years that it would no longer count as a surprise if they finally took the extra step and won the whole thing. They’ve been second, third, and fourth in the past five years – finishing on top is the only thing left for them to do. They’re arguably further away right now than they have been in a while, with Jose Mourinho finding the job much harder than he probably expected when he took the reigns, but they have the financial resources to spend heavily in the summer.
They also have Harry Kane, who, so long as they can keep hold of him and he stays fit, is a guarantee of between twenty and thirty league goals every season.
They might have a reputation for choking at crucial moments, but Spurs are the most likely of all the teams who’ve never won the Premier League before to take the crown in the near future.
Everton
For three whole decades, Everton has lived in the shadow of Liverpool on Merseyside, but that wasn’t always the case. Everton was a dominant team during the 1980s and would probably have won the European Cup during that decade if all English teams hadn’t been banned from European competition in the wake of the Heysel disaster. The Toffees are one of the few teams never to have been relegated from the Premier League, but have survived by the skin of the teeth on more occasions than they’d probably care to count.
These days, though, they have Carlo Ancelotti at the helm, and signing a coach of that pedigree is a statement of intent. With heavyweight investors now sat on the club’s board and a manager capable of persuading big-name players to sign for them, Everton might finally be ready to rise again.
Newcastle United
Newcastle United is a club that should have won far more than it ever has. In terms of support, they’re one of the biggest teams in the country, but something always seems to stop them from reaching the next level. In the 1990s, it was the spectacular implosion of manager Kevin Keegan, who was psychologically picked apart by Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson as the club surrendered a twelve-point lead – and the title – to the Old Trafford side.
In more recent times, it’s been deeply unpopular chairman Mike Ashley, who’s hated by the fans and many of the team’s former players and legends. Ashley is now on the brink of selling the club, though, and the new owners are said to be very rich and very ambitious. All it would take is a year or two of good recruitment to turn the Magpies into a potent, championship-capable force.
Wolverhampton Wanderers
Perhaps it’s true to say that Wolves would be nowhere without the club’s Portuguese connection, which has brought them an exceptional Portuguese coach in Nuno Espirito Santo and several great Portuguese players. Even if it is true, it’s irrelevant. The coach and the players are there, and the club appears to be very well run from top to bottom. They finished 7th in their first season back in the Premier League and look set to go one or possibly two places better this time around.
By focusing on taking small steps forward every year instead of running before they can walk, Wolves are creating a solid foundation on which to build. They won’t win the championship next season, and probably not the season after that, but providing the Portuguese link holds, and the club keeps progressing at its current rate, there’s only one place it can end up.
Wolves haven’t been champions of England since the 1950s. Imagine the size of the party when that long wait comes to an end.
Aside from these four teams, it’s hard to see who else could rise and make a challenge without a change in ownership, or a total change of strategy. We never say never, though – Leicester showed us that it’s always a mistake to do so, and so we should never rule out the chances of Bournemouth, Southampton, or Burnley shocking the football world!