The nature of the typical soccer season offers plenty of things to follow beyond the title: There are Champions League and Europa League spots still to be determined; the relegation fight tends to last until the final matchday; and the FA Cup is set to resume at the end of this month.
Still, the title race is typically the headliner, and once it's off the board, the reflection begins.
Granted, the 2019-20 season will be remembered primarily for the coronavirus pandemic stoppage, which in itself made this one of the strangest sports years on record across the world. But as far as the play itself goes, how will we remember this campaign? Where might it rank among the other 27 Premier League seasons?
Ranking things on the internet is as old as the internet itself, and the list of criteria for ranking seasons is seemingly endless. Maybe the title race is the most important thing. Maybe it's how chaotic the final days of the year were. Maybe European success defines how good a season was at this point. I couldn't come up with a small list of criteria that did it for me; instead, I'm choosing to rank Premier League seasons by all the criteria. Or at least as many as I could think of. And to raise the nerd quotient, I created a proprietary points system, as well.
Below, I ranked Premier League seasons based on six categories worth up to five points each: quality of champion, quality of runner-up, quality of title race, quality of relegation battle, European success and variety at the top. This covered most of the angles I could think of, and to the extent that it didn't, I awarded up to four bonus points to a few seasons for particularly memorable moments or achievements. The most points a season can garner are 30. I ranked the 27 completed seasons based on this system, and at the bottom we'll speculate on where 2019-20 might fall once complete.
For this category, I stuck pretty strictly to how many points each champion generated and how dominant their goal differential was. Doing this was the most objective approach; it also allowed me to slaughter a couple of sacred cows, which is always fun.
Based on a blend of points and goal differential, the six best Premier League champions to date -- not including this year's Liverpool -- have been as follows:
That list, however, doesn't include two of the most celebrated champions: the 1998-99 Manchester United Treble winners (79 points, +43) and the 2003-04 Arsenal Invincibles (90 points, +47). So let's address those.
As wild as it might sound, United's 1998-99 team was one of the least dominant champions of the era. They are celebrated because of their Treble heroics -- they also won the FA Cup and finally broke through to win the Champions League -- but this almost certainly wasn't one of Alex Ferguson's best United teams. Among this batch of 27 champions, in fact, only 1992-93 United, 1996-97 United and 1997-98 Arsenal averaged fewer points per match. While their goal differential ranks higher, it's still only 18th of 27.
This is a reminder that your highest levels of quality and your biggest accomplishments don't always line up perfectly.
