Misery warning: Southampton fans look away now.
It gives this SBOTOP scribe no pleasure to tell you that Southampton are the first team in Premier League history to be relegated with as many as seven games of the season remaining.
It gives me no pleasure to tell you that the Saints are the third team to lose as many as 25 of their first 31 games of a top-flight campaign, following Sunderland in 2005-06 and Sheffield United in 2020-21 (both also 25).
And it gives me no pleasure to tell you that, after only been relegated twice in their first 45 seasons in the top-flight between 1966-67 and 2021-22 (1973-74 and 2004-05), the proud club from the south coast have now been demoted in two successive Premier League campaigns (2022-23 and 2024-25).
As a footnote, you don’t need to study the Premier League 2025 betting odds to know that the two clubs promoted with them a year ago, Leicester City and Ipswich Town, will soon be joining them with the dreaded ‘R’ by their name in the table.
Leicester were clear winners of the Championship last season and started promisingly in this campaign with an opening weekend draw at home to Spurs.
Indeed, it seemed to some that there’d be no repeat of their surprise relegation nearly two years ago.
To me, in 16th place and two points above the drop zone, it appeared the club owners got twitchy in November when they parted company with Steve Cooper.
I asked at the time had they not learned the lesson of acting so rashly – in April 2023, FA Cup winning boss Brendan Rodgers was surprisingly fired (albeit the Foxes were in the drop zone at the time) and promptly went down.
Cooper had a weaker squad than Rodgers possessed, yet was keeping them afloat.
His replacement, Ruud van Nistelrooy, made a decent start himself but has not been able to stop the slide down the table and, as it stands, amid a litany of more sorry statistics, Leicester have now lost 14 of their past 15 league games and are a whopping 15 points from safety, with just eight games to save themselves from an immediate return to the Championship.
My final attention turns to Ipswich Town.
For those of you who don’t know, Kieran McKenna performed quite a feat in guiding Ipswich from League One, where they had lingered for four years, straight to the sharp end of a brutal Championship promotion fight and straight to the top flight.
Barely any outsiders expected them to last the course in an automatic promotion race against clubs with much bigger resources; but last they did before prevailing.
A 2-1 win at Bournemouth last week gave them hope and some rare Premier League 2025 highlights but this weekend, in effect, sounded the death knell.
Beating Wolves at home with 20 minutes remaining would have given them a fighting chance of survival, but two goals in the final 18 minutes have surely left the ‘Tractor Boys’ on the brink of relegation.
To put into context, this was their 11th league defeat of the season at Portman Road and sixth in successive home games, matching a record league run back in 1963.
Again, I stress, no-one should be too harsh on players or manager after their rapid rise – back-to-back promotions from League One to the Premier League was simply a staggering achievement.
Yes, the money they spent – a reported £150 million – should have made them more competitive after just one home win all season, but it actually highlights the gulf between the Premier League and Championship, let alone for a team which was in League One two years ago.
And therein lies the issue.
Southampton, Ipswich and Leicester City have shown, in patches, this term how they got here.
But the gulf between the established Premier League clubs and the rest is getting wider with each passing year and the ‘playing field’ has never been as uneven.
When someone said to me, a few years ago, that the top flight of English football was the best it’s ever been due to title winners gaining record points tallies, I immediately shut it down.
Champions with 100 and 99 points were undoubtedly excellent teams but the reason they accumulated so many points was not because they were any better than some of the predecessors; more that the league overall had got weaker.
Whereas teams often required 38/39/40 points to stay up, now they could survive without even reaching 30.
This weekend was a case in point.
Last season, Luton Town, Burnley and Sheffield United all dropped back into the Championship at the first time of asking – the first time this has happened since 1998.
The same will happen again over the next few weeks.
As the big boys get richer and even the midtable clubs become more affluent, the chances of the promoted teams staying afloat diminishes with each passing year.
The financial gains received by the Premier League regulars means the gulf is now just too big.
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