These are giddy times for Arsenal. Top of the Premier League and odds-on favourites for the title already, while also cutting a veritable swathe through assorted inadequate European combatants in the Champions League.
It really is starting to look like this is the season the wait for silverware ends. At which point it’s also worth noting that what is now the most talked-about trophy drought in English football will, by the time Arsenal next have the chance to do something about it, only in fact be six years long.
Which isn’t really very long at all, is it? Yet given who Arsenal are and where they keep finishing in the league, it still feels like a mad amount of time.
Especially as we approach the end of a year in which Newcastle and Spurs both ended truly and undeniably absurd trophy droughts and Crystal Palace got their hands on a major piece of silverware for the very first time.
And you know how our minds work by now. That means we have literally no choice but to set about ranking the current most conspicuous ongoing trophy droughts among Premier League clubs. And obviously we’re ranking them entirely subjectively by ridiculousness rather than on anything as mundane or useless as ‘time’. You know what we’re like.
Few points of order. For our purposes here, ‘major trophy’ is defined as any of the three main domestic pots and their predecessors, or any of the major European trophies, current or defunct. Your Champions Leagues, your Cup Winners’ Cups, your Europas and UEFA Cups, The Conference Leagues of this world. And the drought length is measured from the first point it could conceivably end for any of these teams – i.e. next year.
A non-exhaustive list of things that don’t count: one-off Community Shield types, any league title below the first tier, play-offs of any kind, the Zenith Data Systems Cup, God rest its soul, and the equally lost and lamented Intertoto Cup. That kind of thing. Okay?
Any team that has won something in the last five years is not considered to currently be experiencing drought conditions. Also, just so we’re not here all day, we’ve only included teams whose drought dates back to actually winning something rather than to the very beginning of their history.
There’s a philosophical element at play here; is it truly a drought if it’s just all you’ve ever known? But mainly we can’t be arsed. With all due respect to Bournemouth, Brighton, Fulham and Brentford, ain’t nobody got time for that.
That leaves the following eight pot-dodgers.
8) Arsenal – 6 years
The last trophy: 2020 FA Cup
And that’s asterisked to buggery anyway, isn’t it? Because Covid. None of that football was real, was it? Not really? But if you want to read 16 Conclusions on that imaginary game, you can.
And then that’s before we get into whether it was actually Mikel Arteta’s trophy anyway, because he didn’t win it with his team, did he? It was Unai Emery’s team. So in fact it doesn’t count twice, which means it actually removes a trophy from Arsenal’s overall historical tally. That’s just maths.
Five years – six by the time they can actually do anything definitive about it – barely qualifies as a drought in most cases, but Arsenal aren’t most cases. And that six-year wait for silverware is compounded by the fact that certainly during the second half of that drought, Arteta has built a powerfully impressive team yet one that has proved stubbornly and humorously incapable of taking that final step.
And also the awkward fact that during those three most recent seasons no fewer than eight Premier League teams have won something, including not one but two of Arsenal’s most notorious pot-evading local rivals in Spurs and West Ham.
The near misses:
Too many to count. Have infamously finished second in each of the last three Premier League seasons, twice trailing in behind Man City before last season Liverpool stumbled upon the optimum title-delivering blend of Jurgen Klopp’s team with Arne Slot’s methods before f*cking that all right up this year by trying it with Arne Slot’s team.
Have also twice reached the Carabao semi-finals, as well as reaching the last four of the Champions League last season and the Europa League in 2021.
One notable curiosity given how good Arsenal have become and their unmatched overall and recent record in the FA Cup – that 2020 triumph was their fourth in seven seasons – is how crap they’ve been in that competition since that 2020 success against Chelsea. In the last five seasons they’ve never made it past round four, and three times have fallen at the first hurdle, a fate they suffered only once in the previous 24 seasons.
Could it end this season?
We hate the sh*t-stirring reductivism of ‘If [Team X] doesn’t win [Extremely Large Trophy] this season they have bottled it’ but Arsenal really, really should win something this year. And really it should be at least one of the big two.
They are odds-on favourites to win the Premier League and really could on current evidence even be as unchallenged this year as Liverpool were last year, while there is absolutely nothing being done by anyone anywhere to currently suggest they can’t win the Champions League. You do still hear a bit of ‘never won it before, though, have they?’ chat around that particular competition, which is a bit weird now when you consider that two of the last three winners have been Manchester City and PSG. It’s not like a few years before when Real Madrid seemed to beating Liverpool in the final every single year.
No real reason why either domestic cup should be beyond Arsenal’s ken this season either, really, beyond the obvious potential for ‘bigger fish to fry’ prioritising across what does look like being an extremely busy second half of the season.
7) Nottingham Forest – 36 years
The last trophy: 1990 League Cup
And if you want to know just how Olden Times Football 1990 really was, Forest retained the trophy by beating Oldham in the final after knocking out Coventry in the semis.
The near misses:
Forest reached the FA Cup final the following year, and it is still not advised to mention Paul Gascoigne’s name in their fans’ presence, before once again reaching the League Cup final – by now in its much-loved Rumbelows era – in 1992.
Since then, though, there’s been very little. Unless you count the Zenith Data Systems glory of that same year, which you definitely shouldn’t and we certainly won’t.
Did reach two quarter-finals in 1996, in the FA Cup and UEFA Cup, but really you have to wait all the way until their 2022 return to the Premier League for any real sniff of a major trophy. They’ve been to the semi-finals of both domestic cups since their return to the top flight.
Could it end this season?
It’s all going wrong at the moment and there is a strong-to-certain chance Sean Dyche decides to sacrifice that foreign muck altogether on the altar of Premier League survival, but any English team in the Europa League has no real excuse not to at least do pretty well in it these days. And with the new format the fact Forest have but a single point after two games is of no grave concern.
Won’t be winning the Carabao because Ange saw to that when blowing a 2-0 half-time lead at Swansea in such spectacularly none-more-Ange manner. Another run at the FA Cup can’t be entirely discounted, especially if Dyche has by the new year successfully steered them away from the utter woke nonsense of a relegation scrap.
6) Wolves – 46 years
The last trophy: 1980 League Cup
Andy Gray scored the only goal as Wolves stunned the reigning – and soon-to-be-two-time – European champions Nottingham Forest at Wembley, with the win allowing Wolves captain Emlyn Hughes to collect one of the few medals missing from his personal collection after all his success with Liverpool in the 1970s.
The near misses:
Reached the 1981 FA Cup semi-final, losing out after a replay against eventual winners Spurs, but Wolves were about to embark on a precipitous tumble through the leagues that would take from the first division to the fourth by 1986.
Not until 2003 would they return to a very different world of top-flight football in England, although they did reach the 1998 FA Cup semi-finals as a second-tier side.
Reached the last four again in 2018/19 in a very successful first season back after another spell outside the top flight that even involved a short stay in League One. A lofty seventh-placed finish in the Premier League got them into the Europa League, where they would reach the quarter-finals.
And there have been further quarter-final appearances more recently in both domestic cups. But nothing you’d call a particularly near miss.
Could it end this season?
Despite their winless Premier League strife, they have found their way into the last 16 of the Carabao and have a home tie against Chelsea for a quarter-final spot. They’re never going to get a better chance. And we don’t mean that in a good way. We mean literally, this is it for them.
5) Sunderland – 53 years
The last trophy: 1973 FA Cup
One of the all-time great FA Cup shocks saw second-division Sunderland pull down the pants of Don Revie’s star-studded Leeds side, Ian Porterfield scoring the only goal of the game 13 minutes before half-time.
Sunderland became the first team from outside the top flight to win the FA Cup since West Brom over 40 years earlier, but kickstarted a brief revival of the concept. Southampton (1976) and West Ham (1980) would repeat the trick within the next seven years, but nobody has managed it since.
The near misses:
A few, to be fair. Lost out to Norwich in the final of the 1985 League Cup, and had a chance at winning another FA Cup as a second-tier side in 1992, reaching the final only to lose 2-0 to Liverpool, and narrowly missed out on another crack at it in 2004 when losing to fellow Division One side Millwall in one semi-final while Manchester United and Arsenal slugged it out in the other.
Closest of all was in 2014, when they lost the League Cup final to Manchester City despite threatening another Leeds-esque shock when leading 1-0 at half-time before going down 3-1.
Could it end this season?
Unless we’re in for a Premier League season that makes 2015/16 look entirely mundane, it can only happen via the FA Cup, Sunderland having fallen at the first Carabao hurdle on penalties against Huddersfield.
4) Burnley – 66 years
The last trophy: 1960 First Division champions
Emerged top of the pile only on the very final day after a season-long three-way title fight with Wolves and Spurs. Wolves were the defending champions and Spurs would go on to win the Double the following season. None of them has won a league title since.
The near misses:
A 65-year-plus wait for a trophy seemed such an implausible concern for early 60s Burnley that after reaching the semi-finals of the first League Cup in 1961 they didn’t even bother entering it for the next four seasons, and that earns them several points in our very real and very complicated calculations.
The year after Spurs did the Double, Burnley pulled off the Near Miss Double, finishing second to Ipswich in the league and losing to Tottenham in the FA Cup final.
There were two third-place finishes and a League Cup semi-final after they deigned to compete again before the 60s were out, but by the end of the decade their time as a dominant force in English football was over.
There was an FA Cup semi-final in 1974 – and that was in the brief period where a third-place play-off existed for absolutely no good reason at all, which they duly won.
The 1982/83 season was an odd one, featuring an FA Cup quarter-final and League Cup semi-final as well as relegation to the third tier.
The closest they’ve come to anything since was the 2008/09 League Cup, where Burnley fell victim to the tournament’s esoteric away goals rule after a stirring semi-final comeback against Spurs. A 4-1 defeat in the first leg at White Hart Lane appeared to have settled the tie, only for Burnley to roar to a 3-0 ‘win’ after 90 minutes of the second leg at Turf Moor.
Under the normal away goals rule used by literally everyone else at the time, they’d have been through. But in the League Cup away goals only counted after extra-time, by which point Spurs had regained the run of themselves and scored twice to dump Burnley out.
Could it end this season?
The FA Cup is the only route to ending those 66 years of hurt after suffering the second most infamous defeat for a Premier League struggler in the third round of the Carabao at the hands of a Welsh club this season.
3) Leeds United – 36 years
The last trophy: 1992 First Division champions
As with Burnley, a good effort for anyone’s last trophy to be the actual league title rather than something slightly more tinpot. Can’t quite decide whether doing it in the last year before football was invented makes it better or worse. It is funny that it simply doesn’t count when people talk about how few teams have won the league in relatively recent history.
Have had some good years, some middling years and some truly sh*tbone awful ones in the subsequent 35. But when you consider just how good their very best sides were across that period, it’s a mad old amount of time for such a big club to have won nothing halfway proper.
The near misses:
Even at their pre-crash high point around the millennium Leeds never really sustained a proper season-long challenge for the actual title. Their highest finish over those giddy years was third in 1999/2000, but they were over 20 points behind Man United there.
They also have a curiously wretched record in both domestic cups over our time period. They lost to Villa in the 1996 Coca-Cola Cup final but haven’t reached so much as a semi-final in either League Cup or FA Cup since.
Did famously get to the last four in Europe two seasons running around their 2000 streets-won’t-forget peak, in the 99/00 UEFA Cup and the following season’s weird two-group-stage Champions League.
Could it end this season?
Don’t think we’re speaking out of turn in suggesting the Premier League title is beyond the reach of Daniel Farke, while the Carabao was sacked off in most undignified fashion at proper crisis club (rather than the Premier League version which just means ‘lost three games’) Sheffield Wednesday.
So it’s the FA Cup or, more likely, nothing this season as far as Leeds are concerned.
2) Everton – 31 years
The last trophy: 1995 FA Cup
Everton’s 1980s glory years were already fading into the background by the time they stunned Manchester United thanks to Paul Rideout’s winning goal at Wembley, but if you’d said to anyone then that this would represent the last silverware the blue half of Liverpool would be celebrating for 30 years and counting, that no men’s trophy would ever again be added to the Goodison Park trophy cabinet because if and when it does ever happen again it will be after they’d left and moved to a brand new stadium built over water at the docks, you’d have got some pretty hard stares.
This was still a time when it was only eight years since they’d been league champions, and six years since their last appearance in the FA Cup final. The old pre-Premier League ‘Big Five’ was still fresh in the memory, despite the startling extent to which Everton had missed that particular bus.
The near misses:
Restricted to a few half-decent domestic cup runs. Have certainly never challenged for the league title in the Premier League era, while their occasional forays on the continent have generally been disappointing having never taken them beyond the last 16.
The closest they’ve come is the 2009 FA Cup final, when Louis Saha gave them a 1-0 lead after just 25 seconds only for Chelsea to hit back and win 2-1 thanks to goals from, predictably, Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard.
They reached the semi-finals again three years later, and made the last four of both domestic cups in 2016.
But they’ve gone no further than the quarter-finals in anything since.
Could it end this season?
We’re going to be bold and suggest the Premier League trophy is not heading to the Hill-Dickinson Stadium in its inaugural season, and we can be even more certain the Carabao won’t after a 2-0 defeat at Wolves in the last round.
So again, it’s FA Cup or bust for David Moyes and co this season, then, or on the drought will go. No shade, but on the drought will almost certainly go.
1) Aston Villa – 30 years
The last trophy: 1996 League Cup
A second League Cup win in three seasons for a team that might have expected more trophy parades just around the corner given they’d finished second in the first Premier League season, and in 1996 would go on to reach the FA Cup semi-finals and finish fourth in the league.
But no. It’s been a fairly wild ride for Villa over what will be a 30-year drought by the time the next possible chance of an ending comes around, featuring numerous rises and falls. In that time they’ve had sustained spells in the top six, three years slumming it in the Championship, relegation battles, mid-table stodge, Champions League qualification and, well, pretty much everything apart from an actual trophy.
If we combine the two elements here of time without a trophy and time spent as plausible trophy contender, it’s hard now that Newcastle and Spurs are out of the equation to conclude any drought is dafter than Villa’s.
The near misses:
Lost out in the FA Cup finals of 2000 and 2015, as well as the League Cup finals in 2010 and 2020. Which raises the question of what the f*ck they were up to going out of both cups early in 2005, really.
Reached the FA Cup semi-final last season, which was an absolutely massive chance missed, as was the failure to do a West Ham and get the job done in the Conference League the year before. Another semi-final f*ck-up there.
Were one of the three ‘winners’ in the 2001 Intertoto Cup, but not even the Intertoto Cup’s mum considers it a major trophy. Especially as Villa then went out of the UEFA Cup it got them into in the very first round at the hands of NK Varteks, a Croatian club that no longer even exists.
Could it end this season?
Absolutely yes. Only Arsenal have a better chance. Fumbled the Europa Conference in 2024 but this season’s Europa League represents another gilt-edged and less tinpot opportunity, and one where they’ve made a thus far flawless start.
Are already out of the Carabao and will not be winning the Premier League. Might be well advised to adopt the Tottenham/United approach of so thoroughly mangling their league campaign that the extremely winnable Europa becomes not just the primary focus but the only one.
