The end of the year means best-of lists and awards, doesn’t it?
Gongs and baubles and flowers for the great and good. Well tits to that. We’re interested not in who’s been good but who’s been bad. And not even bad as in ‘not good’ but bad as in complete and utter pricks.
This list is an absolute hive of scum and villainy, with the worst thing about it the sure and certain knowledge that the top two pricks are going to be even worse and even more prominent in 2026.
Southampton, Leicester and Ipswich
Managed a pitiful 24 points between them from 57 Premier League games in the first half of 2025, denying everyone the chance to enjoy any kind of relegation fight.
A pathetic effort all round and one put into context by even the weakest of the latest batch of promoted clubs this season. Burnley have more Premier League points this year from a game less than these three sorry individuals.
The utter failure of these three to even put up a fight allowed certain clubs who shall remain nameless (not really, we’re going to name them literally immediately in this list) to completely sack the league off with no consequence. Well, no relegation-based consequence anyway. Infuriatingly bad.
Manchester United
The trio of promoted clubs who adhered to the Homer Simpson principle that if something’s hard then it’s not worth doing meant that while a historically bad season for Manchester United was still funny, it wasn’t as funny as it could or should have been had it contained even a sliver of actual relegation peril.
But mainly they get on this list for the unspeakable crime of being This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About and putting every single one of your eggs in a basket labelled ‘Simply beat the sport’s most notorious trophy-dodgers in a major final’ and then somehow managing to not even do that.
Sure, everyone took the p*ss a bit but we still feel like this just isn’t talked about enough. Manchester United should be too embarrassed to leave the house after something like that. But it didn’t even cost anyone their jobs.
And now they’re bumbling around being kind of halfway competent but not really. Unacceptable. They are no longer bad enough to be consistently amusing, nor good enough to be interesting. Because they’re only ‘good’ because standards have been allowed to fall so desperately low.
Not one other post-Ferguson manager would have been able to get away with ‘Maybe nick a top-six spot with a following wind’ as an acceptable stretch goal. Ruben Amorim might be a genius; it might actually be the only way for Manchester United to escape the Fergie Era once and for all.
Recalibrate the club so entirely that sometimes qualifying for Europe is good, actually.
READ: Every Prem club’s best decision of 2025: signings, subs, shape switches…
Tottenham Hotspur
One of the single most absurd calendar years in Premier League history from this complete pack of pricks.
Finally won a trophy, which was prickery in itself because Spurs’ only job is to make other clubs who don’t win trophies feel better about themselves. What are your Evertons and Villas supposed to do now? Well, as it turns out it’s ‘move into spectacular new stadium’ and ‘challenge for the actual title’ but that doesn’t give Spurs a pass.
But what Spurs did in order to win a trophy was to completely abandon everything else. They stopped even pretending to try and get Premier League points – again, the pricks at the top of this list have a lot to answer for here – in order to win the Europa.
And then decided that actually that wasn’t okay, that finishing 17th (albeit chasms clear of actual trouble) in order to win a trophy wasn’t acceptable. So they sacked the manager. And then got rid of the man who sacked the manager.
And now they might finish 17th without even competing for a trophy anyway. There is a complete pointlessness to Spurs at the moment.
Say what you like about trophy-dodging, at least it’s an ethos. At least the trophy drought provided some clarity of purpose; it’s now impossible to ascertain what Spurs are even trying to achieve.
They’re not really trying to compete with the rest of the Big Six anymore, they’re not really trying to win trophies anymore because they’ve ticked that off and don’t really need to bother again apparently.
Nobody knows what constitutes a good season for Spurs now, or more importantly who is actually in a position to decide. At least when Daniel Levy was around we all knew where we stood, but now he’s toddled off to spend more time with his CBE.
David Sullivan
A proud and storied football club is being allowed to rot. West Ham have been outside the Premier League for only four seasons in all, but relegation is looking increasingly likely after another wasted summer and unsuccessful manager sacking.
Nuno Espirito Santo will likely soon go the way of Graham Potter as scapegoats are sought for why things are going so terribly wrong for a club whose owners decided that there was money to be saved by limiting ambition every year to simply being better than whichever poor saps got promoted every season.
The problem with making ‘Just stay in the Premier League’ the ceiling rather than floor of your ambitions, though, is that there is no margin for error when things go wrong. Or when Leeds and Sunderland turn up with unexpected confidence and a bit of actual ambition.
West Ham have been sleepwalking towards this situation pretty much from the moment they moved to the London Stadium. If there was any point at all in giving up everything they had at Upton Park for the soulless, cavernous bowl that is the former Olympic Stadium then it was surely about increasing income and becoming more competitive on the pitch, not less.
The Hammers aren’t the first or last team to give up an atmospheric old ground full of history and palpable energy, but they are definitely the ones who f*cked it the most. At least Tottenham and Everton got brilliant stadiums out of it, if not yet in Spurs’ case much evidence of the on-field improvement.
West Ham fans have been asked to give up an awful lot that was precious to them, and ‘For what?’ is becoming an increasingly relevant and angry response.
It was unacceptable when mere top-flight survival became the target; now they won’t even have that.
Conspiracy-addled fans
Not a novel observation, but it really has grown exponentially more exhausting this year as more and more fanbases allow themselves to be sucked down the conspiracy rabbit-hole with Liverpool and Arsenal.
Every Premier League club now has a sizeable and loud coterie of supporters who are of the unshakeable belief that a conspiracy exists against their club. No refereeing decision can ever just be a refereeing decision now, it must always be part of the grand plan in which every governing body within English football is risking it all to conspire together to ensure Brighton remain tenth.
And of course that nonsense now extends to other teams’ games, so there is never any escape. Matches not involving your team are scoured for incidents that would definitely have been treated differently “If that were us…”
Fixture lists are scoured for evidence of bias. Referee appointments are considered important. The entirely ludicrous idea that referees from the north-west of England will always favour the teams from the north-west of England, because if there’s one thing we know for sure about football fans it’s that they definitely like all the teams from their local area rather than hating all but one of them more than anyone else.
Which then in true cake-and-eat-it style means that those referees are then obviously biased against the north-west clubs, actually, because they are bitter rivals of the team they actually support. Like all the best conspiracy theories, everything is evidence that you’re right if you try hard enough.
We imagine there must have been some pretty high-level meetings between shadowy figures from the PGMOL and the FA and the Premier League this week ahead of Arsenal v Aston Villa. We can’t wait to find out whether the conspiracy this week is the old favourite of making sure Arsenal don’t win the league because reasons, or putting Aston Villa back in their place because the Big Six must be favoured.
Apart from Arsenal, obviously.
Conspiracy-addled managers
Yes, you know who you are. You can stop egging on your most hard-of-thinking supporters as a deflection tactic please. It doesn’t end well for any of us to continue propagating the idea that none of this is real and everything is being controlled by a shadowy cabal of bastards.
Craig Hope
Broke the first rule of journalism by becoming the story and then revelled in rolling around in the big sh*t he’d left on the floor.
By the end of the October international break it was already clear that The Media had made the decision that what was by then a low-stakes November break for England was going to be all about The Jude Bellingham Situation.
But for one journalist in particular everything is always about The Jude Bellingham Situation. And absolutely not in a good way.
Craig Hope works for the Daily Mail, an outlet which has routinely racially targeted English footballers. This is not new for Craig, who has been doing this to Jude Bellingham for a long time – dating back years.
Is it any wonder Bellingham chose to play abroad & steers clear of… https://t.co/kRycu2RBhZ pic.twitter.com/an6cNFvLzz
— Adam (@AdamJoseph) November 18, 2025
As Mediawatch put it at the time, we’re not saying it’s about race, but when you write for the Daily Mail and are obsessed with one brilliant black footballer to this extent, then a lot of people will say that.
Hope’s obsession reached a nadir with the bizarre ‘Ex players blaming media for fallout from Jude Bellingham’s petulance is like blaming the mirror for the haircut’ simile, coming out swinging on social media and sadly shaking his head that alas it was Bellingham’s antics that left Hope with absolutely no choice but to focus entirely on that rather than the football and conclusion to a flawless qualification campaign for England.
We strongly suspect you, like us, can no longer even remember the specific antics Bellingham had got up to that left Hope so devoid of choices without looking it up.
The crime? In Hope’s own words, ‘twice flapping his arms in opposition to his withdrawal’. Yes, Bellingham became the first player in football history to show mild disappointment at being substituted. He then applauded England fans, shook hands with Thomas Tuchel and sat down.
Hope also used the second question of a press conference to highlight a push by Bellingham in the 10th minute of a 2-0 away World Cup qualifying win. Absolutely nobody else noticed or cared.
We are already dreading what he’s got in store for us when, as overwhelming balance of probability inevitably suggests, England do not in fact win the World Cup.
Evangelos Marinakis
The sight of Evangelos Marinakis sat seething in his customary City Ground seat as the ungrateful worms that are his Nottingham Forest team had the temerity to lose to possibly the best team in the country was to be reminded of just how thoroughly he has inserted himself into Barclays lore over the last year.
He didn’t come from nowhere. We’ve all been dimly aware of the outlandish cartoon villain in charge of Forest and his entertaining ways, but 2025 was his year in so many ways. This was the year where his main-character energy achieved mainstream crossover.
It’s been a spectacularly prickish year for the big man, and who knows what 2026 may bring. We do really quite seriously want to see him run on to the pitch, ageing iPhone in hand, to remonstrate with Sean Dyche as he did so infamously with Nuno Espirito Santo towards the end of last season.
We’re absolutely certain Dyche wouldn’t just stand there and take that utter woke nonsense like beta cuck Nuno did.
That wild incident was key to the whole Marinakis character arc of 2025, though. Because what he was beyond furious about was that Nottingham Forest – Nottingham Forest! – had only managed to draw with Leicester and this had dented their Champions League – Champions League! – chances.
The breathtaking speed with which entitlement took hold of Marinakis and Forest on the back of being Quite Good for Quite A While in an all-time-weak Premier League year was stunning to behold.
Running out of steam on the home straight and not quite making it into the Champions League was, for Marinakis and others, an absolutely unacceptable end to a season that began, as all seasons for all but a handful of teams must, with avoiding relegation trouble as the primary goal.
That Marinakis was so furious with the man more responsible than any other – himself included – for Forest being in a position where he was able to get quite so dangerously high on his own farts was just profoundly ungrateful and enormously Marinakis.
The public nature of that specific outburst cemented his status. He was a main character now. And boy has he spent the rest of the year doubling down on that with some elite villainy.
With Daniel Levy gone, Marinakis is now the Premier League club suit most likely to be pictured sat watching from the stands and requiring commentators, by ancient law, to say ‘penny for his thoughts’.
And the great thing with Marinakis is that you don’t really need to spend that penny. Unlike the expressionless round head of Levy, Marinakis’ thoughts on any situation at any time are writ large across his features. Especially when he’s happy, but especially when he’s angry.
Happy moments of Marinakis behaviour this season have included the entirely normal photo op he staged with Morgan Gibbs-White after convincing the number 10 to sign a new contract entirely and definitely of his own free will. That incident also reminds us that even acts of villainy can have unexpected outcomes; saving Gibbs-White from joining Spurs was far more of a kindness than any of us could have predicted at the time, even allowing for the undeniable and unending fact that Spurs are Spurs.
There was also the undisguised glee he had over Forest’s promotion to the Europa League at Crystal Palace’s expense. We sort of admire the complete lack of pretence there. There was at least an honesty to it rather than some performative attempt at ‘Not the way we wanted to qualify but…’ response.
This season, Marinakis’ core work in maintaining his profile and expanding his role has been to fall back on an old favourite. Manager sackings. Shrewd work. After the wild behaviour of the summer, there was no need to overcomplicate things. Why not simply fall back on a tried-and-trusted tactic?
Nuno was doomed from the moment of that on-pitch dressing down, really. The surprise if anything was that a flimsy and unconvincing ceasefire lasted until a fair way into the new season. But not far enough for Nuno, the man who had just delivered Forest’s best league finish in 30 years, to claim victory in the Premier League Sack Race.
Marinakis was only warming up, though, following that dramatic flourish with his greatest act of hubris yet. So quickly and utterly had Marinakis lost sight of where Forest had been just a year earlier and how quickly they could return to that status, that he appointed Ange Postecoglou.
An absurd decision that still managed to exceed the most dire predictions, which were very dire indeed. And it’s only a matter of time before Dyche goes the same way in 2026 because this is just how Marinakis now rolls.
Donald Trump
He’s football’s problem now. We’ve invited him in and now we don’t know what to do about it, do we?
Sure, it was one thing when he was turning the Club World Cup into the Trump World Cup, because that was only the Club World Cup and nobody gives a sh*t. But we’ve already seen that he is going to do the same and more to make the actual World Cup that we do care about all about him as well.
And football is going to indulge him like the massive Cheeto-hued toddler that he is in the desperate hope that this vast yet desperately insecure ego can be placated to keep him onside enough not to just smash everything to pieces.
He’s threatening to take games away from cities he believes have wronged him. He continues to agitate and threaten other countries, including the two neighbours who are co-hosting this bloody tournament.
We still fully expect him to make a serious suggestion that actually it would be better if they just had all the games in America, wouldn’t it.
What do we do then? Give him another fake shiny thing in the hope it distracts him until August?
Gianni Infantino
Has always been a highly objectionable character, but is now in truly unprecedented waters after his nauseating fawning over the Trump. Inventing an award to give him so he won’t have a tantrum, like trying to stop the arsehole little brother from spoiling someone else’s birthday party, was bad but we could just about understand the tactic.
Trying to keep that lunatic happy does make some depressing sense. But does he have to be so actually delighted about it? It would be easier to give Infantino a pass if he didn’t constantly come across as the second person on the entire planet to actually think Trump deserves a FIFA peace prize, or that a FIFA peace prize is in fact a real thing.
Turning the World Cup draw into a political rally for one of the most deeply divisive leaders of any major western power was an unprecedented lurch into some deeply unsettling waters, as was unequivocally throwing the full weight of the world’s biggest sport behind that leader.
You don’t get to speak for the entire sport like that, Gianni. You don’t speak in our names. And we don’t want to hear a single word ever again from the ‘keep politics out of football’ brigade when rainbow armbands or Black Lives Matter or anything else like it comes up. Not after they watched FIFA officially declare the biggest event in the entire sport the MAGA World Cup.
And the worst thing? The sure and certain knowledge that these two are guaranteed to be top of the list again in 12 months’ time having been even worse pricks at the actual tournament.
We can already picture them getting in Harry Kane’s way at the trophy lift and ruining everything.
