Much has been made of Manchester City’s potential to crack the EPL's top four, but few observers expect the club to outlast the competition and secure a Champions League spot.
Indeed, Chelsea look like a sure bet to supplant City in the standings sooner rather than later, especially with four of their next six games at home after two consecutive away wins.
That said, it appears to me that the real competition and excitement in the Premiership will take place at the bottom of the table—where only three points separate the final eight clubs.
The promoted three are found in this group—and all three may well manage to stay up. Bolton, Fulham, and Wigan are struggling under new managers, while Reading has failed to recapture its form from last season and Middlesbrough have started slow.
So whereas the top four is more or less set in stone, the bottom three is shaping up to come down to the wire—more so than in any other season since the Premiership began.
What gives?
As I see it, it's not that the promoted clubs have gotten better—it's that te mid- and lower-table teams have gotten worse.
Bolton and Middlesbrough are telling examples here. The Premier League is remarkable less for the competition at the top than for the growing number of teams that just can't cut it.
Sunderland, Birmingham, and Derby are themselves fairly ordinary—but could all stay up by default.
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9 months ago
Thanks Matt...was a nice change of perspective on things! I have a soft spot for a few teams down there, so it could be a long season.
9 months ago
Nice article.Yeah it looks like a two way battle in the league..i am anticipating the most electrifying two horse race of all time in the likes of Man Utd and Arsenal. But the relegation strugglers won't give up that easily..as it seems. Sunderland has answered some questions of their critics and are sitting pretty above the relegation zone. I think Bolton, Derby and Birmingham/Middlesbrough will go down.
Fulham can even succumb to the gravity of the CC League, but let's hope not, coz they aren't that bad a team.
9 months ago
Derby are going to survive by a single point. That's my prediction. This is a club that everybody has to secretly support just a little bit. Watching them drop to Liverpool in such a futile manner gave everyone reason to doubt them, but they are rebounding as best they can.
9 months ago
It's the flip side of the improvement of middlish teams like Villa, Man City, Tottenham, Portsmouth and Newcastle. These teams can't improve without taking the points off someone, and that someone is going to be Wigan, Bolton, Fulham etc. The Wigans and Boltons haven't got any worse - they're just failing to keep pace with the investment and management improvements in the upper-middle range clubs.
9 months ago
I d agree that the investment into the mid-table clubs over the last couple of years wealthy foreign owners pouring millions into teams like Villa, Man City and Newcastle has meant that they are more likely to take points from the teams below them, increasing the gap between them and the teams aiming to purely survive.
However, in the case of Bolton, they have qualified for Europe in the last two seasons yet now find themselves competing at the same level as the teams just up from the Championship. They have certainly lacked the investment of other clubs but surely having finished in the top eight the past few seasons they should be of a higher standard than the promoted teams? On this seasons evidence this doesn t appear to be the case as Bolton have seeming regressed to a standard more on the level of the top Championship teams than those challenging for European positions. The same, to a lesser extent, could be argued for Fulham (last four seasons, 9th, 13th, 12th, 16th (last season)), they seemed to be a mid-table outfit somewhere between the standard of European qualifiers and relegation candidates. Again, it seems that their standards have slipped to match the teams below them.
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