Dave Tickner: The Premier League's squeezed middle

As another Premier League season comes to a close, it’s traditional to wheel out all the features dissecting the best and worst of the campaign. Best goals, worst signings, best players, worst aeroplane fly-by messages, best Antonio Contes, worst Jose Mourinhos, and so on and so on.

But let’s instead take this opportunity to celebrate what really defined this Premier League season. The hefty, slow-moving sludge of mediocrity that clogged up a full half of the final table.

While the best got better – even Arsenal got four more points this season than last - and the worst got worse, the Premier League was left with a large and crowded zone of humdrum and unremarkable averageness.

Whatever the reasons, and one suspects that increased spending power from the TV deal has served to homogenise the standard between elite and dreck rather than opening the league up, the 10 teams from eighth to 17th in the Premier League were separated by just six points. 

That was the same as the gap that separated 17th from 18th, and smaller than those separating first from second, second from third and sixth from seventh. It is nine points smaller than the gap between seventh and eighth.

These 10 teams built of overwhelming meh all won either 11 or 12 of their 38 Premier League games. None had a positive goal difference. None scored more than 55 goals (although, in fairness, neither did Manchester United).

Some teams can be excused their spot in this morass of mediocrity. Leicester City obviously have a free pass to do whatever the heck they like for the rest of time after their 2015/16 shenanigans, while on a serious level their uninspiring domestic campaign was played out behind the thrill and the glamour of a genuinely impressive tilt at the Champions League. Bournemouth’s top-half finish and Burnley’s unfussy survival are straightforwardly impressive achievements with no caveat.

For others, it’s harder to be kind. For the most part West Ham’s football accurately reflected their expensive but utterly inadequate new home, while eventual best-of-the-rest Southampton ended a forgettable season under an unloved manager with a fittingly nondescript 1-0 home defeat to Stoke.

The Potters, too, regressed this year. After finishing ninth, ninth, and ninth in the last three seasons they slip to 13th. Albeit another ninth-place finish was just a tantalising two points away.

West Brom did exactly what Tony Pulis teams do until they reach 40 points, and then did exactly what Tony Pulis teams do after they reach 40 points, while Crystal Palace and Swansea both found themselves embroiled in undignified relegation fights for much of the campaign despite possessing some of the finest attacking talents outside the Biggish Seven.

Watford perhaps best sum up the bizarre middleground of the 2016/17 Premier League after spending the entire season as your archetypal mid-table mediocrity outfit but somehow finishing just one place above the dropzone when the music stopped.

Relentless Premier League survival seems a dreary old existence. I’ve even heard some Sunderland fans express something approaching relief at finally being put out of their Premier League misery and expressing hope that at least the Championship might be fun. 

But even allowing for the financially motivated survive-at-all-costs mentality, can anything really be done about it? The top six aren’t going anywhere, while Everton will surely continue to exist in a lonely one-team hinterland twixt sixth and the rest unless they invest the Romelu Lukaku and/or Ross Barkley money either spectacularly well or spectacularly badly.

At least promoted pair Newcastle and Brighton offer something interesting, as would David Wagner’s Huddersfield should they get the better of Reading in the Sky Bet Championship play-off final. Any or all of them could well be relegated just as comfortably as Sunderland and Middlesbrough have been, but it’s hard to imagine any of them would do so in such insipid and joyless fashion.

Of those ultimately mired in the middle this time around, Swansea are perhaps the most interesting. Gylfi Sigurdsson was the outstanding player outside the top seven this season, and Fernando Llorente the best striker. If they stay, Paul Clement’s relegation-dodging turnaround could only be the beginning. They’ve taken 29 points from 19 games under Clement, and 13 in their last five games. Leicester are the blueprint for a relegation battler carrying absurd late-season form into the following campaign. If they can find themselves an N’Golo Kante between now and August then who knows?

Palace could potentially do something interesting with a talented squad, but with Sam Allardyce at the helm and their most exciting player, Wilfried Zaha, a possible summer departure it seems unwise to hope for too much there.

West Ham might improve as they come to terms with the fact that they’ve swapped one of the best football grounds in the country for the worst. Anything is possible if they can harness a large support, especially if they can somehow hypnotise all the players and supporters into thinking the other 36 games of the season are also against Tottenham.

But ultimately it’s hard to see too much other than more of the same from the top flight’s squeezed middle. The onus for excitement will be on none of the current lot going Full Sunderland, and for Brighton and Reading/Huddersfield to avoid doing a Middlesbrough. If we can extend the 10-team hegemony to 13 then at the very least we’ll get a relegation scrap for the ages out of it.