So that’s 2025 almost done. A lot of things we expected to happen duly went and happened.
But we’re not magic. We can’t see everything. We are constantly surprised by this daft sport.
Here are just some of 2025’s big storylines that had us open-mouthed in wonder and disbelief and confusion and anger.
Title challengers Aston Villa
Obviously by the start of 2025 we all knew they were good and that Unai Emery was doing a grand job. He’d got them into the Champions League, and also got them doing rather splendidly in said Champions League.
But they weren’t tearing up the Premier League at that time. Villa ended 2024 in ninth. It was a competitive ninth, only three points away from Newcastle in fifth which even at that early stage of the season already looked certain to be a Champions League spot. But ninth nevertheless.
They’d been beaten six times already in the league. In 19 games they had conceded 31 goals – at least three more than anyone else in the top half at that time – while only an incongruously second-placed Nottingham Forest had scored fewer.
It was no startling surprise to see them improve over the second half of the season. It was no surprise to see them make the quarter-finals of the Champions League and give eventual winners PSG a rollocking good game over two legs.
It is a surprise to now seem them right in the white-hot heat of a title battle against teams in Arsenal and Man City who have seen it all before and having put seven points of space between themselves and those squabbling for Champions League spots.
And that’s from a perspective of January; it’s even more surprising from the perspective of September, when after five games Villa were sat miserably near the foot of the table with three draws and no wins and just one goal to their name.
CHECK OUT: Aston Villa clear third in 2025 calendar year table
Trophy winners Tottenham Hotspur
Surely nobody can blame us for this one. Assuming that Tottenham won’t win a trophy is like assuming night will follow day or or that England will be 3-0 down after three Tests of an Ashes series in Australia. It is easy money.
Did we listen when Ange Postecoglou told us he always wins something in his second season? We did not. He may have always done that, but he’d never been manager of Spurs before, had he? And Spurs do things differently.
In the last two months of 2024, Spurs managed to win only three of their 10 Premier League games. Because they were Angeballing maniacs it goes without saying that those wins were by 4-1, 4-0 and 5-0 scorelines with two of those wins coming against Aston Villa and Man City.
They had reached the semi-finals of the Carabao but had Liverpool to come in that, while their Europa League campaign was stuttering and the risk of heading into the play-off round had become mighty real after three wins to start the campaign had been followed by two draws and a defeat.
What none of us yet quite realised at the time was the true genius of what Spurs had achieved by having their league campaign already a total write-off was a chance no Spurs manager had contrived for himself before: the absolute freedom to focus the entirety of his efforts on a competition they actually had a chance of winning.
They won their last two Europa League group games to secure a top-four finish and handy seeding. They also at that point ensured they couldn’t meet third-placed Man United until the final, prompting bookmaker guffaws about how that wouldn’t happen because #banter while simultaneously making it the clear favourite in the Name The Finalists market. Enormously 2025 all round.
Spurs lost the first leg of their last-16 clash at AZ Alkmaar, and all felt right with the world. Spursy, that. But they won the return leg 3-1 to battle through. Hmm.
When they fell behind in the early exchanges of the quarter-final first leg against Eintracht Frankfurt to Hugo Ekitike’s wonder goal, normal service had surely been resumed. Even the equaliser Spurs found on the night didn’t feel like enough.
But then two weird things happened. Spurs battled and scrapped and fought heroically to a 1-0 away win in the second leg. Meanwhile, Bodo/Glimt beat Lazio on penalties.
Suddenly, there were alarm bells. Suddenly there was the absolute possibility that Spurs might not f*ck this up.
The Norwegian side were beaten 3-1 at home, but that still felt suitably Spursy. They could and should have finished the tie, but didn’t. The late consolation in the first leg gave Bodo every chance of doing a mischief on their dodgy artificial pitch in the Arctic circle, didn’t it? The road to humiliation and an excruciating missed opportunity was now all too clear.
But no. Spurs went to Norway and very calmly, very professionally, very serenely won 2-0 on the night and 5-1 on aggregate.
Off they went to Bilbao to face a Man United team they’d already beaten three times earlier in the season. That would put a stop to all the silliness, surely. Yes, United were every bit as crap as Spurs but they had a proven track record of not letting crapness get in the way of trophy-harvesting.
The final was a dreadful game, but somehow Brennan Johnson’s scruffy finish – one so messy that it took about an hour for everyone to actually agree he rather than Luke Shaw had actually scored it – proved to be the only goal as Spurs, the team that couldn’t defend, did so for the entire second half.
A 17-year wait was over, an albatross removed. It’s just a relief that Spurs have spent the last six months so thoroughly and entirely pissing away any hope of turning that success into some kind of springboard for further glory. Reassures us that this might not be bizarro world after all.
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Trophy winners Crystal Palace
Really does say an awful lot that Crystal Palace winning the first major silverware in their entire history is only the second most surprising success of 2025.
Trophy winners Newcastle United
Really does say an awful lot that Newcastle winning their first major domestic silverware in living memory is only the third most surprising success of 2025.
READ: Ranking Premier League trophy droughts by ridiculousness – and Arsenal still don’t win
European contenders Sunderland
The idea of Sunderland return to the Premier League was not a wildly outlandish concept at the start of the year. They began 2025 in fourth place in the Championship table, behind the three obvious main promotion contenders of Leeds, Sheffield United and Burnley.
They almost, in a way, felt more plausible contenders for promotion then, when only a handful of points behind Burnley in third, than they did when the regular season ended with them still in fourth but now 14 points behind third-placed Sheffield United and a whopping 24 adrift of Leeds and Burnley.
Sunderland had committed the apparently cardinal sin of hitting the play-offs in miserable form and zero momentum.
But even getting the better of Coventry and then Sheffield United to secure promotion was still only the start of the surprises they had in store.
After an excellent summer of massive recruitment, they have been one of the great surprise packages of recent years, approaching the final rounds of Premier League games this year sat in sixth place entirely on merit and with genuine European aspirations.
Losing huge chunks of their team to AFCON may see those dreams fade as the new year begins, but this is a team that less than halfway through the season already has more points than any of the promoted teams managed in the entire campaign last year, and one that could entirely feasibly end up outpointing the three of them combined; another 23 points from 21 games would do it.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin redemption arc
It really does seem a long, long time ago that Dominic Calvert-Lewin was a significant Premier League figure. And that’s because it is a long, long time ago. You have to go right back to our covid-addled memories of 2019/20 and 2020/21 to find the two seasons where he reached double figures for Premier League goals.
His Everton career was subsequently wrecked by injuries and poor form, the latter largely begotten by the former, and in the summer headed to Leeds in the hope a fresh start on the other side of the Pennines might rejuvenate him and his career.
He missed the first two games of the season, including a 1-0 win over his former club, as he fought to reach full fitness and then managed a single goal in his first 10 Premier League games for his new club. And that was against Wolves, which is in danger of becoming the most asterisked Premier League goal it has ever been possible to score.
But now something quite wonderful has happened. He has scored six goals in his last five games. Goals that come entirely without asterisk. Goals against Man City, Chelsea, Liverpool and Brentford before a double against a Crystal Palace side that before running into Leeds and DCL boasted the second-best defensive record in the division.
At less than half-distance this is already a Premier League goalscoring record he has bettered only in the Covid Era, with his current run propelling him firmly back into England contention ahead of the World Cup next summer.
An extraordinary and really quite wonderful thing.
The fall and rise of Dycheball
It was not a good start to 2025 for Sean Dyche. Easy to forget he was still Everton manager when the year began; the reason it’s so easy to forget being that he only lasted eight full days of the year before being dismissed with the Toffees just a point above the relegation zone and in genuine danger at that time of beginning life in their shiny new stadium as a Championship club.
It did rather look like it might be the end for Sean Dyche as a Premier League manager, especially when David Moyes returned to such stunning effect and lifted Everton pretty effortlessly out of danger and into the comfort of mid-table.
Where could Dyche possibly go next after that? Where could he find a team that had f*cked things so thoroughly that they would need the sort of dread panic to have set in that Dycheball became the answer?
Enter stage left Nottingham Forest, a club entirely high on their own farts after finishing seventh and qualifying for Europe who had done two incredibly stupid things in quick succession at the start of the season.
First, they had sacked Nuno Espirito Santo, the manager who had made it all possible. Then, with startling hubris for a club only one year on from having ‘avoid relegation’ as an overriding primary goal, they appointed Ange Postecoglou as his replacement.
A club that believed relegation was none of their concern a few short weeks earlier once again found it to be their only concern. Angeball was out, Dycheball was in.
But that’s not the end of the surprises. Dyche very quickly made Forest a lot less cartoonishly sh*t, which most could have predicted. But there’s now the very real prospect he might make them actually good.
Dyche has already overseen seven wins across the Premier and Europa Leagues, but not in anything like the way you might necessarily expect. Dyche’s Forest have developed an unlikely but hugely welcome fondness for the 3-0 win, having beaten Liverpool, Malmo and Tottenham by that scoreline in the space of a month, with a 3-1 win over Leeds thrown in as well for good measure.
Liverpool collapse
We didn’t quite buy into the prevailing mood that last season’s title triumph and subsequent transfer splurge had set Liverpool up for an unstoppable march to multiple titles and a new era of dominance to rival those previously enjoyed by Manchester United and Manchester City.
But we didn’t expect Liverpool to be actively bad, having already lost two more league games than in the whole of last season and for several fans to be calling for Arne Slot’s head less than halfway through a long-abandoned title defence.
The great pillars of Liverpool’s recent success have fallen. Trent Alexander-Arnold is actually gone, Mo Salah is spiritually gone, and Virgil van Dijk’s head and legs have gone.
The big question always felt to us like whether last season was really the start of an Arne Slot Era, or just the last hurrah of the Jurgen Klopp one under a different manager. We never expected the answer to be quite so swift, or quite so emphatic.
Wolves touching Derby’s balls
Sure, every season now begins with the expectation that somebody might give Derby’s seemingly unbeatable record for worst Premier League team ever a decent crack, but the assumption is always that it would be a newly promoted side who did it.
Again, for the umpteenth time: Sunderland, we are very, very sorry.
While they, Leeds and even Burnley have put any such fears they had firmly to bed inside half a season, we’ve still somehow ended up with perhaps the most compelling tilt at infamy we’ve yet seen thanks to Wolves’ long-term policy of selling all their best players without replacing them finally catching up with them in startling fashion.
The back-to-back draws against Tottenham and Brighton back in the autumn remain all Wolves have to show for a season of near constant, abject misery, and with very little prospect of any further respite before 2025 ends; their remaining games this year are against Liverpool and Manchester United.
The only glimmer of hope on a bleak horizon is that at least 2026 might just start better than 2025 ends; it’s West Ham first up.
Newcastle regression
We maybe should have seen it, because there’s a definite pattern with Saudi-era Newcastle. Good season, qualify for the Champions League. Mediocre season, struggle with workload. Good season, qualify for the Champions League.
We were where we were in that cycle, but the sight of them stumbling around in mid-table – and most damningly not making any kind of case for looking any more or less likely than any of the other stragglers to extricate themselves from such travails.
