With Arsenal now clearly on a quest to 1-0 their way to an inevitable and unopposed Premier League title this season, we have simply no choice but to ask the very fair and in now miserable, joy-sapping and just unnecessarily spiteful question: who are the worst ever Premier League champions?

From that point, there was then no further option but to turn it into a top 10. A top 10 with something for everyone.

It should go without saying that the operative part of the phrase ‘worst ever Premier League champions’ is still ‘Premier League champions’. Let the medals and the trophy and the memories soothe your anger and vex you not as you consider our rigorous, scientific and, as you will all surely accept, entirely fair and robust findings in the tish and fipsy that follows.

10) Arsenal 1997/98
Broke up the United monopoly, whatever. Won the double, who cares. First non-British manager to win the Premier League, yawn.

Facts are facts. United bottled it. Arsenal took advantage in magnificent fashion to roar over the finishing line, but they should never have had the chance.

No team that loses four games out of six and then can only draw at relegation-haunted Spurs to hit the new year sixth in the table should be winning the title.

We will grudgingly concede that a 10-match winning run to wrench the trophy out of Sir Alex Ferguson’s white-knuckled fingers is pretty good, but our main praise is reserved for Arsenal not just winning the title from 12 points back, but to do it in the end so easily that they could just sarcastically lose their last two games of the season for a laugh.

The more we look at the second half of this season, the more harsh this gets but hey-ho, we’re here now. Someone has to be the 10th-worst champions. Just be grateful we haven’t included the Invincibles. The Fraudvincibles we call them. Not to their face. Not cos we’re scared of them.

Twelve (12) draws! Got knocked out of literally every other competition in extremely vincible fashion! Only managed one more point than Arteta’s 23/24 runners-up! Would probably be 11th on this list now we think about it.

9) Chelsea 2016/17
We’ve got to have a Chelsea one in here, obviously. They’ve won five of the things after all. They can’t all have been good. But it turns out… most of them were really good.

Those early United-Arsenal-duopoly-smashing Jose Mourinho teams are chiefly and understandably remembered for their absurd defensive prowess and near-refusal to countenance the concession of any goals at all.

But they were far better and more compelling attacking sides than they are now given credit for. Carlo Ancelotti’s 2009/10 Double winners were genuinely thrilling, cracking the 100-goal barrier and often to be found handing out the most fearful paddlings.

They scored seven on three separate occasions in that league season, before finishing the season by going one better and putting eight past a Wigan side who had that season developed a kink for suffering eight-goal defeats in the capital.

So it can’t be them. Nor, really, can it be Mourinho’s Great Return triumph in 2014/15, a post-to-post win in which they rarely looked like being bested and had the title wrapped up with four games to spare.

So that leaves only Antonio Conte’s 2016/17 champions. We actually really rate that team, and it deserves its place as one of the great coaching triumphs.

But, as with Ferguson’s ability to somehow get a Premier League title in his final season by just putting a Robin van Persie atop a squad being allowed to decline and inevitably ruin his successors’ chances of success, so too does the sheer scale of Conte’s achievement highlight the relative mediocrity of his side.

It’s not much of a spoiler, but this is not the last team on this list to suffer for having their only even semi-plausible rivals on the home straight be Tottenham Hotspur, the most unserious football club on earth.

Spurs didn’t even bottle it this time, either, winning 12 of their last 13 games of the season but still making almost no impression on a Chelsea side who had shouldered their way to the front and weren’t about to give it up.

Really, though, Chelsea are punished here for the collective failure of everyone else to make life more difficult for a team that started the season so unconvincingly. Consecutive defeats to Liverpool and Arsenal after a draw at Swansea were enough to tell Conte he needed to impose his will upon this squad of wastrels who had already made a show of themselves in 2015/16.

In came his preferred back three, from where they swept all before them. But fundamentally it should just not ever be possible to simply go ‘Well, we just put Victor Moses at wing-back, don’t we?’ and then win the league spinning on your c*cks. Everyone else ought to be ashamed of themselves.

8) Arsenal 2025/26
No, listen, we genuinely have a bit of sympathy for Mikel Arteta here. Seriously, we do. He spent a good few years crafting a really, really good and entirely watchable football team, but alas one that kept coming up just short when set against the unstoppable and oh so surprisingly not entirely legit Manchester City dream-crushing factory.

So then he spent another couple of years turning his entertaining and almost-good-enough Arsenal side into a relentless, unwatchable, set-piece-dominating, dark-arts-perfecting point-harvesting machine.

Only to discover once he got there that it turned out he didn’t actually need any of that anymore, and that his much more fun (and, we will argue forevermore, better) 23/24 team, a great bunch of lads who scored 91 goals and racked up 89 points, would have been just the ticket to hoover up plenty of titles now.

Ah well.

7) Liverpool 2024/25
Despite frequent attempts to attach one, there is no asterisk against Liverpool’s first Premier League title win in the 2019/20 season. By the time of the Covid interruption that renders the season null and void in some eyes, the title was already a formality for a Liverpool team that absurdly won 26 of its first 27 games. Most of the jokers on this list didn’t win 26 games all season.

So we’ve got no choice but to put the 24/25 lot in here instead, a team that won the league on the back of the incoming Arne Slot being clever and humble enough to just keep his head down and let Jurgen Klopp’s side play Jurgen Klopp football with some very, very slightly smoothed-off edges.

Liverpool were very good, but there was an undeniable oddness to the sight of watching this particular version of this particular team waltz to the title essentially unchallenged when it was obviously not quite as good as at least two and possibly three previous iterations who had come up just short.

There was no Man City to worry about this time, they imploded in the autumn and were well out of contention by the time they’d righted themselves. And Mikel Arteta had taken his own excellent City-bothering Arsenal side off on the first tentative steps of their ultimately successful (but at what cost?) supervillain arc.

It’s harsh – all of these are harsh – and not really Liverpool’s fault, but for all the magnificence of Mo Salah and unique irreplaceability of Trent Alexander-Arnold, this title-winning side (and manager) just didn’t grab you by the bollards in the way so many of their near-miss sides did. Which just made it a tad underwhelming, really.

6) Manchester United 1998/99
Treble schmeble. We accept this is a bold take, but we’re talking worst Premier League champions here. And in this specific instance we are being very, very specific. In those specific 38 games of one of the greatest team seasons in English football ever? Yeah, United are not that great, actually. Yes, all the italics are a sign of panic. But we mean it.

Didn’t crack the 80-point barrier, for one thing, which is a pretty solid barometer of ropey champion status. Had a run of one win in seven games in late 98.

Didn’t win any of their four games against Arsenal and Chelsea, the only other two half-decent teams in a league so bereft of quality and depth that West Ham could finish fifth with 57 points and a minus-seven goal difference.

That Night In Barcelona and ‘And Solskjaer has won it!’ will forever remain one of the most dramatic and iconic moments in football, but anyone who pretends to remember a single thing about United’s league campaign that year is a liar. A dirty, rotten liar.

5) Manchester United 2012/13
It’s not a new observation. It is in fact one that has been repeated over and over across the last 13 years and counting. But it’s a valid one. Just how much of United’s post-Ferguson malaise is down to him ending his astonishing managerial career with one last massive p*sstake, perhaps his biggest of the lot?

Ferguson went up against some genuinely great managers in the Premier League. The very, very best of them – your pre-offside-induced-insanity Wengers, your pre-meme Mourinhos – would occasionally even get the better of him.

But more often than not, Fergie got the last laugh. Often in Fergie Time, amirite?!

He has a strong case for being the greatest football manager of all time. He is without doubt the greatest of the Premier League era having built not one, not two but three distinct all-time great sides in that time.

But arguably even more impressive than success with those undoubtedly great sides he churned out were the times he was able to still win the title by something close to sheer force of will.

His final title-winning side was not a vintage one. It had one conspicuous blockbuster new arrival in the decisive Robin van Persie and we’ll not pretend he wasn’t a huge and magnificent part of United’s title success.

But he’d been a vital part of Arsenal teams that had fallen short. We already had proof he couldn’t win titles on his own. Yet at United… he kind of did. Van Persie, Patrice Evra Michael Carrick and Antonio Valencia were the only United players to make 30 appearances in the league that season. Van Persie scored 26 goals. Next best was Wayne Rooney with 12. Supersub Javier Hernandez was the only other man to score more than six.

That this was an end-of-an-era United team was clear everywhere you looked. With the exception of David De Gea, still very much in his promising-but-error-prone-teenage-werewolf-in-a-genre-bending-high-school-sports-movie phase, this was a team almost sarcastically built for one last hurrah. Handfuls of games for ageing legends like Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes. The last Premier League season in which Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic constituted a defence to be reckoned with – and both missed chunks of the season anyway.

Van Persie was, in essence, the brilliant shining star atop a very ropey Christmas tree, with all branches and needles dropping off it.

Nobody else but Ferguson could have steered that squad/tree to success. Which was a problem, because it was precisely the squad he was leaving for an inevitably inferior manager to try and lead to success.

We all know how that’s turned out.

4) Manchester City 2020/21
Yes, the obvious and – even laying banter to one side for the briefest moment – likely correct answer to the inherently mean-spirited question ‘Who are the 10 worst Premier League champions?’ should now arguably at least begin with ‘Dunno, but the eight Man City ones for a start’.

But some of those City teams were gooooood. And also it would be a really dull, repetitive and uninspiring feature. Sure, we’ve never let that stop us before, but it does also feel like we would be best advised look to spread our misery around all the clubs who’ve won the title, in a dismally transparent attempt to avoid accusations of bias. We’ve got everything crossed for just being accused of having a petulant, salty tantrum.

That does also mean we have to include at least one City team, though, and we’re going for 20/21 for a few reasons that we’re confident should satisfy all. One, for all the banter about Liverpool’s asterisk for winning the Covid-interrupted 2019/20 season that they absolutely dominated, if there actually was a season that didn’t count it was 20/21, with its empty stadiums and opening match in September and just generally indefinable air of being not quite real somehow. Had it happened just a few years later, we’d have all been saying it looked like a Premier League season constructed by AI.

Early in the campaign we could genuinely be heard saying out loud and without embarrassment that we thought Everton could challenge for the title. See? A ridiculous time in history, and just clearly not by any measure a cromulent football season.

This was also just not a particularly compelling City team, one that had slid from its 2019 peak and was in the early days of the rebuild that would be fully realised with the arrival of Erling Haaland. This was a kind of strikerless hinterland for City, with Sergio Aguero being phased out but the Goalbot 3000 not yet on the scene.

If you want an indication of how relatively drab this particular City team was compared to the Pep teams that came before and after, their leading scorer in the league was Ilkay Gundogan with 13 goals. No offence, but that’s a dirty protest.

A 2-0 defeat at Tottenham on matchday nine in November saw City slump to 13th. We distinctly remember a few weeks later trying desperately to wring 16 f*cking conclusions out of a particularly event-free goalless draw at Old Trafford and, in a panic, making one of them a declaration that neither of these teams were capable of a title challenge. They were no Everton, that’s for sure.

Almost directly after that, City won 14 games in a row which we suppose is quite good. Probably what spurred them on. It was a run that took them from ninth to a lead they would never surrender, eventually finishing 12 points clear of United. So we could at least congratulate ourselves for being right about them.

3) Manchester United 1996/97
They got 75 points. Seventy-five! And won the league! You can’t not include them on that basis alone.

In fairness (ha, like that’s been a consideration at any point in this definitely-not-rattled feature), comparing points totals from one season to the next is not actually that useful. Unusually weak teams at the bottom can distort totals upwards, and unusually competent ones can do likewise in the other direction. All that matters is getting more points than anyone else. And Man United did that. But 75 points. It’s not even two per game! It shouldn’t be enough!

What 96/97 definitely did have was strength at the bottom, with no teams who were routinely easy to beat. Nottingham Forest finished dead last but lost only 16 of their 38 games – they lost the same number while finishing 16th and safe as houses last season. Spurs lost six games more than that in 24/25 and stayed up by 13 points. Forest were only 41 points behind United.

Obviously, this was a season with a lot of draws. Nineteen of the 20 Premier League clubs were in double figures for sharing the points. Goes without saying that the exception, with a mere seven, were obviously Spurs.

For comparison, in 24/25 – when we last had a conspicuously weak foot of the table – only six of the 20 clubs drew 10 or more games.

So none of this is United’s fault. They did what they had to do in an atypically even league where Leicester could finish both ninth and just seven points clear of relegation.

But it’s just still quite sh*t, isn’t it?

2) Manchester United 1992/93
Not a great surprise that the first Premier League winners would be among its least impressive. It simply stands to reason that back then, before the league became the globe-dominating behemoth it now is, that it was all a bit different.

Most importantly is the simple and universal truth that old football was rubbish. As the oldest Premier League football on record, it stands to reason its winners would be among the most rubbish.

While Man United would set the blueprint that would define the first 20 years of Premier League football by winning the title as would become the general norm, they were surely the least impressive United side to do so.

Manchester United are a shadow of their former selves now, but it’s still hard even from a 2026 viewpoint to truly capture just how bang average they were back in that first season.

Imagine, if you will, a Manchester United side going seven Premier League games without a win, including a clash with Aston Villa in early November. Unthinkable. Or how about a Manchester United team forced to stage a dramatic late comeback to salvage a point after going 2-0 down inside the first six minutes of a game.

Imagine, if you will, a Manchester United side who on November 10 found themselves sitting a lowly, miserable 10th in the Premier League.

You see? You simply can’t do it. It is simply unthinkable to even conjure the very idea of Manchester United enduring that kind of distress. That title-winning team from the first Premier League season had Mark Hughes as its top scorer, and he could only be bothered to get 15 goals. Brian McClair was joint second with nine.

Just a team of plodding industrious grafters, but in those long-lost, far-off days that was enough, you see. As long as – listen, fair play – you had a little bit of Giggs, Cantona and Kanchelskis to go with it.

1) Leicester City 2015/16
Shut up. You all know that it’s true. Pretty much literally by definition, the most unlikely and outrageous of all title winners will be the worst actual team to have pulled such a thing off. Otherwise it wouldn’t be unlikely and outrageous, would it?

It’s a fabulous and astonishing story never to be repeated, but ultimately what turned Leicester having an extraordinarily good season and maybe getting a Champions League spot into Leicester completing the single most astonishing success perhaps in all English top-flight history is the extent to which all the clubs who could or should have prevented such an outcome shat the bed.

We all know about Tottenham finishing third in a two-horse race, but that should already be setting off alarm bells. Leicester’s only challengers – and we use that word really quite incorrectly – were Lads, it’s Tottenham.

Arsenal would eventually rally to finish second, but they know what they did. Deep down they know they should have won the league at a canter, but from top of the table at halfway they embarked on a run of two wins from eight games that allowed Leicester – and Spurs – to believe in the impossible. Arsenal’s strong finish to banter Spurs right off came after the big prize had already been spirited out of reach by those crafty Foxes.

And that shambolic north London pair were the best this league could throw at Leicester. Defending champions Chelsea embarked on one of Jose Mourinho’s most emo third-season destroy-and-exits on record, ending up 10th even after binning him off. Liverpool, who appointed some affable, toothy German fella in the October of a transitional season, weren’t much better.

And neither of the Manchester clubs could really be bothered, Leicester’s exquisite timing for the best season in their history further highlighted by having it in the last one before Pep Guardiola came along.

You won, Leicester. Enjoy the money, I hope it makes you very happy. Dear Lord, what a sad little life, Leicester.