Liverpool are perhaps the most emphatic champions of the Premier League era.
Jurgen Klopp’s team might yet rival the one created by Bob Paisley that ruled English football for 14 years. And yet, after Manchester City’s 4-0 demolition of them on Thursday, might their dominance be altogether briefer?
Here are five champions who crumbled more quickly than anyone expected:
Spurs 1960-61
The glory, glory team won early and kept on winning. By 5 November 1960, Tottenham had won 15 of their first 16 fixtures and scored 53 goals. Bill Nicholson’s side then turned its attention to becoming the first club in the modern era to win the Double.
However, tactics were changing. Spurs employed an expansive 2-3-5 formation with Cliff Jones and Terry Dyson used as out-and-out wingers. The following season, newly-promoted Ipswich, managed by Alf Ramsey, won the title with a simple, functional 4-4-2 that was to become the new tactical norm.
The glory was slow to abandon White Hart Lane; they won the FA Cup in 1962 and the Cup-Winners’ Cup a year later. The championship, however, would never return.
Nottingham Forest 1977-78
This was a romantic title, won by some unromantic football. Nottingham Forest were freshly promoted and underestimated but the championship would not have been won without Peter Shilton. Forest did not concede in 25 of their 42 matches and after 19 November they did not lose a game.
However, Forest were a provincial side. In an age when attendances mattered, the champions were the seventh-best supported club in the country.
Liverpool’s resources went far deeper and, although Forest lost only three times the following season, Bob Paisley’s beautifully-oiled machine tore the title from their grasp.
The magic and miracles were transferred to the European Cup while Peter Taylor’s resignation in 1982 deprived Brian Clough of an alternate voice.
Liverpool 1987-88
The team spearheaded by Barnes, Beardsley and Aldridge is probably the nearest Anfield has seen to Klopp’s high-octane football. After their 5-0 destruction of Nottingham Forest in April, Sir Tom Finney commented: “You couldn’t see it bettered anywhere, not even in Brazil.” Alan Hansen thought that but for the Heysel ban this team might have won the European Cup.
Almost exactly a year later came another fixture against Nottingham Forest, the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough. The stresses of the tragedy that followed would tear the club apart. The central defensive partnership of Lawrenson and Hansen broke up in 1988 and the squad was allowed to grow old together. There was one more title in 1990 and then nothing for three decades.
Man Utd 2000-01
Manchester United were declared champions on 14 April, the earliest any team has won the Premier League. Sir Alex Ferguson’s side were 16 points clear with five matches to play. The standard of opposition was so feeble that Gary Neville admitted to being bored during the season, calling it: “The poorest league I have ever played in.”
It would have shocked Neville to know United would win one more title in the next five years as London replaced Manchester as the capital of English football.
Roy Keane blamed complacency at Old Trafford – “the Rolex culture” he called it. One United director responded to news of Ferguson’s abortive attempt to retire in 2002 by asking “how many shirts does he sell?”
Arsenal 2003-04
The season in which Arsenal did not lose a game and won the title at White Hart Lane should have begun a long domination of the English game. Instead, Arsène Wenger would not win the championship again.
When he was doing battle with Manchester United, Wenger used to say he had to compete ‘with a side that spends 50 per cent more every year.’ Now there was a second front against Chelsea, funded by Roman Abramovich, whose spending dwarfed Old Trafford’s. On its own this would have been a struggle but Arsenal had to fund a move to the new Emirates Stadium, which drained their budgets and limited their room for manoeuvre.
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