Are Sheffield United the worst Premier League team ever? This is what the numbers say

Ninety-four teams have been relegated from the English top flight since the 1992-93 season, but only a handful reach the dismal pantheon that is the worst Premier League teams of all time.

It’s a collection that will soon include Sheffield United 2023-2024. Their season reached a new low on Monday evening, with a 6-0 defeat to Arsenal, making them the first club in the history of the English league to lose three home games in a row by a margin of five or more goals. And let’s not forget that their campaign also includes an 8-0 home defeat to Newcastle. Tell me a sad story in four words or less: The Bramall Lane scoreboard.

But Sheffield United aren’t the only ones experiencing the horror in the table. Name and season combinations such as Swindon Town in 1993-94, Derby County in 2007-08, Queens Park Rangers in 2012-13, Huddersfield Town in 2018-19 and the very word ‘Sunderland’ conjure up memories of terrible teams, woeful managers , terrible defeats and broken fan bases. Reaching the Premier League can be the greatest feeling of all. Leaving it can be humiliating.

Find out who did that Actually to have been the worst team is a difficult task. Football didn’t start in 1992, but that year is a long time ago and the sport is constantly evolving. Is it fair to compare a workmanlike Swindon team who are still getting used to the backpass law with a Sheffield United side who are clearly not very good but who have still been able to spend many millions of pounds on players like Cameron Archer and Gustavo Hamer?

Maybe not, but let’s try anyway.

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Points won

Points are the ultimate currency in a relegation battle, so if you have the record-low total like Derby did in 2007-08, then a lot of people will look your way when the discourse about the worst team starts. Eleven is the number of players you have to end a match with, not how many points you have to end a season with.

Derby finished 2007–08 without having won any of their last 32 matches, with manager Paul Jewell – who replaced Billy Davies, architect of Derby’s only win that season – collecting just five points in 24 games. At the point of the season where Sheffield United are now, Derby had nine points. Will Chris Wilder’s side add more than two to their eleven games between now and the end of the campaign? You have to suspect they will.

However, are there any mitigating factors for Derby? A glance at the other side of the table will remind you that 2007-08 was in the middle of one of the strongest periods of the Premier League era. We’re deep into the ‘Big Four’ era here, with Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea all reaching the semi-finals of the Champions League, and the latter two contesting the final. Derby were clearly not ready to challenge at the top that season, but they did choose one of the most difficult times to make their entrance. Still 11 points.

Sunderland should not avoid the censure here, recording not one but two campaigns below 20 points. Nineteen in the difficult 2002-03 season seemed bad enough, but three seasons later they returned and took four fewer. They ended the 2002–03 season with three managers with a run of fifteen consecutive defeats and then lost their first five defeats in 2005–06, to extend this to twenty defeats in a row at the top level, a record that may never be seen again. more will be defeated. And in a series of events that scientists deemed ‘unlikely’, Sunderland led the Premier League in home defeats between 2002-03 and 2005-06, despite not playing in the division for half of those four seasons.

Huddersfield’s turgid relegation in 2018/19 only saw them gain 16 points, but was it a real surprise for a team who managed to climb from the third tier to the Premier League without ever recording a positive goal difference in their five seasons in the Championship? Win promotion to the top flight via two penalty shootouts and with one goal – an own goal – scored in the three play-off matches?

Man City have now won more PL games in the last 58 days than Huddersfield have in two seasons

— Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor) March 2, 2021

Finally, Aston Villa’s total of 17 points in the 2015/2016 season is often overlooked due to the antics of Leicester City at the other end of the table, but it was a truly dismal effort.

This was an ever-present Premier League club who had challenged for Champions League qualification a few years earlier, but who went through three managers in this campaign (the classic successor to Tim Sherwood, Remi Garde and Eric Black), losing eleven games in the Premier League. the spring and even played two games in February without winning a corner.

Villa led matches for just 243 minutes in 2015-16 – the length of the Star Wars films A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back combined (which is possibly a more enjoyable use of time) – but unlike Sunderland and Sheffield United, they have done. have since returned to the top flight in style, so that counts in their favor at least.

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Goals against

You have to admire Swindon’s dedication to round numbers. With one game of 1993-94 remaining, Wiltshire had conceded 95 times. No top team had scored 100 goals since Ipswich Town thirty years earlier, so everyone knew what they had to do. Leeds United turned up at the County Ground and promptly won 5-0, Swindon had their century and everyone moved on with their lives.

And after the Premier League reduced its four-match schedule to 38 between 1995 and 1996, many concluded that we would never see a three-figure goals-against column again. They’re learning to defend now, you know.

But that was until this Sheffield United team showed up. (Appropriately, one of Swindon’s reserve goalkeepers in 1993-94 was called Jon Sheffield – he conceded seven goals in the two games he played.)

0-8 – This was Sheffield United’s biggest ever defeat in their league history in their 4,988th match. It is the first time the Blades have conceded eight goals in a league match since their 3-10 defeat to Middlesbrough in November 1933. Drubbing. pic.twitter.com/OU0kqJ3Fcv

— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) September 24, 2023

If their 8-0 home defeat to Newcastle in September was a warning sign, then Sheffield United’s current run of defeats at Bramall Lane (5-0 against both Villa and Brighton & Hove Albion and 6-0 against Arsenal) is a team’s vision that is making its way into the record books.

Conceding 2.67 goals per 90 minutes is comfortably the highest rate ever seen in the Premier League era, making Swindon 1993-94 seem like a lesson in catenaccio by comparison.

It also means that Sheffield United – as it stands – are on course to concede 101 goals this season. From deepest Wiltshire to South Yorkshire, it’s news that will stun the nation when it happens.

The appearance of Burnley 2023-24 in the chart above is also telling.

The current bottom three in the Premier League are conceding goals at a record pace and the total of 3.25 goals scored per game this season is the highest in the English top flight since the early 1960s. That may have made Sheffield United unlucky enough to be playing with this team in the Premier League at the moment, but Burnley – who, let’s not forget, are level with this Sheffield United team – could well can make you extremely happy. Vincent Kompany and, er, company are also embroiled in a mess of a campaign, but they can get away with it relatively easily by sneaking up behind the team with significantly more egg on their shorts.

Add Swindon or Derby’s goals conceded to a season like this and you’d expect them to concede another 15 to 20 goals, but that’s not how football works and, more importantly, neither does remembering football’s worst teams. If Sheffield United reaches three figures for goals conceded this season, it will be shouted on pub tables and halls for decades to come. Rightly so.

Erling Haaland has now scored as many PL goals as Derby did in 2007-08, but in 24 fewer games

— Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor) December 28, 2022

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And the worst team is…

Raw numbers only get you so far. There have been plenty of wrestlers over the last 32 years who may not have the absolute numbers of a Derby, a Sunderland or a Swindon, but who should still be recognized for their services to ineptitude.

Norwich City, for example, who finished top of the Championship from 2018/19 to 2021/22, bottom of the Premier League, top of the Championship again and bottom of the Premier League again. Among relegation experts, their 2019-20 team is seen as the inferior side, with 27 defeats before being relegated, including losing all nine games in the scorching summer following Project Restart’s lockdown. That said, the 2021/22 Norwich team had only scored eight goals by Christmas, so were definitely not a classic side.

Then there’s Queens Park Rangers in 2012-13, initially managed by Mark Hughes before being managed through the January transfer window and beyond by Harry Redknapp. It took them seventeen games to finally win before finishing the season with two points from the last nine games and a Christopher Samba they didn’t need.

In case you were wondering, that winless QPR run to start the season is no longer a Premier League record. It was ‘beaten’ by our old friends Sheffield United in 2020-2021, who took two points from seventeen games before finally taking their first three points in the January match (!) against Newcastle. Not that it led to a revival: they went down with six games to play, another (joint) Premier League record.

Derby 07-08 Sheff Utd 20-21
🤝
Beat Newcastle at home

— Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor) January 12, 2021

And here’s the gist of the worst team story: do what Sunderland did in the mid-2000s and Sheffield United are in the process of doing – that is, mash two utterly terrible Premier League campaigns into the space of three years – the win from Derby? one 11 point season? Yes, it is becoming increasingly clear that no team will ever get as low as eleven points again, but at least Derby have had the feeling of never coming back.

There’s something deeply unsatisfying about a team that performs poorly, only to come back shortly afterwards and do exactly the same thing. It feels like a waste of a season. It feels like you’ve been cheated out of the variety.

So here’s the deal.

If Sheffield United continue to concede at their current pace and break Swindon’s goals-against record, add that to the 29 defeats of 2020/21 and the points total they rack up in the coming months and announce it: the new Premier League worst team ever.

Derby County of 2007-2008, your redemption has finally arrived. Maybe.

(Top Photos: Getty Images)