A title is a title, stop downgrading it

Liverpool fans should know better than most: you don’t win the Premier League by accident. Trying to knock a champion because “others were poor” is just lazy, and it never really stacks up.

There’s a habit creeping into football chat that I just can’t get on board with: the idea that you can quietly take the shine off a league title by saying the standard was “poor”. It’s cheap, it’s thin, and it usually comes from the same place as bad banter. The Premier League is hard. Every year. If someone finishes top over 38 games, they’ve earned it.

You can’t have it both ways

You hear it all the time, don’t you? “You can’t fluke the Premier League.” Then in the next breath: “Yeah but they only won it because everyone else fell off.” Which is it? Either the league is a proper grind where consistency is king, or it’s some sort of open-top lottery where you stumble into first place.

Truth is, if the so-called big sides are “poor”, the team that wins still has to do the basics better than everyone else: handle pressure, avoid silly slips, beat teams when it’s uncomfortable, and keep doing it from August through May. That isn’t a fluke. That’s the whole point of a league.

Every season has its quirks

Football history is full of years that, in hindsight, people try to label as a bit messy, a bit flat, a bit whatever. Manchester United won titles in seasons people could now call “average”. Did anyone at the time go around saying it didn’t really count? Course they didn’t. It was a title and it went in the cabinet.

And we’ve all lived through seasons that were plainly unusual. The lockdown period, empty grounds, strange rhythm, disrupted schedules. You can say it felt different because it did. But the league still asked the same question it always asks: who can keep turning up? Whoever answered it best still deserves their medal.

Give credit where it’s due

Leicester’s title is a good example of how selective this talk can be. People can argue all day about what shape the traditional powers were in that year, but Leicester still had to be brilliant, brave and consistent. That’s why it’s celebrated. Because football isn’t just about brand names, it’s about performances.

So when a side wins the Premier League, especially comfortably, it shouldn’t be met with attempts to downgrade it. If you didn’t win it, you didn’t win it. Simple as that. And if you did win it, you’re champions. No asterisks needed.

Written by OliRed: 9 January 2026