Before the fall: how the battle to beat the Premier League drop turned nasty

Certain ideas in football have been repeated so often and are believed in so fervently that after a while they coalesce into something closer to fact. They exist at the point where feeling bleeds into knowing; truisms, rather than truths. It’s best to score just before half-time. Never make a substitution while defending a corner. It can be easier to defend with 10.

The best example, of course, is the one which has been occupying the minds of Leeds, Nottingham Forest, West Ham and Tottenham fans for much of the last few months. It is an article of faith that 40 points is enough to stave off relegation. That is and always has been the target, the defined and established border of the promised land.

It’s not much of a twist to reveal that this is not correct. It is, in fact, wrong in two ways. Just occasionally, 40 points has not been enough to bring salvation. West Ham know that to their cost; they were relegated with 42 points in 2003, the highest total this century. Twenty years later, that tally would have been enough to finish in the heady heights of 13th.

More often than not, though, 40 points have delivered not just safety, but some measure of comfort. Sheffield United went down with 38 points in 2007; in 2011, Birmingham City and Blackpool slipped into the Championship despite each picking up 39 points. In most other seasons, there is not really any need even to average a point a game. In all but two of the last 10 top-flight seasons, 35 points would have done it.

All of which will be scant solace to those teams still anxiously working through the permutations of the last four games of the season. In most estimates, that group encompasses four teams. Until yesterday a more dramatic interpretation might have extended it to six. There are seven points between West Ham, in 17th, and Crystal Palace, in 14th. It would take a wholly outlandish combination of results to see those placings switched.

Even if the denouement of the campaign is not quite that dramatic, there is a general consensus that this will be one of those years that defies the old adages. “I believe this season will be special in terms of points needed to avoid relegation,” said Forest’s current manager, Vítor Pereira, a few weeks ago.

He is likely to be right. Leeds have already passed 40 points. Forest are almost there. West Ham have to face Arsenal at home, but welcome Leeds, too. Tottenham sit 18th with 34 points, with home games against Leeds and Everton to come. All might clear the historic bar. Someone, come the end of the season, is going to regard themselves as distinctly unfortunate.

It is far too early to say whether this represents the emergence of a pattern, a new normal for the Premier League, or whether it is an exception to the general direction of travel; in the last two seasons, after all, none of the relegated sides even managed to clear the 30-point barrier. There is a possibility this year proves to be nothing more than an anomaly.

More concrete is the sense that it fits with the overarching feel of the season, that enduring impression that the Premier League is bunched up tight together, a competition in which the boundaries between success and failure have become so narrow as to be virtually indistinct, a league of small differences and fine margins, a place where almost everyone is mid-table.

That has manifested in any number of ways. For example, Manchester United are third, despite having spent the first five months of the campaign in a state of outright crisis, on the cusp of a return to the Champions League basically because Michael Carrick got the vibes right for six weeks or so.

There is Liverpool, a team who barely won a game between September and March, and somehow still have a cushion of seven points over Brentford in sixth. Or there is Newcastle, a club who started this weekend in 14th, on the back of four straight defeats, a club apparently locked in an endemic drift and yet now maybe one win away from contending for a possible place in Europe .

“I see it as an overall picture,” said Nuno Espírito Santo, the West Ham manager, this week. “I think nothing in the table is decided, no matter where you are or what we are fighting [for]. This year is so tight in all the positions that everything is going to be at the final moment. In all the aspects of the table, it’s going to go to the last one, for sure.”

There are circumstantial explanations for this – most immediately, at the foot of the table, the fact that both Sunderland and Leeds have provided a rather stronger contingent of recently promoted teams than had been the norm – but there is reason to believe more systemic changes have had an influence, too.

Broadly, they fall under two headings: wealth and intelligence. The teams who have constituted the bulwarks of the Premier League for the last decade or so now invariably rank among the richest 30 teams in the world; all of them have the economic power to pick the flower of the game’s talent, whether in the form of players or coaches. It is the strength of these teams that has caught out Spurs, in particular, or at least put them in a position to punish them for their mistakes.

At least some of those resources have been ploughed into acquiring as much knowledge as possible. Every Premier League team have a suite of analysts, poring over every detail of their opposition. The league as a whole, as the Brentford owner Matthew Benham said at the MIT Sloan Conference earlier this year, is smarter than it has ever been.

That has had a stylistic impact – the prominence of set-pieces seems inextricably linked to the trend toward a more scientific, analytical understanding of and approach to the game – but also a material one. Everyone knows everything about each other. Everyone has the sort of players to make the most of that research, to exploit any weakness, to punish any slip.

That has turned many games into the flip of a coin, a meeting of largely equal forces in which victory and defeat turn on the execution of a single corner, the precise engineering of a specific press.

It is striking that both form and consistency have, for most teams, been wholly elusive. Manchester City won six games in a row in the autumn; so did Arsenal. Aston Villa managed eight, the high watermark, in the winter. As the season reaches its climax, Liverpool currently boast the longest streak. They have three.

Bournemouth – unbeaten in three months and, until victory at the Emirates last month, simultaneously winless in two – feel like the team that most closely embody a season in which the table has, at times, resembled a game of musical chairs, when the identity of the sides for whom it had been a success and a failure would depend largely on where they were standing when the music stopped.

It is at the bottom of the table where the consequences of that may well be most keenly felt. In most other years, Leeds, Newcastle and Forest and perhaps even West Ham would be breathing a little more easily now, aware that they had almost certainly done enough to safeguard their place for another year. They, like Crystal Palace, would be safely in mid-table, relieved to have passed what we all know, what we all feel, is the magic mark.

Instead, what they have found is that there is no such thing as the safety of mid-table when it extends all the way from third place to somewhere about 17th, when there is precious little difference between the sides dreaming of Europe and those glancing nervously over their shoulders, when the margins are so fine that the merest mistake could lead to the ultimate – and in Tottenham’s case, an unimaginable – punishment.

Photograph by Lewis Storey – Danehouse/Getty Images