The scene was a school in west London, the weather was overcast and, for what felt like the first day of a new term, the mood was horribly tense.
It was the Premier League’s official launch event for the 2015-16 Premier League season. Eddie Howe led a contingent from Bournemouth, all of them wide-eyed with excitement on the eve of their first top-flight campaign. The Swansea City lot were happy to be there, too. The delegation from reigning champions Chelsea? Not so much.
Three months after leading Chelsea to the Premier League title, Jose Mourinho was in a dark mood. Sitting down with a small group of journalists, he gave the impression he would rather be almost anywhere else. Gentle questions about his team’s prospects of defending their title were met with tetchy or guarded responses. Are you happy with the make-up of your squad, Jose? “I don’t want to think about it.”
He signed a new four-year contract the next day. In a statement, he said he was “very happy to know I will be staying here for a long time”.
Four months later, he was gone, sacked with Chelsea in 16th place, one point above the relegation zone, after just four wins in their first 16 games. His fate was sealed in a grim defeat at Leicester City, where he accused his players of “betraying” the work he had done with them on the training ground. His relationship with several of his title-winning players had broken down completely. The phrase used by their technical director, Michael Emenalo, explaining the decision to sack the club’s most successful coach, was “palpable discord”.
It was the season of Mourinho’s unedifying spat with Chelsea’s doctor, Eva Carneiro; the season of simmering tensions between the coach and Eden Hazard, among others; the season of his famous “I prefer not to speak” interview, now the subject of thousands of memes. It was also the season in which Mourinho said he and his players were now defending champions in name only.
“I don’t think in this moment they can feel they are top players or they can feel they are superstars,” he said at Leicester before his contract was terminated. “They have to look to Sunderland and Watford and say, ‘We are at the same level (as them). I am not the superstar, I am not the world champion, I am not the Premier League champion. At this moment, I am at your level’.”
Jose Mourinho, pictured in the troubled autumn of 2015(Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Over the past couple of months, as Liverpool have lost five of their last six Premier League matches and seven of their last nine in all competitions, some of us have found ourselves scratching our heads and wondering when we last saw a title-winning team unravel like this.
The answer, of course, is this time last year, when Manchester City, champions for the previous four seasons, made a winning start to their campaign and then — just like Liverpool this term — fell into a nosedive. Before Christmas, there was a run of six defeats in eight Premier League matches, nine defeats in 12 in all competitions. They rallied in the second half of the campaign and eventually finished third with 71 points, a drop of 20 points from the previous campaign.
Before that, there was Liverpool’s 2020-21 season, when a torrid run of six defeats in seven Premier League matches (three wins in 14) saw them slump to third place with 69 points, 30 fewer than when they were champions a year earlier. Even in finishing runners-up to Liverpool in 2019-20, Manchester City suffered a 17-point drop-off from the year before.
Until last season, Manchester City under Pep Guardiola had made defending the Premier League title look easy. It was rarely so comfortable in reality — they were taken to the final day by Liverpool in 2018-19 and 2021-22 and by Arsenal in 2023-24 — but what they achieved in that period, winning six out of seven titles between 2017-18 and 2023-24, was exceptional in every sense.
Nine of the past 15 Premier League title defences, starting with Chelsea under Carlo Ancelotti in 2010-11, have seen a drop of at least 10 points from the previous season. In six of those cases (Manchester United in 2013-14 after Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement, Chelsea in 2015-16, Leicester City in 2016-17, Chelsea in 2017-18, Liverpool in 2020-21, and Manchester City last season), there was a drop of at least 20 points. In the cases of both Chelsea in 2015-16 and Leicester in 2016-17, it was a massive 37 points.
Only the Leicester drop-off felt foreseeable. They had famously defied bookmakers’ odds of 5,000-1 to win the Premier League in the first case, having narrowly avoided relegation the previous season. But even so, the extent of their post-title slump was staggering. A run of five consecutive defeats after the turn of the year left them 17th, one point and one place above the relegation zone. To widespread dismay, Claudio Ranieri, who had presided over the previous season’s miracle, was sacked.
To quote Italy’s Gazzetta dello Sport, Leicester were a frog that had briefly, under Ranieri, been magically transformed into a prince before the spell was broken and they returned to their previous state.
But it wasn’t quite as simple as regressing to the mean. Under caretaker manager Craig Shakespeare, they won their next five Premier League matches and overturned a first-leg deficit against Sevilla to reach the Champions League quarter-final. In the space of two years, they had gone from battling relegation under Nigel Pearson to winning the title under Ranieri, to falling back into relegation trouble under Ranieri, and now to another winning run under Shakespeare. Rarely in football has there been a better illustration of the importance of momentum and positive energy — of how a team can feel unbeatable… until that feeling is lost.
Claudio Ranieri, pictured in January 2017, a few weeks before he was sacked by Leicester City (Lewis/Getty Images)
Roy Keane, Manchester United’s irascible captain in their glory days under Sir Alex Ferguson, has a phrase for it. “Bad champions,” he called Liverpool during that slump in 2021. “It’s as if they won the league last year and they all believed the hype and got carried away.”
Keane, in his role as a Sky Sports analyst, has been similarly unforgiving of Liverpool’s recent struggles, saying that last season’s champions look like “a really weak team”. While there is a wide range of factors behind their travails, Keane, ever the captain, would typically put it down to a question of mentality, of whether or not players “want it” enough.
Invariably, these discussions are boiled down to that. Revisit any of the failed title defences we have talked about — Chelsea under Ancelotti, Mourinho and Antonio Conte; Manchester United under David Moyes; Leicester under Ranieri; Manchester City under Roberto Mancini and in those two off-seasons under Guardiola; Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp and quite possibly again now under Arne Slot — and there will be no shortage of suggestions that the players grew complacent, sated by success, and took their eye off the ball.
But can it really be as simple as that? Sports psychologist Dan Abrahams, who has worked with several Premier League clubs and also with Slot’s successful Feyenoord side, suggests a loss of motivation or intensity is usually a knock-on effect rather than the root cause of a team’s problems.
“For people to say, ‘They’ve taken their eye off the ball. They don’t want it’, that can be true,” he tells The Athletic. “But the picture is almost always a lot more complicated than that. Teams can drop off for multiple different reasons. It’s never just one thing. It’s never just motivation.
“A football team’s dressing room is such a complex landscape. The mental side is always interconnecting with other factors: tactical, technical, and physical aspects. It can be staleness, or injury problems, or new players who aren’t fitting in, or opponents working out game models to play against you, all of which can have a knock-on effect in terms of losing a couple of games.
“In psychology, we talk about emotional contagion. Teams lose a couple of games and then suddenly there’s outside noise, which can have a negative emotional impact on a group. The feeling around the place changes, the environment changes, the winning culture changes. You might have tension between coach and players, tension between different players, star players feeling unhappy. All of this can impact what they do day to day in training, which in turn can have an effect on gameday.”
And this is where football management comes down to … well, management. While coaches will be criticised for their team selections or for substitutions that backfire, those micro issues can become an irrelevance if, on a macro level, the environment around a team has worsened dramatically.
For all the focus on find a winning tactical formula — whether the spotlight is on Slot now, Guardiola last season or Conte, Mourinho and others in the past — the chemistry that matters most is about the team environment, as Abrahams describes. When everyone is pulling in the same direction, there is hardly such a thing as the wrong line-up. When negativity sets in, when so many players are performing below their best, the “right” line-up seems not to exist.
A winning culture is easy to recognise, but hard to establish. If that winning culture is lost, it can become harder and harder to recover.
And then, in extreme cases, perhaps most notably in what Conte disparagingly called “the Mourinho season” at Chelsea, the whole thing can snowball.
Roy Keane lifts the Premier League trophy for a third successive season, in May 2001 (Alex Livesey /Allsport)
There is no catch-all explanation for why title defences go wrong. There were similarities between Chelsea’s post-title collapses in 2015-16 and 2017-18 — a coach (first Mourinho, then Conte) piqued by what he considered a complacent approach in the summer transfer market, causing frustration which resulted in tensions with the boardroom and then with the dressing room — but there were also differences when it came to the nature of their struggles on the pitch.
Manchester City’s regression last term looked more like a case of burnout, with Guardiola and his team appearing to run out of ideas and energy after winning four league titles in a row. There were also signs of complacency in their failure to rejuvenate an ageing squad in the summer of 2024 — something they have sought to address by overhauling the team at considerable expense in the two transfer windows since.
Even as Guardiola grappled in search of answers last winter, or when Klopp’s Liverpool lost their way amid a defensive injury crisis in early 2021, it never felt like those Chelsea seasons under Mourinho and Conte. There was never a hint of having “lost the dressing room” or — as in the case of Ancelotti at Chelsea in 2010-11 — losing the support of the owner.
Jurgen Klopp watches his reigning champions lose to Burnley in January 2021, the first in a run of six successive home defeats for Liverpool (Peter Powell/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Manchester City’s regression after winning the Premier League title in 2012 was felt, internally, to be entirely down to the breakdown of Mancini’s relationship with his players. But the coach preferred to point fingers at the club’s recruitment team, wondering how, having targeted Daniel Agger, Javi Martinez, Daniele De Rossi, Eden Hazard and Robin van Persie, he had ended up with Jack Rodwell as his only new signing until a trolley dash in the final days of the summer transfer window yielded the signings of Maicon, Matija Nastasic, Javi Garcia and Scott Sinclair.
Here, there were similarities with Mourinho and Conte at Chelsea. Mourinho wanted to sign England defender John Stones from Everton in the summer of 2016, but ended up with Papy Djilobodji, who did not make a single Premier League appearance for the club. Conte told the Daily Telegraph last year that he felt Chelsea could have “become dominant in England” had they landed his two leading transfer targets, Virgil van Dijk and Romelu Lukaku, in the summer of 2017. Instead, they joined Liverpool (the following January) and Manchester United respectively. Chelsea have not come close to winning a Premier League title in the eight years since.
A reluctance to build from a position of strength, having won the league, is a recurring theme here, but nobody could accuse Liverpool of standing still this summer. Indeed, the more common accusation in recent weeks has been that, rather than do little in the transfer market, they did too much. They spent approximately £450m on Alexander Isak, Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike, Milos Kerkez, Jeremie Frimpong and others over the course of a summer in which they sold Caoimhin Kelleher, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Jarell Quansah, Luis Diaz, Darwin Nunez and others for around £260m, and also lost Diogo Jota in tragic circumstances.
Arne Slot is not the first title-winning manager to experience a subsequent downturn (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
There remains a confidence at Anfield that their summer rebuild will be more than vindicated in time. But in the short term, Slot has been left struggling to strike the balance between building on his team’s established strengths and integrating the new players, of whom Frimpong has struggled with injuries, Wirtz is taking time to adapt to the physical rigours of English football, and Isak is yet to reach full fitness and sharpness having effectively forfeited a pre-season programme at Newcastle United in order to engineer his British record £130m transfer to Merseyside.
On top of all of that is the unquantifiable impact of Jota’s death in a car accident in Spain, which also killed his brother, Andre Silva. Liverpool vice-captain Andy Robertson spoke this week about having been “in bits” thinking about Jota in the build-up to Scotland’s decisive World Cup qualifier against Denmark — a rare insight into the grief that has hung over him and his team-mates since July 3.
“They’re human beings,” Abrahams says. “It’s an extreme example of what I mentioned regarding other factors and how they might impact a team environment and the emotional well-being of that team. It’s never one factor, but psychologically, emotionally, the way it affects individuals on a day-to-day basis and the way it affects the group more widely, that is another huge challenge.”
The challenge for Liverpool’s players has changed since the season began. What started as a title defence is now a fight to get back within anything like touching distance. They are down in eighth place, already eight points adrift of leaders Arsenal. Only four times in the Premier League era (Leeds United in 1992-93, Blackburn in 1995-96, Chelsea in 2015-16, and Leicester in 2016-17) have the previous season’s champions had fewer points after 11 games.
But what is striking is that when title defences have crumbled over the past 15 years or so, teams have often lost their way entirely. Since Manchester United’s third consecutive Premier League title under Ferguson in 2008-09, only Manchester City, under Guardiola, have successfully defended the trophy. Beyond that, only Manchester United in 2009-10 and 2011-12, when they took the title race to the final day in each campaign, have even come close.
It sometimes appears as if once the momentum of a title-winning campaign is lost, often a couple of months into the following season, the psychological effect is so profound that a sort of paralysis takes hold and can be hard to shake off. After Manchester City’s title defence hit the rocks in early November last year, it took until the final weeks of the campaign — and a fraught battle to achieve Champions League qualification — to rediscover any kind of consistency.
“Winning, at that level, is bloody difficult,” Abrahams says. “What Manchester United used to do under Ferguson, and what Manchester City have done under Pep, is bloody hard.”
And they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Keane would say it comes down to mentality. “My mindset when you won a league title was, ‘Can we do it again?’,” he said in his “bad champions” speech in 2021, suggesting that Klopp and his players had been satisfied by winning Liverpool’s first league title in 30 years and had eased off as a result.
Manchester United in 2009: the last team not managed by Pep Guardiola to retain the Premier League title (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
“Bad champions” is an interesting concept, as if to suggest that the only way a team can prove they were worthy of their trophy success in the first place is by retaining it.
But Keane means it. That was his mentality as a player. It is entirely consistent with his messaging when he was Manchester United’s captain, saying “the complacency that comes with the kind of success we’ve enjoyed has caught up with us”, accusing his team-mates of “believing the publicity” and being so focused on the “Rolex watches, garages full of cars, f***ing mansions” that they “forgot about the game, lost the game, lost the hunger that got you the Rolex, the cars, the mansions” — and that was in 2002 after they lost to Bayern Munich in the Champions League quarter-final and saw a run of three consecutive Premier League titles ended by an outstanding Arsenal side.
Does that mentality still exist among today’s players? Perhaps not, but even in that Manchester United dressing room of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Keane, along with Ferguson, was widely regarded as an exceptional case. And even some of those league titles were won at what looked like a canter, losing five or six games along the way. In 1996-97, they retained the Premier League title with 75 points, which was only four more than Manchester City’s seemingly disastrous total last season.
Ultimately, when it comes down to winning tight matches when the stakes are high, it can indeed come down to how much a team wants it. But how much a team wants it is not always easy to quantify. A loss of motivation is more likely to be a symptom of struggle rather than its root cause. But the biggest test a manager or a group of players can face is how to respond once their crown has slipped and the reflections of glory have begun to fade.
