da spicy bet： The stress levels outside of the top six in the Premier League are through the roof.
da bwin： Despite the fact that most of the teams in the division are capable of spending tens of millions of pounds on individual players, the standard of play has largely dropped simply because the pressure is so great. Teams can ill afford to lose a single game, but defeats are clearly inevitable: as a result most games which don’t involve the top teams are six-pointers and that stifles creativity. No one takes risks.
But there is something of a burgeoning middle class in the Premier League this season. Burnley, Everton and Leicester have managed to pull away from the rest to the extent that they’re probably now safe already.
Of the three, you’d expect that the money Everton have at their disposal thanks to their new ownership makes them the seventh best team in the league and the most likely to join the top six. You’d also think that Burnley are the candidates to drop back down to the maelstrom below, given that their good run at the start of the season could well have been a bad run had their form gone the other way.
The interesting ones are Leicester.
The Foxes’ Premier League triumph two years ago has clearly raised the prestige of the club, and whilst there has been a lot of talk about ‘regressing to the mean’, the season before their victory was probably too much of an extreme in the other direction. The mean for the Foxes was perhaps always the upper midtable, but maybe their raised profile, the money they made from the Champions League run and their ability to attract players certainly leaves them in the best position of all the clubs outside of the top six and Everton.
What they do next will be interesting and probably very important.
Take Southampton, for example. From being a side in the top six under Ronald Koeman, they’ve dropped off massively this season. But at the end of last season the Saints sacked current Leicester manager Claude Puel after finishing eighth and reaching the League Cup final. For them, that should have been seen as real success, and for Leicester, it should be a blueprint.
It’s certainly not the best blueprint, however. Clearly not, given their performance this season, but there’s an even better model than the Southampton side from last season.
It’s almost exactly a year to the day (just one day short), Leicester City were in the same position as Manchester United are on Wednesday night: travelling to the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan to face Sevilla. And it’s the Spanish side the Foxes should be looking to emulate.
This time last year, Leicester grabbed a vital away goal against the Spanish side, and then outclassed them in the return leg, but there’s no question that the La Liga team were on the slide. But this year, they’re back: they may well lose to United, and they may well fail to qualify for the Champions League through their La Liga position, but they have already reached the final of the Copa del Rey – their 13th final (discounting Super Cups) since 2006.
It shouldn’t matter to Leicester what their league position is. In those last 12 years, Sevilla have finished in the top four only four times.
Sure, the Spanish side are probably the traditionally bigger team, they have European pedigree and their ability to attract top players to southern Spain might be greater than Leicester’s ability to bring them to the English Midlands. And yet, they should really be the blueprint to follow.
Leicester won’t get relegated this season, and so the FA Cup is now their most important competition – and with Manchester City and Arsenal eliminated, they really could do something. But in the future, if the Foxes can create a side they know is good enough to keep their heads above the fevered mass brawl that the Premier League relegation battle has become, they can become the feared cup team Sevilla are today.
The 2006 Europa League was Sevilla’s first trophy since 1948. Since then, they’ve amassed eight in total. Leicester will probably never repeat their Premier League success, but there’s really no reason they can’t become the English Sevilla.