Let’s review Carty Free’s 2021-22 table predictions

What a final day of football it was on Sunday! Tottenham Hotspur may have commanded the lion’s share of the attention of this blog — and for good reason, they crushed Norwich 5-0 to finish fourth place with Son Heung-Min sharing the Golden Boot — but there was high drama up and down the table.

The race for the Premier League title went down to the final few minutes of the season, with Manchester City coming back from a 2-0 deficit to Aston Villa to dramatically win the match 3-2, along with the title for the second consecutive year. At the bottom of the table, Leeds won 2-1 over ten-man Brentford, while Burnley fell at home to Newcastle, consigning them to relegation along with Norwich City and Watford.

For reference, here’s the final table for the 2021-22 season.

At the beginning of the season, the masthead predicted — and asked you to also predict — how this season would go: who would be champions, who would be relegated, and most importantly to this blog, where Spurs would end up. So let’s take a brief moment to check back in with those early season predictions.

In short, it wasn’t too shabby. Everyone, masthead and commentariat, correctly predicted that Manchester City would repeat as champions. And while it was a close thing in the end, it was ultimately a pretty safe pick. Interestingly, we all also thought that Liverpool would take a bit of a step back this season, which proved not to be the case — they were right up there competing as one of the best clubs in world football right until the very end. While you can quibble with placements, correctly predicting three of the top four is not bad, and it’s even better when the one we all got wrong was, in fact, Tottenham Hotspur.

At the bottom, it was a similar situation. Both masthead and commentariat correctly predicted Norwich and Watford for the drop. But while the masthead thought Newcastle would be the third club to go down, the commentariat chose Brentford. Both were pretty wildly off base — Brentford turned out to be a lot better than advertised, especially after signing Christian Eriksen to a short term contract, and while Newcastle were absolutely abject in the first half of the season, they improved dramatically after their purchase by the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia PIF and a hefty January player investment.

The middle of the table is always squishy and hard to predict. Wolves did a little better than expected, Aston Villa, Leeds and Everton did substantially worse than expected. But overall, the guesses weren’t that bad considering the early season managerial churn and a lot of STUFF that happened over the course of the season.

So good job, y’all! Good predictifying. We’ll do this again in early August — the new season will begin on Saturday, August 6 — an accelerated and early start due to the presence of a whopping winter World Cup smack in the middle of the club season.