Southampton and the unwanted Premier League lowest points record: ‘It would be a stain'
There has been little to cheer about for supporters of Southampton Football Club this season.
Southampton were promoted back to the Premier League last summer at the first time of asking via victory over Leeds United in the Championship's play-off final, but it has not been a happy first campaign on their return to the English top flight.
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They've only managed two league wins in their 29 games, sacked the manager who brought them up, Russell Martin, in December, are on a nine-match losing streak at home and have conceded 70 goals, which, unsurprisingly, is more than any other top-flight team.
It was evident a few weeks into 2024-25 that this season was going to be a rough ride for the club's fans. Although their team has lacked quality and fight, the opposite can be said for the supporters who still flock to St Mary's Stadium in their thousands and travel to away matches.
Not once in the league this season has attendance at St Mary's dropped below 30,000. The stadium may be half-empty by the final whistle of yet another demoralising defeat, but it is consistently packed before a ball is kicked.
There are nine matches left for Southampton to ensure they do not finish as statistically the worst Premier League side in the competition's 34-year history.
Derby County have held that record since 2007-08, where they mustered a pitiful tally of just 11 points, winning once and drawing eight times in the 38 matches. Southampton, however, have looked capable all season of taking that unwanted accolade off their hands.
They are currently on nine points. Beating Derby's total from 17 years ago only requires one win, or three draws, from these final nine games.
And in a campaign that has been a marathon of misery, that is surely the final crumb of motivation which Ivan Juric — Martin's replacement as manager — can offer to his beleaguered players and the club's dispirited fanbase.
For Juric, the goal from now until Southampton's final match of the season, at home to Arsenal on May 25, is simple: He does not want the club to be remembered as the most abject Premier League side there's ever been.
'I said to them (the players) I don't want to live this experience, to be the worst team in the history of the Premier League,' Juric said. 'It is a goal in this moment.
'We have had a really bad season, but we have a game against Crystal Palace (at St Mary's on Wednesday) and we can win the game and then we can think about other things. They have to be really motivated by that goal in this moment.'
Beating Derby's points tally is something the Southampton players have been discussing behind the scenes and it is viewed as the main objective from the run of nine games that will determine when — and not if — they are relegated.
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'We've just been s**t,' Tim Bisantz, who features on the Southampton podcast In That Number, tells The Athletic. 'I think the realistic expectations were that we would be able to get somewhere around 15th.
'We saw in the Championship several calamities for goals that were given away and then that translated into the Premier League, where everyone is just a whole lot better. We looked completely out of our minds, we were completely out of the limits of what should have been done and eventually Russell Martin lost his job.
'I think once we hit the end of September, there was a realisation that we are probably going to finish last and will most likely be relegated unless we had a new-manager bounce like Everton had with David Moyes.'
Despite a lack of quality on the pitch — and with it being perfectly reasonable for Southampton's supporters to stop turning up in their thousands — Juric has been nothing but impressed by the club's fanbase.
'It is a real surprise to have fans like this with us in what is a really bad moment for the club,' the former Roma manager said. 'I can only say thanks. The players have to really appreciate what they are doing for us.'
'Honestly, it's really been tough,' says supporter Jamie Cozens, when asked to describe what following the club has been like this season. 'It just gets you downbeat every time you see your team losing.
'I think we've played worse football with Juric than we did with Russell Martin. I don't believe we would have stayed up with Russell, but at least there was an identity there, although I disagreed with the way that we played. It's arguably the worst football we've seen for a long, long time.'
For Lynn Hemsworth, chair of Derby County Supporters' Club, who has been watching the Midlands side for 50 years, the pain of having a front-row seat for the poorest season a Premier League team have ever had hasn't faded.
'You try to forget about it,' Hemsworth tells The Athletic, 'but then you go to a game and the other fans start singing, 'Worst team in history', so it's impossible to forget about it properly.
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'It's always there, always hanging over us, and it comes back every year whenever there's a team with a low number of points (Sheffield United managed 16 last season, for example). That's when you start thinking, 'Maybe, just maybe, someone's going to take the record off us'. You don't care who it is. You just want it to be somebody else other than your club.'
Such was the pain — or even embarrassment — of Derby's miserable season, one fan called Stewart Smith wrote a book called Bad Worse Worst about it, and didn't even put his real name on the cover, opting to use the moniker Edgar Smith instead.
As with Southampton replacing Martin with Juric, during that 2007-08 season, Billy Davies, the manager who had got them promotion, was sacked and replaced by Paul Jewell midway through.
Before Jewell accepted the job, he spoke to Moyes, then in his first spell managing Everton, who offered his opinion on whether it was a role worth taking.
'He (Moyes) said, 'Are you going to Derby?'. I told him I was on my way to talk to them and he went, 'If I were you, I wouldn't. We played them a couple of weeks ago — they won't win another game this season',' Jewell has recalled, as reported by the BBC.
'I just laughed, not realising for one second he would be right. I knew we were in trouble after the first training session.'
Hemsworth recalls: 'We kept thinking, 'We're bound to scrape a draw at some point, maybe even win a game that we don't deserve to win', because that's what happens in football. That's what I kept expecting anyway. And then suddenly it dawns. 'Oh right, we aren't going to do it, then'.
'It was a weird sensation just to keep losing and losing. The performances weren't always awful, but we just couldn't get a result.'
According to Opta, Derby spent 247 days in 20th (aka, last) position during what was their most recent year in the Premier League. As it stands, Southampton have languished at the foot of the table for 150 days, with Wolverhampton Wanderers this season's next closest team on 41 days.
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You can forgive Derby supporters for wanting their unwanted record to be broken.
'Probably more than they're letting on,' Hemsworth says, when asked whether the now Championship club's fans are tracking Southampton's results. 'But you daren't raise your hopes too much. It sounds horrible, doesn't it?
'It doesn't mean we bear any malice to Southampton. I've been to Southampton many times, at their old ground and their current ground, and I know what they are going through. It's just we want someone — anyone — to take that record off us. Get it off our backs.'
The view from the other end of the spectrum is that Southampton's supporters absolutely want the lowest-points record to remain in Derby's possession, especially as the south-coast club already carry the burden of the heaviest defeat — 9-0, to Leicester City in 2019-20 and against Manchester United the following season (Ipswich Town and Bournemouth have also lost by that scoreline) — in Premier League history.
'It is sad to say, but beating the record will be a highlight for the season,' Cozens adds. 'It's going to hurt regardless, but I do feel as though it is really important that we don't have yet another record against our name.'
Instead of desperately trying to piece together three points between now and the final whistle of that Arsenal match in May, it could have been so different for Southampton. Staying up this season was always going to be difficult, but they have shot themselves in the foot all too often.
No team in the division has dropped more points from winning positions than their tally of 23. It's a big if, obviously, but if Southampton had been able to see those victories out, they would have 34 points today, which would have them comfortably above Wolves in 17th.
Ipswich (22), Fulham (22) and Tottenham Hotspur (21) are the only other top-flight sides to throw away 20-plus points from winning positions.
Only once this season — against Leicester on October 19 — have Southampton led by two goals, and they still ended up losing that match, 3-2.
'Sometimes you have a really bad season and everyone makes a lot of mistakes, and this is the result of those mistakes,' Juric said, when asked to explain his thoughts on Southampton throwing away so many points. 'Now, we can analyse everything, but we have nine games to do it better and try to win more points.'
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'It's a completely different story if you just keep getting pumped every week and you keep going 2-0 down and never get a foothold in the game,' Cozens says of the dropped points, 'but that has not been the case. It is disappointing, because even if we were to pick up 10 or 12 points of those 23, then it would look very different now.'
For Chicago-based Bisantz, finding a new topic, or even anything remotely positive to discuss on his In That Number podcast, has proven nigh on impossible.
'It becomes a pity-fest and you are almost like, 'Can we just get the season over with?',' he says.
And what of beating Derby's points record? Will that give them a positive talking point?
'It is a requirement to surpass Derby's points total,' Bisantz says emphatically. 'That is the only remaining goal left in the season. Not getting 12 points is a stain that is going to sit with you.'
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