Every Premier League team's season rated from Arsenal heroics to West Ham disaster

The 2026/27 Premier League season is over and there is plenty to reflect upon.

Arsenal ended their 22-year wait for the title , with Mikel Arteta turning three straight second-place finishes into a trophy lift. At the other end of the table, Wolves , Burnley and West Ham fell through the trap door into the Championship.

Bournemouth , Sunderland and Brighton all ended the campaign by celebrating European football, leaving Chelsea and Newcastle among the disappointed clubs looking on from lower down the table.

As ever, there have been a glut of manager sackings, some hit signings, some dreadful flops and lots besides. Here Mirror Football runs the rule over all 20 clubs, grading them from A+ to F.

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Easiest one first. After knocking on the door for three years, after enduring a barrage of ‘bottler’ accusations, Arsenal finally got over the line.

It all started in the summer transfer window, with Viktor Gyokeres, Noni Madueke, Martin Zubimendi and more arriving to add further depth to the squad and give Mikel Arteta the ammunition to build on his previous work.

The Gunners had the best defence, the best goalkeeper, the best set-piece record and finished seven points clear of Manchester City after ending with five straight wins. It could still get even better, with the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain on the horizon.

By their own accounts, Villa’s players were feeling a little worse for wear after their Europa League celebrations, and yet still ended the campaign with a 2-1 win at Manchester City on Sunday. It was a fitting conclusion to another Unai Emery-inspired success.

A first trophy in 30 years and a first European trophy since the 1982 European Cup is the obvious highlight. But Villa have also punched above their weight in the league, finishing fourth, thanks largely to their performances against the top five, where they picked up 15 points. It could hardly have gone any better.

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Andoni Iraola leaves Bournemouth as a club legend, having continually improved the team, despite losing his best players in every transfer window. After a very slow start to the season, the Cherries finished with a barely-believable 18-game unbeaten run to finish sixth and qualify for the Europa League.

Their recruitment is clearly the backbone of the upward trajectory, but Iraola’s influence is absolutely huge. The Spaniard has left an incredible platform for his successor Marco Rose to build upon. A season beyond most fans’ wildest dreams.

Those at the top of the alphabet enjoyed a fantastic campaign. Brentford were tipped for relegation by many after losing Thomas Frank to Spurs while selling Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa, but Keith Andrews steadied the ship and guided them to ninth place.

As Andrews said himself on Sunday, the fact they ended the season disappointed to draw at Anfield and miss out on European football said a lot. Igor Thiago was a sensation, bagging 22 goals to finish as the league’s second top-scorer. Asking for anything more would be greedy.

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There was a time not long ago when it looked like being a poor season for Brighton. A miserable run of one win in 13 games over December and January saw them in 14th place and a fair bit of unhappiness surrounding Fabian Hurzeler.

But a brilliant March and April righted the ship and saw them end in eighth place, with a place in the Conference League. Danny Welbeck’s 13 goals, making him the fourth-highest scoring Englishman in the league, was the highlight. They ended up with eight points fewer than last season, but a European tour for the fans means they won’t care.

Hopeless from start to finish. Relegated officially in April, but gone way before in reality. One of the Championship’s best-ever defences turned into the Premier League's leakiest and Scott Parker never looked like having the answers.

Zian Flemming’s 11 goals was just about the only bright spot for a squad which will now be ripped apart for another attempt at coming straight back up.

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An absolute shambles right from the very top – and a rotten core that many fans want to see the back of. Enzo Maresca, Liam Rosenior and Callum McFarlane all led the team. And none of them gave the supporters much to cheer about.

The scattergun recruitment policy, the complete and utter lack of stability and the apparent lack of team spirit combined to see them finish 10th, having plummeted down the table. The season was perhaps best summed up by the international break which saw captain Enzo Fernandez dropped for two games for flirting with Real Madrid , while Marc Cucurella and Moises Caicedo also gave eye-catchingly negative interviews. A real mess that Xabi Alonso now has to clear up.

A campaign that is currently hard to judge, with everything riding on the result of the Conference League final against Rayo Vallecano on Wednesday. It’s been a strange one for Palace, dominated by the Marc Guehi transfer saga and then Oliver Glasner's decision to announce his departure at the end of the season.

A 15th-place finish is disappointing on the face of it, after picking up eight fewer points than last season, but all of that will be immediately forgotten if they lift the trophy in Leipzig.

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Mid-table obscurity after the first season in their new home. David Moyes has largely done what was expected of him with a limited squad – both in terms of talent and depth. A seven-game winless run at the end of the season ensured they finished on a flat note, with Moyes immediately emphasising the need to strengthen the squad.

The fact they actually ended up with one point more than the previous campaign demonstrates the lack of progress on the pitch.

The ultimate mid-table team does it again. Marco Silva has guided Fulham to 10th, 13th, 11th and now 11th over the past four seasons after winning the Championship. It now looks very likely that he will leave for pastures new, having done a solid if unspectacular job in west London.

There were at least some stunning goals to enjoy, with Harry Wilson’s outside-of-the-boot beauty against Palace winning Match of the Day’s goal of the season, while Harrison Reed’s last-minute curler against Liverpool will live long in the memory.

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The fact that Daniel Farke managed to make it until the end of the season was surprising, given the near constant speculation over his future throughout most of the campaign. The German stayed and coaxed improvement out of his squad to steer them clear of relegation with time to spare.

A trip to Wembley for the FA Cup semi-final provided another highlight for Leeds, who successfully built on their promotion to finish 14th. Dominic Calvert-Lewin was a huge success in the transfer window, scoring 14 goals.

The drop-off from winning the league has been gigantic. Arne Slot has gone from hero to near-zero in the space of 12 months, with the shadow of Mohamed Salah providing an unwanted side story to a hugely disappointing campaign.

Liverpool lost 19 games across all competitions, with issues right across the pitch. Alisson couldn’t stay fit. The form of Virgil van Dijk and, in particular, Ibrahima Konate fell off a cliff. The trademark high-intensity pressing of the midfield disappeared. And big-money summer signing Alexander Isak was a massive flop. A place in the Champions League is a minor consolation before another rebuild.

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Two trophies is a decent end to the Pep Guardiola era, with the Carabao Cup and FA Cup making it 20 major trophies for his decade in charge. But a second successive failure to win the league counts as a failure for a club with their standards.

With Bernardo Silva and John Stones leaving alongside Guardiola, it is the end of an era at City, but with Enzo Maresca primed to take over, there will be continuity – and likely a major investment in the summer transfer window.

United’s season has to be split into two halves. The first half, under Ruben Amorim, was dreadful, with defeat by Grimsby in the Carabao Cup the nadir. But the arrival of Michael Carrick in January marked a turning point and a strong end to the season – no doubt aided by the lack of cup football – saw them finish third as one of the best teams in the division.

Their points difference of +29 from the 2024/25 campaign is by far the most of any side and demonstrates just how low they were before Carrick took charge. With Bryan Mbeumo, Matheus Cunha, Senne Lammens and Benjamin Sesko settled, there are finally positive signs at Old Trafford.

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Eddie Howe was left to answer questions about his future after a miserable 2-0 defeat by Fulham confirmed Newcastle’s lowest finish under his management on Sunday. The Magpies have arguably been undone by their lack of squad depth, which has made competing across multiple competitions next to impossible.

They made it to the last 16 of the Champions League, where they were thrashed by Barcelona . Nine defeats from 12 Premier League games between January 25 and April 25 saw their campaign unravel and plenty of discontent grow. A major squad overhaul is due.

In their own inimitable and chaotic way, Forest had another memorable season. It’s actually quite hard to remember now, but Vitor Pereira was their fourth manager of the season, after Nuno Espirito Santo, Ange Postecoglou and Sean Dyche. They finished 16th, five points clear of danger, and enjoyed a run to the semi-finals of the Europa League.

The star of the show was undoubtedly Morgan Gibbs-White, who got 15 goals and four assists in the Premier League and was perhaps unfortunate to miss out on a place in England’s World Cup squad.

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The Black Cats timed their kick like a seasoned long-distance runner, jumping from 10th to seventh on the final day of the season with a 2-1 win over Chelsea to make it into the Europa League in their first season back in the Premier League.

What an incredible achievement for Regis Le Bris after a whirlwind summer transfer window saw 18 players arrive in a major spend which has paid off in emphatic fashion. Granit Xhaka has been the standout, but Brian Brobbey is now a cult hero on Wearside while plenty of others have performed admirably.

They may have ended up celebrating on the final day after beating the drop, but Spurs were a disgrace for the vast majority of the season. A second consecutive 17th-place finish is little to cheer about after the Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor experiments failed miserably.

Roberto De Zerbi may have taken 11 points from seven games to keep them afloat, but major work is needed to avoid another repeat. Injuries certainly didn’t help yet can’t be used as an excuse for a largely pathetic campaign.

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Graham Potter started the season as Hammers manager before Nuno Espirito Santo failed to keep them up. Besides Jarrod Bowen and Mateus Fernandes – who will no doubt be sold following relegation – it was an abject performance right across the park.

Yes, their 39 points would have been enough to stay up in just about any other Premier League campaign. But there won’t be many fans who believe they deserved to do so. Anger was directed at David Sullivan inside the London Stadium on Sunday as the sobering reality of life in the Championship beckons.

Right from the get-go they looked like the worst side in the league and so it proved. The only flicker of pride can be taken in the fact that it wasn’t worse. Three wins and 20 points is better than Southampton managed last season in finishing bottom.

Rob Edwards’ arrival from Middlesbrough in November made very little difference and it seemed from quite early on that he was already thinking ahead to next season. A grand total of 27 goals in 38 games is utterly embarrassing, with four players sharing the top-scorer honour with three apiece.