Relegation is bad enough. Finishing bottom is even worse. But there are a select few teams that managed to turn a disappointing season into a full-blown disaster.
Some never looked like surviving from the opening weekend. Others simply fell apart as the months went on. A few were victims of terrible ownership, while others just weren’t good enough to compete.
Whatever the reason, these clubs earned an unwanted place in Premier League history for collecting the fewest points over a single season.
Here’s a look at the eight lowest points totals ever recorded in the Premier League.
Huddersfield Town (2018-19) – 16 Points
Huddersfield Town’s time in the Premier League was a bit like ordering one more drink when you already know you should’ve gone home. Staying up in their first season was a brilliant achievement.
Coming back for a second campaign only made the ending more painful.
Promotion in 2017 was one of the Premier League era’s bigger surprises. David Wagner had somehow dragged a squad with modest resources into the top flight alongside Newcastle and Brighton, and survival in year one felt like an even bigger miracle.
The warning signs, though, were impossible to ignore.
Huddersfield stayed up in 2017-18 despite scoring just 28 league goals, equalling the record for the fewest by a team that avoided relegation. It’s fair to say they were living on borrowed time.
Second-season syndrome arrived with a vengeance.
The Terriers won just three league matches all campaign and somehow managed to take two of those victories against Wolves.
Nearly 40 per cent of their points came against one team, which is either an incredible achievement or an utterly bizarre statistical quirk, depending on how you look at it.
Goals were once again in desperately short supply. Huddersfield found the net only 22 times in 38 games and rarely looked capable of troubling Premier League defences.
Late draws against Manchester United and Southampton at least gave supporters something to smile about before relegation was confirmed. Without them, they would have finished on just 14 points.
Instead, they ended with 16, enough to share the unwanted honour of the fourth-lowest points tally in Premier League history. It may sound harsh, but anyone who watched them that season knows it was probably about right.
Sheffield United (2023-24) – 16 Points
Some relegation battles go right down to the wire.
Sheffield United’s didn’t.
The Blades spent almost the entire season staring at the bottom three. Their highest position was 16th, and after Matchday 6 they never climbed out of the relegation places again.
Paul Heckingbottom, the man who had guided them back to the Premier League, paid the price after collecting just five points from the opening 14 matches. Chris Wilder returned hoping lightning might strike twice after his remarkable first spell in charge.
Instead, he walked straight into a thunderstorm.
Sheffield United managed only two more league victories under Wilder, beating Brentford and fellow strugglers Luton, but by then survival had already become little more than a mathematical exercise.
What truly defined their season was an astonishing inability to keep the ball out of their own net.
The Blades conceded 104 goals, the most ever by a team in a single Premier League campaign. That’s an average of almost three goals every game, and the worst defensive record England’s top flight has seen for more than 60 years.
Scoring 35 goals offered little consolation when almost every opponent seemed capable of putting four or five past them.
Their goal difference of -69 matched Derby County’s infamous record from 2007-08, and while they avoided matching Derby’s points tally, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Sunderland (2005-06) – 15 Points
Just when Sunderland fans thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse than 2002-03, football decided to test that theory.
Two seasons in the Championship gave the Black Cats time to regroup, win promotion and return to the Premier League.
Unfortunately, they forgot the bit about staying there.
After finishing with 19 points during their previous relegation, Sunderland somehow managed to lower the bar even further by collecting just 15.
The warning signs appeared immediately.
Five straight defeats to start the campaign extended their top-flight losing streak to 20 matches, an English league record that still stands. Confidence disappeared almost overnight and, before long, so did any realistic hopes of survival.
A brief spell before the autumn international break hinted that things might finally be turning around as Sunderland picked up five points from three matches.
It was a false dawn.
Nine consecutive defeats followed, leaving supporters counting the weeks rather than the points.
By the time Sunderland lost 2-0 at Charlton in December, fans who had attended each of the club’s previous 32 Premier League matches had witnessed just one victory.
Fun fact: I was a Sunderland season-ticket holder during this period and only missed one game because I was on holiday. Of course we won that game against Fulham and it was one of only two home wins all season.
No Sunderland player scored more than three league goals all season, while the team became the first in a 20-club Premier League campaign to lose 29 matches.
At the time, it genuinely felt like nobody could sink any lower. But they did.
Southampton (2024-25) – 12 Points
Threatening Derby County’s all-time record takes a special kind of dreadful.
Southampton came alarmingly close.
The Saints became the first team in Premier League history to lose 30 matches in a single season, and for long spells it looked as though Derby’s infamous total of 11 points might finally be beaten.
Russell Martin deserved enormous credit for getting Southampton promoted, but stubbornly sticking to his possession-based philosophy proved disastrous in the Premier League.
Trying to play out from the back is admirable.
Trying to do it with players who keep giving the ball away is considerably less so.
Southampton finished the season with more errors leading to shots and more errors leading directly to goals than any other side in the division.
Opponents barely needed to create chances because Southampton often created them instead.
Replacing Martin with Ivan Jurić changed very little.
In fact, things somehow became even worse.
The Croatian collected just four points from 14 league matches, giving him the lowest points-per-game average of any Premier League manager to oversee at least 10 games.
Southampton spent virtually the entire campaign in the bottom three and had been rooted to the foot of the table since Matchday 11.
Paul Onuachu finished as the club’s top scorer with just four league goals, which says everything about their struggles in front of goal.
To make matters worse, they also missed both penalties they were awarded during the season.
When absolutely nothing goes your way, sometimes that’s because you’re simply not very good.
Derby County (2007/08) – 11 Points
Every Premier League season seems to produce one question.
“Could this team be worse than Derby?”
Nearly two decades later, the answer is still no.
Derby’s 2007-08 campaign has become the benchmark for footballing misery. Mention “Derby 07-08” to any football fan and they’ll know exactly what you mean.
Plenty of clubs have threatened the record.
None have come close enough to take it.
Ironically, Derby’s season didn’t begin like one destined for infamy. They drew 2-2 with FA Cup holders Portsmouth on the opening weekend before beating Newcastle 1-0 in September thanks to Kenny Miller.
After 10 matches they had six points. Not great, admittedly, but enough to suggest they might scrape together 20-odd by the end of the season.
Instead, the wheels came off.
Billy Davies departed in November and Paul Jewell arrived hoping to rescue the campaign. January brought an assortment of experienced signings including Robbie Savage, Danny Mills, Roy Carroll and Laurent Robert.
None of them could stop the inevitable.
Derby’s only other positive result before Christmas came in a 2-2 draw at Newcastle. Remarkably, Newcastle and Fulham were the only clubs who failed to beat them all season.
Relegation was confirmed after another draw with Fulham in March, after which Derby finished with six consecutive defeats, conceding six goals to both Aston Villa and Arsenal along the way.
By the final whistle of the campaign, the numbers were astonishing.
Just one win.
Twenty goals scored.
Twenty-nine defeats.
Thirty-two consecutive league matches without a victory.
Eleven points.
It’s difficult to imagine another Premier League team ever producing a season quite as hopeless.
Then again, people said exactly the same thing about Sunderland a couple of years earlier. Could we be adding one of this season’s promoted teams to the list?
