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The Grandfather and the Scot

The Grandfather and the Scot

Your narrative-focused 2024-25 football round-up

June 01, 2025

Your narrative-focused monthly football round-up. Telling the story as the season unfolds.

Another season in the books. Another few thousand football matches notched on the board. Europe’s Top 5 men’s leagues might be done for summer - or not, for those going straight into the Club World Cup - but the magical narratives created over the past ten months will linger long in the memory.

These are the narratives The Armchair Ultra will be reliving all summer:

A first major honour

119 years later, Crystal Palace now have a major honour to their name. A beautiful, shining trophy to form the centrepiece of their trophy cabinet alongside two Championship winner’s trophies, a League One winner’s trophy and two FA Cup runner’s-up medals.

By the end of 2024, at the mid-way point of the season, this looked supremely unlikely at best. Palace had picked-up only 7 wins, 3 of which were in the EFL Cup. 4 wins from 19 left them sitting 15th in the Premier League, below even Manchester United, Tottenham and West Ham. But 2025 arrived and so did Crystal Palace. They started the year with 7 wins and just 2 defeats through their first 11 league games, and coupled that with the start of their FA Cup run. By the end of May, Palace had climbed to 12th, netting their highest ever Premier League points tally, and to crown it off they’d carried that form into the FA Cup, going the whole way by beating Manchester City in the final. It’s not every year you get to enjoy the biggest moment in a club’s history.

The Tinkerman Signs-Off in Style

Roma were in turmoil. After 3 draws and a defeat to start the season, Daniele De Rossi was sacked and immediately replaced by Ivan Jurić. Picking-up only 4 wins from 12 games was enough to get Ivan Jurić sacked too, leaving Roma managerless and floundering in 12th. Cue a call to the retired Tinkerman for one last swansong.

36 games and 22 wins later, Roma had climbed up to 5th place, and Ranieri had been crowned Serie A Manager of the Year. Roma’s 3rd manager of the season, the manager for 26 league games; Manager of the Year.

52 years on, Claudio Ranieri signed-off on his incredible football career for a second time, back where it all started, at Roma. A fitting ending for a true legend of the game.

A Rollercoaster in Spain

Barcelona stormed into an early lead in La Liga this season, establishing a 6 point cushion at the top by the end of October. But, by the end of the year, Barcelona had slipped to 3rd, falling 3 points behind leaders Atlético Madrid, despite having played one game more. By this point Barcelona had already lost 5 league games (26% of their games) compared to Real Madrid’s 2 and Atléti’s 1.

By the end of January, with all 3 teams square on 21 games played, Barcelona had been cut adrift, 7 points behind. Real Madrid had a 4 point cushion over Atléti.

Incredibly, by the 2nd March, just a month later, Barcelona were back on top. Real Madrid picked-up only 5 points from a possible 12 through February, whilst Barcelona went perfect. Barcelona went into March 1 point ahead of Atlético Madrid and 3 points clear of Real. From there, Barcelona won 11 of their last 13 games to maintain their grip on the top spot, eventually winning the league by 4 points.

Through 2025 they looked invincible, tearing teams apart on a regular basis (scoring 3+ goals in 20/35 matches in 2025!), until, somehow, Inter were able to concede 3 goals in both legs of their Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, but still emerge victorious. Barcelona will have to console themselves with just the La Liga and Copa del Rey crowns this year.

Napoli land Scudetto No.4

On the topic of great title races, Serie A’s was a belter too. A belter made all the more interesting by the fact that it was Napoli who came out on top.

Napoli, the team coming off a dreadful 2023/24 campaign in which they were supposed to be defending their Serie A crown, but instead floundered in 10th, some 41 points behind champions Inter. Napoli, who lost their talismanic striker, Victor Osimhen, in the summer and then their talismanic winger, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, mid-season.

Napoli, Scudetto winners for the second time in three seasons!

The title race was a close run thing. At no point were Napoli and Inter ever separated by more than 4 points. Napoli were on top for most of the season, aided, in part, by Inter’s busy schedule which often kept them a game behind. That is until March.

Napoli hit a rough patch, and Inter jumped them into first. By the end of March Inter held a 3 point lead, and it looked a done deal. Napoli had picked-up only 11 points from a possible 24 through February and March (still struggle to comprehend how it’s possible to win a league title whilst being torrid for two whole months). But then Inter faltered towards the end of April, losing 3 in a row to get knocked-out of the Coppa Italia and to find themselves looking-up at Napoli once again with only four games left.

On the penultimate gameweek of the season, Napoli were being held to a draw at Parma, whilst Inter were beating Lazio, and it looked like Inter were about to wrestle their way back to the top of the table at the very last. But that’s not where the story ended. A 90th minute Pedro equaliser earned Lazio a draw and delivered Napoli the biggest let-off imaginable. Napoli beat Cagliari on the final day of the season and sealed the job.

Inter meanwhile have a summer of heartbreak to contend with, having lost the league title, lost the Champions League final and been knocked out of the Coppa Italia in the semi-finals by cross-city rivals Milan.

These are the magical stories that this newsletter is all about. There’s so much football being played all the time it understandably gets reduced down to scorelines and league tables, but league tables are just the outcome. The beautiful narratives that crafted those tables get lost and glossed-over. But not here at The Armchair Ultra. Here we indulge in those glorious narratives.

Mo Salah might have been crowned the Premier League Player of the Year, and rightly so, despite being on the beach since March. He might even have been the best player across Europe (although The Armchair Ultra would pick Raphinha for that particular accolade), but as interesting as that might be to debate, the MVP is a much more interesting subject.

Salah might have directly contributed to 57 goals for Liverpool this season - that’s a lot of value - but Liverpool would still have won the Premier League without Salah, so dominant were they that Salah only occasionally scored decisive goals. And so, err, lacklustre, were the competition. Instead, we want to celebrate the player who has been so pivotal to their team that they fundamentally defined their club’s season. The proverbial Atlas, lifting-up his teammates and carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

This award can go nowhere else but to the Scot who’s already won the Scudetto and the Serie A Player of the Year award. The Scot with 12 goals and 4 assists in 34 matches for Napoli. Goal contributions that have directly contributed to 15 points this season, turning potential defeats into draws and draws into wins. Without those 15 points, Napoli would have finished in 6th.

In terms of open-play goals for a midfielder, Scott McTominay’s 12 goals matches Frank Lampard’s best ever Premier League tally and eclipses what former teammate Bruno Fernandes has ever been able to achieve at United. This guy has been monumental for Napoli this season and he goes straight into the pantheon of Napoli legends.

But winning The Armchair Ultra’s MVP Award was certainly never guaranteed. McTominay was run close by Reims goalkeeper Yehvann Diouf, a man who’s also had an extraordinary season. But for two season-defining games that went poorly for Reims, Diouf very well may have won the award. In the final week of May, Reims lost to PSG in the final of the Coupe de France and then lost their relegation play-off match against Metz. So, as valuable as Diouf’s contributions were, in the end they amounted to nothing.

But it bears dwelling on, because Diouf’s just had an all-time great season.

Reims finished 16th out of 18 in Ligue 1, but conceded just 47 goals. That’s 9th best in the league. 2nd place Marseille also conceded 47 goals. The 3 other teams around Reims at the bottom of the table each conceded more than 70 goals. Their number of goals allowed is comfortably within the top 50% for each of the Top 5 European leagues.

And based on post-shot expected goals (xG of only shots on target i.e. shots he actually faced), Reims were expected to concede 62 goals, meaning that over the course of the season Diouf was responsible for preventing an extra 15 goals from being scored that an ‘average’ goalkeeper wouldn’t have saved. Only 3 other goalkeepers in the Top 5 European leagues have a PSxG value above 10. Most are between -3 and +3.

For good measure, he also set a new Ligue 1 record in April for the most saves in a match, making 14 saves against Lens and leaving with a clean sheet.

And to top it all off, Reims and Diouf had to navigate 3 penalty shootouts en route to the Coupe de France final.

What might have been…