Man, you wouldn’t believe the argument I got dragged into last night. It was late, maybe 11 PM, and I was just trying to wind down, watching some old football highlights on the telly—the classic 2013/14 season popped up, showing a bit of the title race chaos. My mate, Steve, rings me up. He’s usually dead wrong about historical sports stuff, but he was absolutely insistent, swearing blind, that Fulham somehow stayed up that year.
I told him straight up: “Steve, you’re mixing up your years again, mate. That was the season they crashed out.” But he wouldn’t back down. He kept saying the three teams were Cardiff and two others that were total shocks—he was throwing out names like Hull City and West Bromwich Albion, claiming they had inexplicably collapsed right at the end. I knew he was talking complete nonsense, but he’s one of those people who, if you let him win one small fact, he thinks he’s a footballing genius forever. I had to kill the argument dead.
So, I didn’t even move from the sofa. I just grabbed my laptop, fired it up, and got straight to work digging up the facts. This wasn’t about the history books; this was about winning a pointless, late-night debate. I needed ironclad proof.
The Data Retrieval Process
The problem with searching for specific season results from a decade ago is that your brain is clogged with so many subsequent seasons. I remembered the top of the table perfectly—the whole Liverpool near-miss, the Man City title win—but the bottom third? That’s where the memory gets murky. Those mid-to-lower table teams all blend together after ten years of football.
My first search was deliberately simple, trying to avoid any confusing analytical articles. I typed in: 2013 14 Premier League final table bottom half. I just wanted the raw numbers. The first couple of results were links to current transfer rumors, useless stuff. I had to skip past all that noise.
I finally clicked on a dedicated statistics site. Even there, I nearly messed up the investigation. I swear, the layout of these archival sites is terrible. I accidentally landed on the 2014/15 season brief for a minute, and my heart sank because I saw QPR listed, and I knew that wasn’t right for the season we were discussing. I had to slow down, scroll back up, and visually confirm the header: Season 2013-2014.
Once I had the right table, I skipped the top 17 spots—who cares about mid-table mediocrity when you’re hunting down misery? I scrolled directly to the bottom three slots. I wanted the team names, the points totals, and the damning gap between them and the safety spot (which that year was occupied by West Brom, incidentally—the very team Steve thought was relegated).
Logging the Irrefutable Facts
I decided to screenshot the relevant section, but I also logged the data directly into a quick text file on my desktop, just so I had it ready to fire off to Steve via text message, ensuring maximum impact. This is the log I created, confirming the drop zone:
- Position 20 (Dead Last): Cardiff City. They were done early. Finished with just 30 points. No debate there.
- Position 19: Here was the contentious one. It was Fulham FC. The team Steve insisted had stayed up. Their total was 32 points. That was a clear descent.
- Position 18 (The Final Spot): This was the team I had forgotten about entirely, but seeing the name triggered the memory of their terrible run-in. Norwich City. They were relegated on 33 points.
The gap between safety (West Brom at 17th with 36 points) and Norwich was 3 points. It was tight, but those three were definitively gone. My investigation confirmed that the bottom three teams relegated from the 2013/14 Premier League season were Norwich City, Fulham, and Cardiff City. There was absolutely no mention of Hull, and West Brom was, in fact, safe. Steve was wrong on two out of the three spots he tried to guess.
Wrapping Up the Argument
The process took about fifteen minutes of focused effort, scrolling past bad information and confirming the actual list. The most important thing about these kinds of lookups is making sure you’re not confusing seasons—that initial click on the 2014/15 results could have sent me down a rabbit hole of wrong information, so taking a moment to confirm the year displayed at the top of the table was crucial.
I called Steve back straight away, naturally. He tried to argue for a good three minutes that maybe Fulham were saved because another team had some kind of points deduction, even though there was zero mention of that in any of the facts I had just checked. I just read the list to him, slow and clear, emphasizing the points totals for Norwich and Fulham, just to make sure the message sank in. The silence on the other end of the line was golden.
He mumbled something about having to check his “old records” and hung up pretty quick after that. It’s funny how a simple question about a football season from ten years ago can turn into a full-scale research project just to prove a point to a stubborn mate. But hey, now I have the data logged, ready for the next time someone tries to tell me that West Brom went down in 2014. Sometimes, proving the simple, recorded facts is the most satisfying practical result you can achieve.