The Longest Premier League Losing Runs ...Middle East

What are the longest losing runs in Premier League history? Here, we look over the five instances of teams suffering nine or more defeats in a row.

Some poor teams have graced the Premier League in the last few years, but as things stand, the record for the worst run of consecutive losses in the competition’s history has remained untouched for two decades.

A couple of teams have hinted at threatening it in the years since, but Sunderland, who lost 20 consecutive games in a run that ended in September 2005, stand firm in top spot. It will take something very special for that to be beaten.

The Longest Losing Streaks in Premier League History

The first 15 games of Sunderland‘s run came in 2002-03, when they unsurprisingly finished bottom of the league. That 15-match losing streak remains longest losing run in a single Premier League season, and then they added five more games at the start of 2005-06 after winning promotion back into the top flight. Twenty is a nice round number, after all.

“But football didn’t begin in 1992,” we hear you yell. Fine, well, Sunderland’s 20-game losing run is not only a Premier League record, but also an all-time English top-flight record.

Sunderland: 20 Games

Lost 2-1 away at Everton – 18 January 2003Lost 1-0 at home to Southampton – 28 January 2003Lost 3-1 at home to Charlton Athletic – 1 February 2003Lost 4-1 away at Tottenham Hotspur – 8 February 2003Lost 3-1 at home to Middlesbrough – 22 February 2003Lost 1-0 away at Fulham – 1 March 2003Lost 2-0 at home to Bolton Wanderers – 15 March 2003Lost 2-0 away at West Ham United – 22 March 2003Lost 2-1 at home to Chelsea – 5 April 2003Lost 2-0 away to Birmingham City – 12 April 2003Lost 2-1 at home to West Bromwich Albion – 19 April 2003Lost 3-0 away at Manchester City – 21 April 2003Lost 1-0 at home to Newcastle United – 26 April 2003Lost 1-0 away at Aston Villa – 3 May 2003Lost 4-0 at home to Arsenal – 11 May 2003Lost 3-1 at home to Charlton Athletic – 13 August 2005Lost 1-0 away at Liverpool – 20 August 2005Lost 2-1 at home to Manchester City – 23 August 2005Lost 1-0 away at Wigan – 27 August 2005Lost 2-0 away at Chelsea – 10 September 2005

On 17 January 2003, Sunderland looked in a decent position to at least make a go of surviving. They were 18th in the Premier League after 23 games, and they were only one point off safety, although there was a threat from below them, with West Ham and West Brom both boasting a game in hand on Sunderland.

Nobody could have foreseen what would come next.

They threw away a 1-0 lead at Everton to lose 2-1 and that result kicked off what remains the worst losing streak in Premier League history. They didn’t pick up a single point for the remainder of 2002-03 to finish 25 points off Bolton in 17th.

Their fans probably didn’t think it could get any worse, but it certainly could, and did. They began their return to the top flight in 2005-06 with five straight defeats to make it 20 in a row.

Then, they went on to earn just 15 points all season – what is now the third-lowest points total in a season since the competition began in 1992. They lost 29 games that season, and that was a Premier League record until Southampton lost 30 in 2024-25, while their tally of three wins is the club’s lowest in a top-flight term. They even managed a separate nine-game losing streak later that season, which comes in as joint-fourth worst in Premier League history.

If ever a stat summed up a period in a club’s history, it’s that no Premier League side lost more home games between 2002-03 and 2005-06 than Sunderland (28), despite them being in the second tier for two campaigns in this time.

Norwich City: 16 Games

Norwich boast the second-worst losing run in both Premier League and top-flight history, with a 16-game streak stretching across their relegation in 2019-20 and further defeats at the start of 2021-22, after their return to the top tier.

The day before the start of the 10-game losing streak which which they ended 2019-20, Norwich were bottom of the Premier League and six points from safety. It was always going to be a difficult task to remain in the top flight, but then the Covid-19 pandemic hit following the first defeat of the losing run on 7 March against Sheffield United.

Maybe Norwich struggled to adapt to no crowds in stadiums more than other sides, but whatever the explanation, they didn’t win another point that season. When football returned from the pandemic-induced break, Norwich lost all nine of their Premier League games and scored just one goal.

With Sunderland’s 20-game losing run coming across two different managers – Mick McCarthy’s 14 games and Howard Wilkinson’s six – Daniel Farke avoided the sack to become the first manager in Premier League history to suffer 15 consecutive defeats following Norwich’s promotion for 2021-22. The German might be the king of Championship promotion, but taking charge of a Premier League club is a much harder task.

Remarkably, when Farke finally managed to end the 16-match losing run with a 3-1 away victory at Brentford on 6 November, he was sacked anyway.

During the run, Everton’s win over Norwich in September 2021 also piled misery on goalkeeper Tim Krul. In losing that match, Krul suffered his 100th Premier League defeat in what was his 199th Premier League appearance – only three other players have ever suffered 100 defeats in fewer than 200 games in the competition: Steven Fletcher (185), Paul Robinson (the former West Brom defender, 192), Matthew Jarvis (193) and Josh King (199).

Defeat at Aston Villa on 30 April 2022 eventually relegated Norwich from the Premier League for a sixth time – the most of any side since the competition began in 1992-93.

Aston Villa: 11 Games

Aston Villa were already having a dreadful season when they embarked on this run, but even so, it still came as a big surprise.

After sacking Tim Sherwood on 25 October following a run of six consecutive defeats, they hinted at a mini-revival under Rémi Garde. A run of only four defeats in 11 games through the winter suggested there was life in them.

But then came the third-worst losing streak in Premier League history, starting off with a 6-0 hammering at home to Liverpool. Six games into that run, Garde was sacked, but his interim replacement, Eric Black, couldn’t stem the tide.

Villa did end their losing run with a goalless draw in their penultimate game of the season, but they had already long been relegated by that point. They ended the season with just 16 points.

Fulham: 9 Games

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this entry in our list is the fact that Fulham didn’t even finish bottom of the table in 2018-19 despite enduring a nine-game losing streak from 2 February to 2 April on top of another six-game losing streak in the autumn.

That’s because when they weren’t going on abysmal runs of losses, they had some decent runs of form, including a three-game winning streak once the longer of their losing streaks had ended.

It meant Fulham picked up a fairly respectable 26 points that season to finish well clear of last-placed Huddersfield. However, they were unsurprisingly still relegated.

Sunderland: 9 Games

Yet more impressively (is impressive the right word?), Sunderland managed a nine-game losing streak that ended in December 2005, having broken the record for the longest ever run of losses in top-flight history only a couple of months earlier.

They scored in six of the nine games in this particular run but still lost every time, and even when they ended their run with a draw at Bolton, they then lost their next four, adding in another six-game losing streak in the spring.

All in all, it was a season to forget.

Wolves: 9 Games

Wolves have lost nine consecutive matches between October and December 2025, and could yet move further up this list.

They came very, very close to ending their losing run away from home to league leaders Arsenal on 13 December after scoring a 94th-minute equaliser to make it 1-1 late on at the Emirates Stadium.

But nothing is going their way at the moment, and such is their luck, they went on to concede an even later winner, courtesy of an own goal (their second of the game, no less) from centre-back Yerson Mosquera. When it rains, it pours.

So that’s the English top flight covered, but how do these losing runs compare to the best of the best in the top five European Leagues?

Spain

Las Palmas held the honour of the longest losing run in La Liga for 55 years, having gone on an 11-game losing streak that ended in early 1960, until Real Valladolid went one better at the end of 2024-25.

At the midway point in the season, Valladolid had done well enough, winning four of 19 games to sit second from bottom, only two points adrift of safety. Then came a monumental collapse.

They lost 18 and drew one of their 19 games in the second half of the season to sink to the bottom of the pile and end up 25 points away from the safety of 17th place.

They ended the season with a record-breaking run of 12 straight defeats, meaning that next time they return to the top flight, they could extend their lead at the top of this list.

Italy

Brescia lost 16 Serie A matches in a row between February 1995 and August 1997, with 15 of these games at the end of the 1994-95 season, which ended in relegation to Serie B. One more loss came at the start of the 1997-98 season.

A 1-0 defeat to Internazionale started the run, and it was another defeat to the same opposition on the opening weekend of 97-98 that ended the sequence.

The final match in the run was particularly hard to stomach, as they led 1-0 until the 80th minute, when Álvaro Recoba scored an equaliser, and he then fired the winner just five minutes later. To say both of his strikes were wonder goals wouldn’t be an understatement. Had these ancients never heard of xG?

Germany

In 2021-22, SpVgg Greuther Fürth broke the Bundesliga record for the most consecutive losses, with 12 successive defeats between 28 August and 4 December. During that run, they conceded 40 goals, including a 7-1 defeat to Bayer Leverkusen to beat the previous record of 11 defeats in a row, set by FC Nürnberg.

France

The 2022-23 season was a record-breaking season for Angers. Before this campaign, the record run of defeats in Ligue 1 stood at 12 in a row – held by four different teams: Dijon in 2020-21, Grenoble across the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons, Strasbourg across 2007-08 and 2017-18 (after relegation in 2008), and CA Paris way back in 1933-34.

Then Angers, following six consecutive seasons of mid-table finishes since promotion in 2015, capitulated in dramatic style in September 2022. They had started the season with two draws followed by four straight defeats, but then fans would have hoped a corner had been turned when they recorded back-to-back wins over Montpellier and Nice.

It wasn’t to be, though, as they then fell apart, losing 13 games in a row from September through to February. They recovered with two draws, but then went on two separate five-game losing streaks to boot. They were – obviously – eventually relegated, but not until late April, with just five games of the season left.

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The Longest Premier League Losing Runs Opta Analyst.

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