Move over Arsenal’s Invincibles, meet The Invisibles
There are some records in football which you set out to break every season. Most goals scored, most clean sheets, most games unbeaten and most wins are all the stuff of dreams, the things teams and players aspire to.
But for every positive there must be a negative and as such, for every good record there must be a retched, soul-destroying one to balance the universe out.
There have been plenty of bad teams down the years – Sunderland 2002/03, Derby 2007/08, Aston Villa 2015/16 – are three that spring to mind in terms of recent incompetence, but this season we have a new winner.
This season we have a team which makes all of those sides look like slightly less awful teams in comparison. This season we have Brechin City.
Competing in the Scottish Championship after promotion through the League One play-offs last season, the team from Angus in Scotland were unfancied from the off due to the fact that they were one of two semi-professional sides in the league alongside Dumbarton.
Even their greatest naysayers though would likely not have predicted the fact that they would go the entire season without a single win, which they did after losing 5-1 to Queen of the South at the weekend.
That defeat left them bottom of the league, though just four points previously in the season would have done that anyway.
According to the BBC, Brechin’s victory-free season makes them the first Scottish side since Vale of Leven – a team which presumably competed against the likes of the Winterfell Harriers and Iron Islands Academic in the Westeros Football League – to finish a senior league campaign without a win.
Vale’s winless season occurred in the 1891-92, back when Ireland was still a part of Great Britain, Russia was known as the Russian Empire, and former Rangers defender Clint Hill was a sprightly 21-year-old.
