Brighton are good, aren’t they? Fun team to watch, scoring loads of goals – including some ridiculous goals – and just as importantly a team that is entirely inoffensive to all other football fans except for some reason Crystal Palace ones.

They have now surely achieved They Couldn’t, Could They? status after their latest thumping win in a season that has a honking great elephant in its title race. But more important than that, they’ve become something perhaps just as rare.

A true Neutrals’ Favourite. Here are 10 of those from the Barclays era.

10) Harry Redknapp’s Portsmouth
SPOILER ALERT and all that, but it should come as no great surprise that this isn’t the last we’ll see of Harry Redknapp on this list. Still one of the Premier League’s ultimate characters, one who still pops up now and then to do stuff like brutally call Michael Carrick a triffic top, top fella, and a man who knew how to create an entertainingly effective Premier League team, as long as you didn’t worry too much about how your balance sheet might look when it was all over.

His Portsmouth sides across his two spells on that specific spot on the south coast can perhaps boast the highest concentration of pure Barclaysmen ever recorded, to the extent that all one needs to do to make the case for their neutrals’ favourite status is to prove once again that men are class and can have just the best time simply listing old sports players.

Across Redknapp’s two spells at Portsmouth – we won’t talk about the bit in the middle – they had, at various stages and in no particular order among many, many others we’ve missed, the following:

Shaka Hislop, Teddy Sheringham, Yakubu, Patrik Berger, David James, Glen Johnson, Sylvain Distin, Linvoy Primus, Eyal Berkovic, Hermann Hreidarsson, Lassana Diarra, Pedro Mendes, Niko Kranjcar, Jermain Defoe, Sulley Muntari, Nwankwo Kanu, Dapa Bouba Diop, Milan Baros, Lomana LuaLua, Laurent Robert, Sander Westerveld, Andy Cole, Dejan Stefanovic, Benjani, Lauren.

Beyond that, Redknapp’s Portsmouth also proved a fertile breeding ground for future highly successful Premier League managers such as Eddie Howe, Gary O’Neil and Tim Sherwood.

9) Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds
It takes a special manager to make certain clubs anything approaching neutrals’ favourite status, and there’s probably no finer example of that in Premier League history than Marcelo Bielsa – the manager’s manager – making everyone briefly enjoy the idea of Leeds.

He did have the advantage of novelty, restoring Leeds to the top flight after a ruinous 16-year absence, including dalliances with the third tier, that had nevertheless done nothing to cost them their place in Yer Da’s unchanging list of 20 teams that make up a Proper Premier League that he keeps (laminated, obvs) in his wallet.

There was a lot of buzz around their return and the type of football Bielsa might have them playing, and within a week of the Covid-delayed start of the 2020/21 season it was clear they were going to justify that buzz with knobs on.

Their first two games ended 4-3 – a defeat at Liverpool and a win over Fulham. In the space of two heady weeks of Festive Fixtures they beat Newcastle 5-2 and West Brom 5-0, while still finding time to squeeze in a 6-2 defeat at Manchester United.

A winning run to finish the season saw them end up ninth, just three points outside the European places, but for most of the season there was real purity to their neutrals’ favourite status: they weren’t fighting at the top or battling relegation. There was no specific endpoint or target. They were just enormous good fun.

They finished the season having scored more goals than Chelsea, who finished fourth, and conceded more goals than Fulham, who got relegated. What a long-awaited return to top-flight football that is, by the way.

8) Mauricio Pochettino’s Southampton
From Bielsa to the most Barclays-coded of his disciples and a team full of players who, like the manager, were destined for Big Six gigs of greater or lesser success.

We did consider Pochettino’s Tottenham, but ultimately they never really felt as much like neutrals’ favourites as neutrals’ punching bags. Too easily mocked for being a Not Quite team, despite actually everything apart from the badge on the chest being almost all you could reasonably ask of a neutrals’ favourite.

But Southampton are much more the right sort of club for that status. Back when Poch had them purring, they were still indelibly associated with Matt Le Tissier. And you have to remember this was a time when he was still revered as the single most neutrals’ favourite of all Premier League players rather than meme-fuelling conspiracy crank.

This Southampton side was easy to love, and Pochettino had them as high as third in the table by November after a run of six wins and a solitary defeat in their first 11 games of his one full season at the club after replacing Nigel Adkins to the swiftly-silenced and memory-holed dismay of PFMs everywhere midway through the 2012/13 campaign.

They faded, inevitably, but not disastrously and remained an entirely watchable lot throughout. They even then managed, for a while, to survive Pochettino’s departure for Spurs, retaining that status throughout Ronald Koeman’s first season in charge having added Sadio Mane and Toby Alderweireld to the heady brew Poch left behind.

7) Harry Redknapp’s West Ham
Specifically, Harry Redknapp’s West Ham With Paolo Di Canio In It. He arrived midway through the 1998/99 season that remains the Hammers’ best in the Premier League – and second best league campaign ever – when they finished fifth and got back into Europe after almost 20 years away.

Our sketchy memories of that fifth-placed team were that they either won 5-0 or lost 5-0 every week, so it was with some distress that a glance at the final table revealed underwhelming goals tallies of 46 for and 53 against.

Turns out there were a lot of goalless draws and other such low-scoring irrelevances in among the nonsense. Which, really, there had to be. They weren’t actually scoring or conceding four goals every week, that wouldn’t work. We’ll hold our hands up and say we just don’t remember the autumn goalless draws against Man United, Coventry, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa. That’s on us.

But we weren’t entirely wrong. In the first half of the season, the high-scoring games (with the honourable exception of a 3-0 win at Newcastle) were mainly defeats.

A 4-3 against Wimbledon. A 4-2 against Charlton. Back-to-back 4-1 and 4-0 defeats to Man United and Sheffield Wednesday. But Di Canio’s arrival sparked something, and it turns out what we’re mainly remembering of that season was how it finished. In their last five games of the season, West Ham beat Derby 5-1 and Middlesbrough 4-0 while still finding time to get themselves on the wrong end of a 5-1 thrashing from Leeds (who finished a place above them in the league) and a 6-0 humping at Everton.

It was a team built in classic Redknapp style on brilliance from the academy and – even before Di Canio was lured south from Sheffield – canny transfer acquisitions.

A Rio Ferdinand here, helped along by a Neil Ruddock there. An ever-present Frank Lampard but also an Ian Wright no longer required by Arsenal.

While they couldn’t match the fifth-place finish of 98/99, it was surely 99/00 where this team nevertheless hit its neutrals’ favourite peak.

Starting the season like a train because they were match-sharp following the summer’s successful Intertoto Cup campaign. Finishing the season utterly spent because of the summer’s successful Intertoto Cup campaign. That Di Canio goal against Wimbledon, which requires absolutely no further description because you’ve all instantly conjured a pixel-sharp replay in your mind. Getting knocked out of the League Cup for fielding an ineligible player. Having a run of four wins in five games, but the odd one out being a 7-1 defeat. Beating Bradford 5-4 having trailed 4-2 with 25 minutes to go. Fredi Kanoute. Paulo Wanchope. You get the idea.

6) Michael Laudrup’s Swansea
We do feel like we’ve done Brendan Rodgers dirty here, because there’s no doubt Swansea’s popularity among neutrals began and grew significantly under his watch. He at the very least created the conditions for it, and the start of the idea that Leon Britton was some kind of “we’ve got Xavi at home” character.

However, the most significant figure in Swansea’s status is without doubt Michu. And the inconvenient truth is that Rodgers and Michu were ships that passed in the night, the manager’s departure for Liverpool coming in the same summer as Michu’s arrival and subsequent 22-goal season under new manager Michael Laudrup.

It’s not quite a Mandela Effect, but we’d wager good money that a good deal more people would name Rodgers as the manager for the Michu Season than Laudrup. But there’s no doubt either way that Michu is the main protagonist here.

A man assured of a lasting place in Barclays folklore, whose price tag you can all now instantly recall and who for one glorious moment in time joined An Area The Size Of Wales or Number Of Football Pitches as an official comparison indicator.

It was for a while there quite literally impossible to even consider discussing the transfer fee paid for any other player without expressing it not in such mundane terms as pounds and pence but rather in how many Michus it constituted.

A big-money flop might would be dismissed witheringly. “You could have got 15 Michus for that.” Which did, to be fair, always rather overlook the fact that – unless top Barclays boffins were up to something ungodly and kept secret from the rest of us – there was only one Michu. And only really for that one perfect season.

But what glorious privilege it was to be alive in those times.

5) Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City
Indulge us, if you will, in a degree of mischief. But we put it to you that for a great deal of what we shall now call Manchester City’s Cheating Years – both before and during Pep Guardiola’s reign of dominance – they were, if not always quite the neutrals’ favourite then definitely the neutrals’ lesser of two evils.

Even now, amid the inevitable talk of reallocating all their trophies, we’re really not sure there’s much appetite to hand assorted pots and pans to your Man Uniteds, Liverpools and the Arsenals of this world.

That’s the reality of it. How they went about achieving it is now well documented, but Manchester City really were genuinely new and different and – importantly – just more palatable for a neutral to get behind in a Premier League that had become all too predictable.

By the time City’s new owners came along and changed the Premier League forever, it had become hard to see how anyone might actually do that. The big four had become entrenched. Liverpool were too flaky to win the league. Arsenal had by this point disappeared almost entirely up Arsene Wenger’s arse and anus. No neutral could truly get behind Chelsea and Jose Mourinho and John Terry and such.

But City? A club that had been through genuine misery and who could lay claim to actual long-suffering supporters – not the sort Man United would later claim to have after finishing seventh or some such piffling distress.

That could work. City and their fans, plenty would agree, were a great bunch of lads. Easy to be pleased for them. And even when that stopped being the case, they were still in almost all cases less annoying and/or less prone to gobshitery than any of the alternatives in their title-winning seasons.

Let’s have a big hand for the massive cheating bastards who, when you think about it, saved the Premier League. In a way.

4) Carlo Ancelotti’s Everton
Did it actually happen? Was any of it actually real? It was Covid times and the mind plays tricks. Even that collection of words – ‘Carlo Ancelotti’s Everton’ – now has about it an air of the absurd.

We’re certain it did happen. And we’re certain that for a few giddy weeks in that most confusing and discombobulating of times it truly felt like anything was possible and that a James Rodriguez-and-Dominic Calvert-Lewin-propelled side that had won its first four games of the season before an infamous 2-2 draw with Liverpool could absolutely go on and challenge for the very highest honours.

Didn’t happen in the end, they were rubbish. Well, not rubbish. But they faded to a pretty miserable and distinctly underwhelming 10th-place finish from that heady nosebleed-inducing start. Ancelotti buggered off to Madrid, and Everton went back to meat-and-potatoes, humdrum surviving, to mere existing.

But for an all-too brief moment in time in a season that doesn’t really feel like it actually existed, they were living.

3) Fabian Hurzeler’s Brighton
Funny old team in a lot of ways. So many of the teams on here are their manager personified. Hurzeler’s undeniable genius lies in making them the opposite. There’s no avoiding the fact that Hurzeler is quite bad vibes. He’s seamlessly replaced Eddie Howe as the Premier League’s most High Performance Podcast manager, and can be quite hard to take seriously despite his obvious precocious talent.

Even as Diego Gomez was scoring a breathtaking goal of the season, Hurzeler was stood in the midst of a squally shower looking uncomfortable and awkward and painfully aware the weather was revealing how badly his hairhat has taken.

But therein lies the contrast. Hurzeler may be bad vibes but his team is absolutely not. They are very good vibes, and after the joyous, gleeful dismantling of their not-derby but-rivals Crystal Palace at the weekend have achieved “They Couldn’t, Could They?” status, the lesser-seen and far more desirable cousin of “You Fear For Them, You Really Do” for clubs outside the gilded elite.

There is widespread respect and admiration for the work of the Premier League’s B Teams, but Brighton are something else right now. Something none of them have ever been before.

And a quick look around the company they’re keeping at the top of the table makes it very easy to see how they’d have a lot of people cheering them on even if they weren’t also a free-flowing joy to watch who keep scoring four or five goals every week, at least one of which will be ridiculous.

2) Claudio Ranieri’s Leicester City
The ultimate Premier League fairytale. We’re now, vaguely horrifyingly, over a decade on from what remains a genuinely ludicrous achievement that defies all logic. Nothing any other Premier League side has ever done really comes close to it.

Remember when Arsenal fans liked to pretend that it would have been comparable had they managed to topple an elite, pomp-enjoying Manchester City to the title in one of the runner-up years? Arsenal, or any other big club, could win 10 Premier League titles in a row and not come close to an achievement as astonishing as what a Leicester side that had spent most of the previous season looking doomed to relegation managed to pull off in 2015/16.

Sure, they were helped by the fact that the only other team to have a non-disastrous season was Spurs, who carefully stocked and stored up all their disaster for the final weeks. But any attempt to caveat Leicester’s achievement is a nonsense from the get-go. Of course it happened in a season where absolutely all the big clubs contrived to sh*t their bed in some fashion or other. It’s the only way it could ever happen. But it did happen.

1) Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle United
There can be only one. Had we not limited it to one entry per club, there would have been a case for multiple Newcastle teams, which just highlights how much they were the platonic ideal of a neutrals’ favourite club before the p*ssed it all the way for ill-gotten riches they can’t even spend and a single Carabao.

Sir Bobby Robson’s Newcastle could have been here, just because of Sir Bobby Robson.

We retain still a great fondness for Handsome Pards’ 2011/12 vintage, who finished fifth in the league fuelled by the goals of Demba Ba and Papiss Cisse, the midfield artistry of Yohan Cabaye, the hair of Jonas Gutierrez and Fabricio Coloccini, and the whatever-the-f*ck Hatem Ben Arfa was.

But no Newcastle side – no other Premier League side full stop – can really come close to Kevin Keegan’s teams between 1995 and 1997. The Premier League’s most beautiful failures. We would love it – love it – if they’d won at least a title that they absolutely should have. But would the legend of that team be what it is now had they actually won something?

Is much of its beauty in the lessons it teaches us about how life is just one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Manchester United were dead?

The 1996 collapse from 10 points clear remains agonising even to think about, the run of five defeats (including the Collymore Closing In 4-3 at Anfield) in eight games that ultimately pretty much handed the title to the hated, childhood-ruining United who did indeed go to Middlesbrough and get something.