The mid-table is dead. Long live the mid-table.

The Premier League has been dominated by the big six for the past two seasons. Will we see a resurgent mid-table in 2018-19?

The gap last season between eighth-place Burnley and 17th-place Southampton was 13 points. Only three times in the past 15 years has that gap been smaller, and one of those times was 2016-17, when a mere six points separated Southampton and Watford, the smallest difference this century between eighth and 17th.

The big six, meanwhile, are thriving. Manchester City shattered the record Premier League points total last season, only a year after Chelsea broke the then-record for wins in a season, and finished with the second (now third) highest points total ever.

The points total required to finish in the top four also increased. Only two fourth-place teams since 2000-01 have ended a campaign with more than the 75 points Liverpool managed last season, and one of those teams was Liverpool in 2016-17.

The obvious conclusion, which is not without its merits, is that the top six have simply become too wealthy, too powerful, and the rest of the league has suffered as a result.

Then again, there’s no better place to be poor than the Premier League. Last year, Leicester, West Ham, Southampton, Everton, Crystal Palace, West Brom, Bournemouth and Stoke all ranked in the top 30 of Deloitte’s annual money league. They averaged a shade under 41 points in 2017-18, and two of them were relegated.

As this suggests, the most significant problem with these teams isn’t that they’ve been getting poorer, but that they’ve been getting dumber. And indeed 2017-18 felt like a banner year for mid-table stupidity, even after the alarming depths of buffoonery plumbed in 2016-17. Where even to begin?

Everton spent almost £200 million over the summer only to sack their manager after nine matches, five of which came against big-six teams. Crystal Palace couldn’t even make it that long, giving Frank de Boer his marching orders after four games.

West Brom, not to be outdone, sacked the most reliable relegation-avoider in the country 12 matches into the season because they were in 17th place after a run of four losses in a row, two of which came against Chelsea and Manchester City. And then, as if to check whether they really had hit bottom, they hired Alan Pardew. Of course they were relegated.

West Ham also found themselves in the thick of a relegation battle after spending over £50 million in the transfer market, and ultimately turned to David Moyes to save them. Frustration among their fans, which by that point extended well beyond the quality of the team, culminated in mass protests, and multiple pitch invasions, during a 3-0 loss to Burnley in March, with the threat of relegation still very much alive.

Indeed, the only non-big six teams to emerge with any credit last season were the newly-promoted ones, Burnley and maybe Bournemouth. Of the teams that emerged with no credit, only Southampton had a remotely good excuse.

There are, to be fair, some reasons for this state of affairs besides the basic incompetence of many of the clubs involved. The top six really are better than ever, while the reward for a mid-table finish has never been greater. These two facts have led to a damaging, but understandable focus on the short-term.

For all the talk of these mid-table owners about European qualification, a Tottenham-like leap into the big time, they always seem to blink at the first sign of trouble. They’ll spend the time and money necessary to build a team capable of challenging for Europe only until their Premier League survival is under threat. Treading water has become a far more lucrative skill than swimming.

But of course these things take time, and a willingness to stay the course even when things go wrong. Look at Burnley, who finished seventh last season despite having one of the lowest wage bills in the league. They wouldn’t be in this position, however, if they hadn’t persisted with Sean Dyche when they got relegated in 2014-15.

But I say all this only to say quite the opposite, which is that there are signs, if you’re willing to look for them, and perhaps more to the point if you’re willing to trust the idiots responsible for this mess, that many of these clubs have learned their lesson, or at least happen to have stumbled into a long enough sequence of good decisions to be above average this season.

For the first time in a long time, we may have an honest to goodness mid-table in 2018-19.

Everton’s squad still looks a lot like it was built by people who put no thought into what they were doing, but in Marco Silva they have a legitimately promising manager, and a man who was desperate enough to move to a club the size and financial might of the Toffees that he talked himself out of his job at Watford to try to get it.

West Ham have somehow landed Manuel Pellegrini, a Premier League winner with Manchester City and La Liga winner with Real Madrid, whose arrival has precipitated a set of signings about which the first question that comes to mind isn’t “Wait, is this 2012?” That in itself is an improvement. Whether he can tolerate the circus in east London is quite another matter.

Leicester and Crystal Palace are in more settled positions entering this season as well, the former under a manager who seems to appreciate that trying to be a worse version of the 2015-16 title-winning side probably isn’t a viable long-term strategy, the latter under a manager the club won’t be tempted to fire after four matches (a high bar indeed).

Two newly-promoted sides have also impressed with their business this summer, and will, privately at least, have their sights set on a mid-table finish. Wolves, on the back of a dominant Championship campaign, have signed, most notably, Joao Moutinho and Rui Patricio to strengthen a squad that was, frankly, too good for the second tier. That their plan has been made possible by a highly dubious business relationship with Jorge Mendes doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

Fulham have had an even more eye-catching summer, bringing in Jean Michael Seri, Andre Schurrle and Alfie Mawson, among others, to a squad that already boasts several players who seem ready to make the jump to the Premier League level, the most exciting of whom is 18-year-old Ryan Sessegnon.

And last season’s promoted sides continue to display good sense (Mike Ashley notwithstanding). Brighton are quickly emerging as one of the smartest teams in the league, and are beginning to improve the individual quality in their squad. Their recent track record in the transfer market (Pascal Gross, anyone?), and the fact they have a clear tactical identity under Chris Hughton, suggests this window’s signings will have a positive impact.

Huddersfield and Newcastle are in quite different positions, money-wise, and for quite different reasons, but they also both have excellent managers who proved last season that a coherent system of play, and a squad of players built to fit into that system, are far more valuable than the finest mid-table Serie A forward money can buy. The same could be said for Bournemouth, maybe without the part about Serie A. The same could definitely be said for Burnley.

To an extent, it doesn’t matter whether, or at least how much, these sides succeed next season. Or rather, it doesn’t matter whether they finish eighth or 10th or 15th. Indeed, few would argue Everton, who were eighth in 2017-18, had a better year than Bournemouth, who were 12th, or Brighton, who were 15th.

Some of this, possibly a lot of this, is of course down to the different expectations at those clubs. Eighth looks a lot worse when you have top four aspirations; 15th a lot better when everyone expects you to get relegated.

But the suggestion here is that an analysis that equates success with league position is bad for the same reason so many of these mid-table clubs have been bad, namely, it (and they) mistake moving up with moving forward.

Everton climbed the table under Sam Allardyce, as did West Ham under David Moyes, and yet both sides ended the season worse off than they started it.

League position is, obviously, important; any mid-table teams that want to realize their European ambitions must at some point climb the table. But long-term success requires a coherent plan. If that plan is abandoned every season, in the hope of getting four or five or six more points, it will never be realized.

This is possibly a very condescending thing to say if the club you support isn’t at risk of relegation. The fear of the drop is real, and the fear is legitimate. And there are times when sacking a manager is unquestionably the right thing to do. Somebody must be relegated, after all.

But it’s nonetheless remarkable how quickly some of these teams lose their nerve (did anyone seriously expect Everton to get relegated under Ronald Koeman last season?). It reveals both how insecure they are about their own decision-making processes and how little they care about the long-term visions they seem to spend every summer talking about.

And so we enter the season in a strange position, vis-a-vis the mid-table. Many of last season’s most frustrating teams have done smart business this summer. They have done the hard work of pointing themselves in the right direction, or at least somewhere in the vicinity of the right direction.

With Chelsea, Arsenal and, to a lesser extent, Manchester United all in far more uncertain situations than they have been the past two seasons (they could all be very good, but they also all have the potential for significant regression), there’s even an outside chance one lucky mid-table side could crack the top six.

After the stupidities of the past several years, however, the measure of these teams will not be whether they make an unexpected run up the table; it will be whether they show the conviction to try to finish what they have tried to start this summer. All teams make mistakes. Only good teams learn from them.