I think the methodology the sportswriter used is flawed and it leads to some absurd examples. The 07-08 Celtics aren't an upset by any stretch of the imagination. We all know why they underperformed the previous season and why they performed so well the following season. No one was surprised by their winning the league. Using the 99 Rams or the Hurricanes is comparing apples to oranges, because in soccer leagues, crowning a champion based on points earned during the regular season tends to reward the actually better teams whereas, the playoff system of american sports introduces an element of luck. Either way, in all american leagues save baseball, there's financial parity and multiple champions. In the past 20 years, only 4 teams have won the league and only 5-6 enter the league seriously expected to vie for it.No.
(You can also find the link somewhere upthread.)
This leads to the next point. The point isn't which team had the most improvement from one season to the next, but which team surpassed the expectations set for her based on the evaluation of its talent level before the season. This makes the Montpellier, Kaiserslauten and Nottingham Forrest examples more interesting. However, there's an additional wrinkle to the argument. In modern football, post-Bosman and post-humongus TV rights and Champions League money, whereas there's no 1 on 1 perfect correlation between money spent on players and league standing, arguably money spent is the biggest predictor of success (I would say anywhere between 65-75% can be predicted by wages).
I don't know enough about Kaiserslauten and 90s era German football. I know that they aren't giants by any stretch of the imagination and they have trouble staying in the top flight, so this could in fact be a comparable case. And so perhaps is Wolfsburg which won a couple of years ago. OTOH, although Bayern Munich tends to dominate German football overall, it seems to me that the teams that challenge it tend to change from year to year and era to era.
I do know that in the 70s era English First division there wasn't as much money to go around, financial discrepancies weren't as large as they are today and thus, the league race was far more open affair than it is nowadays. The same is true more or less of French football before the infusion of oil money to PSG. The French league has been the one major league in recent years where you could see all sorts of teams win the title.
So, to have a team that has the tenth of a budget of a Chelsea or a Manchester United go on and win the race in a league played out over 38 game days -not a cup with one off games that can knock out any overall favorite- seems to me to be a definite contender for greatest upset in football history. I do think a better methodology to tease out the largest upset is to compare the preseason odds of a team with its final league standing. I mean, Leicester's odds were 5000 to 1. This implies that if we could magically replay the past season for 5,000 years, Leicester would win just 1 time and we are actually witnessing. It's gobsmacking.
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