A run of six different winners in six seasons will come to an end at Twickenham on Saturday
Some leagues are famous for their predictability.
In football, Bayern Munich not winning the Bundesliga makes headlines, while the Scottish Premiership and La Liga titles are traditionally shared between Celtic and Rangers, and Barcelona and Real Madrid, respectively.
Rugby can be just as susceptible to dominant team syndrome as its round ball cousin – Toulouse have won five of the last six Top 14 titles available, for example.
But the same cannot be said right now of the extremely competitive, impossible-to-predict Gallagher PREM, which has had six different winners in the last six seasons.
It’s a sequence that has to change this year.
Spanish football fans have got used to Barcelona and Real Madrid sharing La Liga between them (Javier Borrego/Europa Press via Getty Images)
Breaking the chain
The period from 2015-16 to 2019-20 was dominated by two clubs, with Saracens claiming three Premiership titles and Exeter Chiefs two.
But since Exeter claimed their last title in the Covid-19-delayed 2020 final (the season Saracens were relegated for breaching the league’s salary cap regulations), no team has lifted the Premiership trophy more than once.
Chiefs’ win was followed up by a shock victory for fourth-placed Harlequins in 2021. Since then, Leicester Tigers, Saracens, Northampton Saints and Bath Rugby have all been crowned Gallagher PREM champions:
- 2019-20 Exeter Chiefs
- 2020-21 Harlequins
- 2021-22 Leicester Tigers
- 2022-23 Saracens
- 2023-24 Northampton Saints
- 2024-25 Bath Rugby
But with 2024 winners Northampton Saints set to face 2020 champions Exeter Chiefs and Leicester Tigers in this year’s final, it’s guaranteed that the PREM’s incredible run of a new winner every season is about to end.
Should Exeter win the title, they will also become the first side in the league’s history to ever win the championship after finishing third in the regular season.
At the end of such an unpredictable season, however – and with so little to choose between the four sides on paper – we’d all be unwise to make assumptions.
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