AFC Bournemouth

AFC Bournemouth should not exist at this level, and the fact that they do is a standing provocation to every club that has ever used lack of resources as an excuse for mediocrity. The Cherries were on the verge of extinction in 2008 — genuinely, existentially, not-paying-the-electricity-bills extinct. Eddie Howe dragged them from the wreckage through the Football League pyramid to the Premier League by 2015, and the red and black of Bournemouth has been an irritant to the established order ever since. Their stadium holds 11,307. Their ambition holds considerably more.

Andoni Iraola, appointed ahead of the 2023-24 season, has taken what Howe built and turned it into something genuinely formidable. The Spaniard’s high-pressing, possession-based football has earned plaudits from across the footballing world and transformed the Cherries from plucky survivors into a legitimate top-half side. The Vitality Stadium creates an atmosphere that makes you forget you are watching Premier League football in a ground smaller than most Championship venues. Iraola’s coaching is the kind of work that should be studied by anyone who believes football is primarily a game of money.

For Australian fans, Bournemouth’s story is the sporting equivalent of a cold shower: bracing, invigorating, and a reminder that if a club from Dorset with an 11,000-seat ground can compete in the Premier League, every excuse you have ever made for anything is invalid.

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Bournemouth’s 2025-26 campaign continues to make a mockery of the financial hierarchy that the Premier League pretends to govern fairly. Iraola’s side play progressive, watchable football that would grace grounds three times the size of the Vitality Stadium, and European qualification is a realistic target for a club that was in League Two less than two decades ago. Plans for a new stadium are being explored, because the Cherries have outgrown their home — a sentence that would have provoked genuine laughter in 2008. A league title remains a distant dream, but then again, so did Premier League survival once upon a time. With Bournemouth, ruling anything out is simply not advisable.

VS — Chief sports columnist, australiafootball.com