Where do Hurzeler's Brighton rank among Keegan's Newcastle and other Premier League Neutrals' Favourites?
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.
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 likebrutally 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. 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.