Ranking the 10 most surprising title winners of all time | OneFootball

When a new league season gets underway, there are always teams that are expected to be at the top of the table at the end and everyone has their favourites for winning the title that year. However, sometimes a team comes out of nowhere and manages to defy all the odds and lift the trophy come May.

Girona's 4-2 win away to Barcelona in December 2023 saw them return to the top of the table as their remarkable season continued. As they approach the halfway point of the La Liga campaign, many neutrals will be watching on eagerly to see if the Spanish side can pull off the almost impossible.

Many leagues across Europe have had some unexpected winners over the years who have managed to break the spell of dominance of certain clubs. In celebration of Girona's miraculous rise to the top of La Liga, we're going to be looking at some of the teams down the years. Each of the top five European leagues feature in this list at least once. So join GIVEMESPORT, as we rank the ten most surprising title winners of all time.

10 Atletico Madrid (2013/14)

Atletico Madrid enjoyed a very successful 2013/14 campaign as the truly incredible defensive unit Diego Simeone had assembled was put on show for all to see. Los Colchoneros conceded just 26 league goals all season, which made up for the fact that second-placed Barcelona scored 23 more goals than them throughout the campaign.

The two sides faced each other on the final day of the season with Atletico needing just a point to take the title off Gerardo Martino's side, and they managed it with a 0-0 draw. It was the first time a team other than Barca or Real Madrid had won La Liga in ten years, and Simeone's team, boasting the likes of Diego Costa and Thibaut Courtois, also managed to reach the Champions League final, which they lost to their deadly city rivals.

9 FC Twente (2009/10)

FC Twente are a relatively young club in the Eredivisie, having only been established in 1965, but had spent the middle of the 2000s punching above their weight under Fred Rutten, who Schalke promptly poached in the summer of 2008. His shock replacement was Steve McClaren, fresh from disgracing himself as England manager.

However, Sir Alex Ferguson's former assistant, aided by Erik ten Hag, managed to not only keep the club firmly in the Champions League places in his first season, but he also managed to go one better the following year by guiding Twente to their first ever league title. They managed to finish just one point ahead of Ajax, with future Fulham star Bryan Ruiz grabbing 24 league goals from midfield.

8 Deportivo La Coruna (1999/00)

As of December 2023, Deportivo found themselves in the third tier of Spanish football, but there was once a time when they were regarded as one of the best teams in the country. In 2000, manager Javier Irureta guided the club to their first-ever top-flight title.

In a season where the standard in La Liga was surprisingly poor, Herculinos needed only 69 points to win the league, finishing five points ahead of Barcelona and Valencia in second and third place, and were inspired by such talents as Roy Makaay, Djalminha and Pauleta. The accolade made A Coruna the second-smallest city to ever boast a La Liga-winning team, after Real Sociedad of San Sebastian.

7 Wolfsburg (2008/09)

Wolfsburg were a club created for Volkswagen workers, and they rose through the ranks of German football before finally reaching the Bundesliga in 1997. They cemented their status as an established top-flight team and began to push for European places but nobody could have expected what would happen in the 2008/09 campaign.

Under manager Felix Magath, Wolfsburg won their first-ever Bundesliga title, finishing on 69 points, two points ahead of Bayern Munich, who they thrashed 5-1 in early April. Their two forwards, Grafite and Edin Dzeko, were by far the standout players of a historic season, with their 54 league goals between them seeing them go down as one of the most prolific strike partnerships ever.

6 Nottingham Forest (1977/78)

Brian Clough is one of the most iconic football managers of all time and tales of his days at Nottingham Forest are stuff of legend. He became their manager in 1975 when they were in the second tier of English football, and was soon re-joined by his assistant Peter Taylor, who had helped him work magic with Derby County years before.

The pair helped Forest win promotion in 1977, and in their first season back in the First Division, they wasted absolutely no time in clinching the club's first, and to date only, top-flight title as they finished seven points ahead of an all-conquering Liverpool side and only lost three matches. The two didn't stop there as they proceeded to guide the Garibaldi to back-to-back European Cup titles in the following two seasons, becoming only the second English club to ever pull off such a feat.

5 Montpellier (2011/12)

Montpellier are a historic club in French football who were founder members of the first division in 1932. Despite that, it took them until 2012 to win their first Ligue 1 title as they spoiled PSG's first campaign under Qatari ownership.

After finishing 14th in the table the season before, La Paillade shocked everyone as they managed to pip the Parisian club to the title by three points, winning 25 of their 38 games and sealing the title on the final day with a 2-1 victory away at Auxerre. Olivier Giroud was the star of the team, finishing as the league's top scorer with 21 goals, and he was rewarded with a £9.6m move to Arsenal in the summer.

4 Boavista (2000/01)

There have only been five winners of Portugal's top football league since its formation in 1934, with Benfica, Porto, and Sporting Lisbon dominating the competition. By the turn of the 20th century, the only other time one of those three teams had not won the league was in 1946, when Belenenses finished as champions.

Therefore, it came as an enormous shock when Boavista came out of the blocks strongest during the 2000/01 season and would retain their position at the league's summit from the middle of December until the very end of the season. Jaime Pacheco's sido beat all the Big Three teams at home by a 1-0 scoreline and won the league, conceding only 22 goals.

3 Hellas Verona (1984/85)

During the 1984/85 season, the Serie A could boast such international stars as Diego Maradona, Michel Platini, Zbigniew Boniek and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. Therefore, no one could have possibly anticipated that Hellas Verona would swoop in and claim their first, and to date, only top-flight title.

But in a bizarre Serie A campaign, that is exactly what happened. The decision to assign referees by a random draw, in an attempt to clean up the league's image after a betting scandal earlier that decade, resulted in a bizarre league table in which the big three of Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan were all well off the pace domestically, and Verona took full advantage, winning the league by four points having only lost twice all season.

2 Kaiserslautern (1997/98)

Despite being slumped in the second tier as of December 2023, Kaiserslautern are a relatively successful team within German football. They won two league titles before the creation of the Bundesliga in 1963, of which they were a founder member, and remained in the top division until 1996, having won the league title five years before that.

Otto Rehhagel's team immediately returned to the Bundesliga as champions a year later, but no one could have anticipated what they'd go on to do the following campaign. Kaiserslautern became the only newly-promoted team in Bundesliga history to win the league, doing the double over holders Bayern Munich, and finishing two points ahead of the Bavarian giants.

1 Leicester City (2015/16)

Almost undoubtedly the greatest underdog story in football history, Leicester City were handed odds of 5000-1 on winning the league title in the summer of 2015. The previous season, the Foxes had launched a great escape to avoid relegation at the end of their first season back in the Premier League in ten years and the subsequent summer, the owners made the seemingly uninspired decision to appoint Claudio Ranieri as a replacement for the charismatic Nigel Pearson.

But while most people tipped the club for relegation, Leicester stunned everybody and found themselves top of the table after a 3-0 win over Swansea City in early December which, besides a brief period at the turn of the year, was a position they would not give up as they finished ten points clear of second-placed Arsenal, losing only three matches all season. The likes of N'Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez would each join Champions League clubs in the following seasons. At the same time, Jamie Vardy earned himself icon status within the annals of Premier League history.