Premier League 2 Player of the Month, plus it wasn’t all England in the transfer window.

by Tony Attwood

The Premier League have now announced the eight players who are in the short list for the August 2017 Premier League 2 Player of the Month.

The eight players shortlisted for this month’s award have been drawn up following PL2 Managers nominating the best individual performance from each of their opposing teams across the course of the month.

The eventual winner will then be decided in a couple of weeks by a panel of the Premier League Football Development Department.

The short list is

• Arsenal: Reiss Nelson,
• Blackburn Rovers: Joseph Nuttall,
• Chelsea: Ethan Ampadu,
• Derby County: Kellan Gordon,
• Fulham: George Williams,
• Middlesbrough: Marcus Tavernier,
• Leicester City: Hanza Choudhury,
• West Bromwich Albion: Kyle Edwards

Of the Arsenal nominee Reiss Nelson the Premier League say

“After featuring prominently in the senior team’s pre-season fixtures, the 17-year-old scored five goals in three Premier League 2 matches. He netted doubles in the wins over Derby County and Manchester City, and opened the scoring in the narrow loss to Liverpool.”

Arsenal’s next game is against Leicester City under 23s on 15 September at Meadow Park, kick off 1900 BST.   After that it is Everton away on 25 September at Southport.

For some very odd reason, Arsenal.com (which is to my mind becoming increasingly eccentric, although maybe it is just a revamp which has gone a bit slow) has limited its coverage of the under 23s, and is, for example, only publishing last season’s end of year league table, and not the current table.  So here it is…

Club	Played	Won	Drawn	Lost	F	A	GD	Points
Liverpool	3	3	0	0	7	1	6	9
West Ham United	3	2	1	0	8	4	4	7
Arsenal	3	2	0	1	8	7	1	6
Everton	3	1	1	1	3	1	2	4
Leicester City	3	1	1	1	3	3	0	4
Chelsea	3	1	1	1	2	3	-1	4
Manchester United	3	1	1	1	2	4	-2	4
Tottenham Hotspur	3	1	0	2	6	5	1	3
Derby County	3	1	0	2	4	5	-1	3
Sunderland	3	1	0	2	2	6	-4	3
Manchester City	3	0	2	1	5	6	-1	2
Swansea City	3	0	1	2	3	8	-5	1

Among other oddities on Arsenal.com, the entire index of all the players who had played for the club since Arsenal’s  entry into the football league vanished at the end of last season, and has not returned.   If you are looking for details of a historic player you can try the Arsenal History Society site and enter the players’ name in the search box top right on that page.

A postscript to the transfer window

Trying to get an overview on the transfer market of which the British press tell us little save that it “broke all the records” and that of course “England is the biggest and best”, really means doing some of the sums oneself.  And doing that one sees that fewer and fewer clubs dominate the market.

Paris Saint-Germain and the two clubs from Manchester stand out of course but also (and I’ve not noticed mentioned this in the British press) this summer, Pep Guardiola became the third coach in the history of football to spend a billion euros.

The Pep has spent just over one billion Euros during his career at FC Barcelona, ​​Bayern Munich and Manchester City together.  That is to say 1,000,000,000 euros.  Quite a lot really.  Not surprising that his teams do quite well, with that sort of money available.

The other two members of this very exclusive club are… the current Bayern coach Carlo Ancelotti (1.13 billion) in second place and leader is… José Mourinho (1.43 billion).

So it is no surprise that Guardiola’s club is the biggest of the big buyers – even above Paris Saint-Germain.  Manchester City, built a completely new defence with their Dubai money.

Here are the totals…