Manchester City’s two nil win should have come as no surprise to any Gooner

By Andrew Crawshaw

My recent look at squad values using data from the website transfermarkt.com indicated a total value of the City squad as being well in excess of £900m whilst that of Arsenal was virtually £500m.

To put this discrepancy into perspective mere are the stated values of the two squads starting 11s broken down by position 😡

Arsenal

Value £m

position

Man City

Value £m

Petr Cech

3.0

GK

Emerson

50.0

Hector Bellerin

40.0

RB

Walker

50.0

Mustafi

25.0

CB1

Stones

55.0

Sokratis

20.0

CB2

Laporte

50.0

Maitland-Niles

7.0

LB

Mendy

40.0

Guendouzi

2.5

MF1

Bernardo Silva

50.0

Xhaka

40.0

MF2

Fernandinho

15.0

Ramsey

45.0

MF3

Gundogan

40.0

Mkhitaryan

35.0

Forward 1

Mahrez

50.0

Özil

45.0

Forward 2

Aguero

80.0

Aubameyang

75.0

Forward 3

Sterling

90.0

332.5

Total team value

570.0

So City’s starting team was more valuable than our entire squad.

Even when City made changes – Aguero, Mahrez and Sterling, they were replaced by as high or even higher value players. On came De Bruyne £150m, Sane £90m and Jesus £80m meaning that the end the team value was £670m

Our substitutes were Lichtsteiner £1.5m for Maitland-Niles, Lacazette £60.0m for Ramsey and Torreira £30m for Xhaka effectively leaving our team value unchanged.

There are very few contests in the world where you would expect a team to beat another who has twice the resources – at least not without a large slice of luck or some kind of external intervention. With the PGMO in charge of the game I think we all knew in our hearts that any possible intervention would never come our way and so it proved.

On a positive note, their margin of victory this year was less than last season and Guendouzi put in another strong performance.  There are still things to improve but hopeful and his value is certain to rise from its current low figure.

Less positive were the ‘heart in mouth’ moments when we were attempting to play out from the back. Our Women’s team were the same at first with their new coach and it has taken them six months to look comfortable with this tactic. I hope the men learn far more quickly!

On Sunday City were the better team, they were far more sure of their tactics and on a player by player measure they were more skillful. We announced them as PL Champions a couple of weeks ago and nothing happened today to make us alter that view.

On the flip side they displayed a snide side to their game throughout and were allowed to get away with too many blatant and niggly fouls that our players were invariably punished for and they wasted time from the first minute to the last without ant sanction by the match officials.

2 Replies to “Manchester City’s two nil win should have come as no surprise to any Gooner”

  1. The ‘replace the corner taker at the last second’ routine was as blatant a time-wasting tactic as I have ever seen. Even Tony Pulis never stooped to that one. I shows that Man City as a club rely so little on the money coming from fans that they are as likely to insult them as the most negative manager ever would.

  2. Andrew it was indeed there for all objective observers to record how the pgMOB official tilted towards the petro club in this football match. Not an opinion.

    50/50’s, not giving corners off slight deflections, the time wasting, the lack of a yellow for eg Gundagan taking out Xhaka (Xhaka has got reds for less), other yellows and fouls not called one way and given the other etc. not forgetting the pelanty call not given.

    Wow.
    It was quite a performance from Oliver.

    Plus la change.

    As former head of the pgMOB Keith Hackett said last week the pgMOB is not fit or purpose. A stain on English football.

    https://talksport.com/football/406242/keith-hackett-premier-league-video-assistant-referee-var/amp/

    Welcome to the pgMOB Unai!

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