- Can the end of one season or the start of the next predict the final table?
- Arsenal beat Manchester United and the great news is…
By Tony Attwood
In recent seasons, despite Arsenal’s rise up the league from eighth twice to second twice, there has been a constant background of moaning and suggesting that Arsenal urgently need to buy more players. Indeed at the start of the current window it was virtually impossible to read an article about Arsenal that wasn’t suggesting that there was an urgent need to buy a new striker.
And over the last ten years Arsenal have made life pretty easy for bloggers and journalists because they have been one of the high spending clubs. Indeed a 10-year report from the CIES Football Observatory – whom we often use as a source of data, and whose figures are hardly ever (if ever) challenged, came up with a list of the “highest net-spending clubs in the world since 2014”.
Over that ten year period top spenders were Manchester United who spent over £1 billion on players (£1,196m to be exact).
Second were Chelsea on £885.5m, third were Paris Saint Germain on £865.8m and fourth were Arsenal on £746.9m.
Going on down the spending league we have Manchester City in fifth, Newcastle United in sixth, Barcelona in seventh, Tottenham in eighth, AC Milan in ninth and West Ham United in tenth.
Highlighting one or two of the surprising inclusions (and remember this is a Europe wide table across ten years) Everton come in at 15th, Crystal Palace at 16th, Bournemouth at 17th and Nottingham Forest in 20th.
Now that’s normally as far as it goes, except for supporters of teams not on the list demanding that their club should be matching that sort of expenditure, which is ok except for one thing.
For although there is some link between the amount of money spent and the league position that the club achieved last season, it is not a perfect match. And indeed that is to be expected since good players once signed might stay with the club for a number of years.
But what we can note particularly is that the top five clubs of last season all achieved a league position higher than their position in the spending charts – which indicates that they spent their money rather wisely (although of course this chart doesn’t take into account exactly how much money was spent).
The club with the most benefit from its spending in terms of league position has been Liverpool followed by Aston Villa and then Crystal Palace. The teams with the least benefit from their spending are Manchester United and Chelsea, both of whom have been big spenders of late. In this table a + sign means the club is achieving more than might be expected given its purchasing.
| League Position | Team | Spending position | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manchester City | 5th | +4 |
| 2 | Arsenal | 4th | +2 |
| 3 | Liverpool | 12th | +9 |
| 4 | Aston Villa | 11th | +7 |
| 5 | Tottenham Hotspur | 8th | +3 |
| 6 | Chelsea | 2nd | -4 |
| 7 | Newcastle United | 6th | -1 |
| 8 | Manchester United | 1st | -7 |
| 9 | West Ham United | 10th | +1 |
| 10 | Crystal Palace | 16th | +6 |
Since 2019 Chelsea have spent £852m on players and over that period they have come fourth, fourth, third, twelfth, and sixth. During this time they have had seven managers.
Over the same period Manchester United have spent £765m and have come third, second, sixth, third and eighth. During this time they have had four managers. Arsenal have had three managers over this period and Manchester City one.
Obviously the stability of the managerial position is related to the success of the club as much as the reverse. And of course if we were only counting from 2020 to 2024 Arsenal would be listed with just one manager.
So as we have seen before, changing managers is not a guaranteed recipe for success anymore than being hyperactive in the transfer market is a recipe for success. Unfortunately some clubs go in for both at once, and that can be an utter disaster.
However, the final column above does tell us something interesting, for quite simply the clubs that come out with a positive figure are doing well. That positive means that they are higher up the league in terms of actual league position, than they would be if matters were just considered in terms of money spent in the past five years.
Thus we are drawn back to an issue that we have seen time and again. The media remorselessly focuses on getting rid of managers and buying players, and of course, both do affect the way a club plays. But quite often we find that neither spending money and changing managers works as intended.
Which means of course that the club has to change managers again, and the new manager will want to bring in new players – which means spending more money. Thus the clubs in a vicious circle which they attempt to get out of, by doing the two things that are liable to make matters worse.
We should always remember that for the first season and a half under Arteta, Arsenal came eighth and vast amounts of money was spent or lost by cancelling contracts or selling players for far less than their assumed market value. We might think of Ozil and Aubameyang as two examples.
But Arsenal allowed Arteta to cancel those contracts, and unlike the media did not express their discontent when the club finished eighth twice followed by a fifth.
Of course for the moment the media have stopped the whinging and whining. But defeat will undoubtedly get them going again.
