- The key points we will be putting to the Football Regulator on Day 1
- The battle lines are drawn, but the Premier League has the winning hand.
In football there are several traditional ways of writing about players and clubs and most publications follow these. But such traditional approaches can lead to commentators missing out on a few key points.
For example, it is commonplace to take the league table based on points – and this is reasonable since after all that is what determines the final position of clubs in the league. But supposing for a moment one created a league table based on goals scored, there would be a certain shuffling around.
On a goals-scored table Tottenham shoot up from 9th (based on points) to fourth. Liverpool drop from top of the league to fifth. In fact Tottenham have scored more goals than Liverpool so far!
Elsewhere, Brentford shoot up from 11th to 7th And amazingly Wolverhampton who look set for relegation leap up eight places. And if Manchester United’s 14 place in the league were not bad enough, on goals scored they are in the relegation zone.
Of course in reality that doesn’t matter, we know the league is based on points, but when journalists write articles as they often do, focusing on how a player is brought in to score goals but doesn’t (or doesn’t achieve any other simplistic measure of success) then that sounds bad. Until one realises that either the player wasn’t actually brought in for that job that the media presumed he was brought in for at all, or in fact he is scoring goals but the media won’t acknowledge it.
Consider Kai Havertz. Last season in the league he scored 13 goals in 30 games which is 0.43 goals a game.
This season he has scored in the league four goals in seven appearances., which if it were to be kept up through the whole season would mean 25 goals – exactly the sort of number that centre forward that the entire media were demanding through their pre-season “analyses” (I use that word in its vaguest sense) ought to score.
Quite an improvement, and one that makes the demand for a 20 goal a season centre forward to be signed during the last transfer window look even more bonkers than it looked before, since based on him playing 34 gmaes a season that is just about what we have got.
So let us see how that compares to last season.
Last season Saka scored 16 in 35. That is 0.46 a game. Using the same metric Trossard scored 0.67 goals a game. And as we have season Havertz was on 0.43 a game.
So none of these players is on 0.57 goals a league game which could take them up to 20 goals a season. Except that Havertz has scored six in nine. That is a ratio of 0.66 goals a game, which if he can play 35 games would give him 23 goals.
In short we already have our 20+ goals a season man.
But Arsenal have not exactly been short of goals in the past. If we look across the last five years Arsenal have scored, in successive seasons 56, 55, 61, 88 and 91 goals. Last season we did it with Saka scoring 20 goals. Two years ago three players each got 15 goals in the league. This time maybe it is going to be with the traditional 20+ goals a season man, but clearly Arteta always has plans and backup plans. Someone else might come along and start knocking those goals in.
At the current rate Arsenal are on track to score 81 goals this season – but top of the league Liverpool at the current rate will only score 70.
But then as they say it is a funny old game..
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