By Tony Attwood
Apologies for the late appearance of Untold today, we seem to be having major technical problems not just in my house but in the whole area around where I live. I’ll do my best to keep the show on the screen, but when the power or the internet goes, I regret, there ain’t much I can do.
So moving onto the world of football as we know it, the gap at the top is big and getting bigger it seems but Arsenal remain in second place.
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Liverpool | 29 | 21 | 7 | 1 | 69 | 27 | 42 | 70 |
| 2 | Arsenal | 28 | 15 | 10 | 3 | 52 | 24 | 28 | 55 |
| 3 | Nottingham Forest | 28 | 15 | 6 | 7 | 45 | 33 | 12 | 51 |
| 4 | Chelsea | 28 | 14 | 7 | 7 | 53 | 36 | 17 | 49 |
Meanwhile, the last six games table is also looking rather interesting. Liverpool as you can guess without looking is top, but then come two lower-ranked clubs who are actually doing rather well: Palace and Brighton. This means that the other challengers for Arsenal are in fact, slipping away. So, while there is a lot of talk about Liverpool, no one is really noting too much about what is happening below.
But the last six games table does give a clue in that in the top seven clubs of late, most of them are clubs from lower down the league making their way, step by step and often very slowly, up the table. And it is worth noting that even when we exclude the wonderful away win in Europe last week, Arsenal have still got the second best goal difference over the last six games in the league.
| Pos | Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Liverpool | 6 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 13 | 6 | +7 | 14 |
| 2 | Crystal Palace | 6 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 11 | 5 | +6 | 12 |
| 3 | Brighton | 6 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 11 | 10 | +1 | 12 |
| 4 | Arsenal | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 9 | 3 | +6 | 11 |
| 5 | Everton | 6 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 12 | 7 | +5 | 10 |
| 6 | Tottenham Ho! | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 10 | 6 | +4 | 10 |
| 7 | Brentford | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 8 | 5 | +3 | 10 |
| 8 | Chelsea | 6 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| 9 | ManC | 6 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 9 |
Of course, realistically Arsenal are not going to close that gap at the top, and of course, the media will continue its rather childish demand that Arteta should be buying centre forwards – or at least one of them, but still we are holding on.
Meanwhile, with Leicester, Ipswich and Southampton in the bottom three for both the last ten games and the last six games, we can safely forget about relegation as an issue since that looks pretty much sorted.
Meanwhile the media turn the screw on Arteta and if he were not such a strong character I would start to have fears that we might lose him, with headlines today reading “Arsenal’s title challenge has collapsed after an epic failure of recruitment.”
Of course, what this story doesn’t actually tell us is just how many recruitments where players are brought in result in failure.
Now CIES tell us that, “Chelsea stands out from the crowd in terms of spending over the last decade (€2.78 billion). This is 42% more than the next clubs having invested the most: Manchester City and Manchester United. Chelsea are fourth, and Manchester United are 14th. So spending money doesn’t actually mean success, and one of the great problems is of course that if a club buys players who simply don’t make it, that money has gone and can’t be spent again. Unless of course, one is thinking of Chelsea, who seem to get away with it forever, and Manchester City who do get away with it forever.
In fact transfer fees in England are so far above those in the rest of the world that really we only have to look at England to get a picture of transfer fee excess.
This table from Football Observatory shows the gap between England and the rest of the world, and these figures are without add-ons.
- Premier League £23.02bn
- Serie A (Italy) € 10.84 bn
- La Liga (Spain) € 7.94 bn
- Ligue 1 (France) € 7.44 bn
- Bundesliga (Germany) € 7.17 bn
So it seems that what the media want is not just for the English clubs to maintain their position of spending more and more money on football, and thus making it ever more expensive for us supporters to attend, and indeed ever more impossible for any club coming up from the Championship to survive, they want even more of this, by claiming that Arsenal are “only” second.
