- Arsenal start season at ManU where things look a bit strange
- How Arsenal’s spending compares to some other teams this summer
By Tony Attwood
There have been a number of pre-season newspaper stories just recently in which supporters from the 20 Premier League clubs are invited to name the top four, for the end of this season, which is about to start.
Unfortunately, the various publications that run such stories tend not to offer us a summary of the numbers they get from different supporters – I think the notion is that they are just supporters and not experts (ie not people who write newspaper columns) so they don’t really matter. But even so, I thought it might be an interesting exercise so I’ve done the job for them, just to see where they thought each club would come by the end of the season.
Five of the 20 correspondents suggested Arsenal would win the league, two fancied Arsenal to come second, eight had Arsenal coming third and four had Arsenal coming fourth. Which meant that only one person – that was the Fulham supporter – completed the survey and didn’t have Arsenal in the top four. He had a top four of Manchester City at the top, followed by Liverpool in second, then Chelsea and fourth Newcastle United.
18 voters had Manchester City in the top four come the end of the season, all 20 had Liverpool in the top four, the same for Chelsea – these clubs squeezing in just above Arsenal.
That fact of 25% of those voting had Arsenal to win the league is a nice positive feeling for us, but it ought to be a warning for the League as a whole, for although none of us can be really certain who will win the league, the vast majority of supporters seem to think that three of the top four will contain Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal in some order or other.
In short, to a certain degree the Premier League looks a bit like a foregone conclusion..
Although of course I would love Arsenal to set out winning every many and charge ahead to wrap up the title by Easter, this hardly leads to an open and exciting league season – rather it looks like being a war of attrition for everyone else, with the big three or four winning most of their games and just the odd slip, or a couple of goalless draws deciding who gets there in the end.
And while of course, I want Arsenal to win, and while I am delighted to see that others think this is likely, the part of me that enjoys football as an unpredictable sport does not want the same club winning over and over again. Indeed, I was rather pleased that Manchester City only got two votes to end up as winners out of the 20, which is certainly a change from a couple of years back, where everybody took it for granted that it would indeed be Manchester City winning the league again and again and again.
Indeed, one might even begin to think that the main aim of newspaper journalists is to pretend that the question of who will win the league is worthy of serious debate, even when over a nine-year period only two clubs have won the title.
As for Arsenal, the most hopeful point that can be made from looking at the league table across the last decade is that the club has come second four times – three of those of course, in the last three seasons.
But going back to the voting of the supporters, the Bournemouth supporter turned out to be a little eccentric in his/her opinion, in that he or she had Tottenham Hotspur coming fourth this season. It was the only vote they got for a place within the top four, and that one seemed rather optimistic. Mind you the voter also had Manchester United being relegated so he or she is not all bad. In fact, Manchester United got two votes for relegation alongside that one vote to come fourth.
There is also a general tendency to vote two of the three promoted clubs as favourites to be relegated, which does seem to me to be very realistic based on recent years, but again doesn’t do much for the notion of a competitive league. In fact, all clubs coming up must now be thinking of nothing but a desperate attempt to hang on for a few draws while snatching a couple of wins.
Indeed, there is a general agreement that at least two of the three promoted clubs from last season will go back down again. Again, it doesn’t suggest a singularly open and competitive league.
The last ten seasons in terms of the top three positions have been dominated by Manchester City, Liverpool. Chelsea have crept in with one title and two third places, Tottenham with one runners-up and two third places, and Manchester United with two seconds and two thirds. Arsenal have four seconds, which does place the club in third spot overall behind Manchester C and Liverpool, but we still have quite a bit of catching up to do. Manchester C have only been out of the top three for one of those ten years, while Liverpool have been out of the top three for four of those seasons. The competitive nature of the league seems to have slipped a bit.
Just read an article in the Express (not something I do very often let me make clear) in which their “experts” (or unskilled scribblers, as they should be known) tell us their predictions for the top four and who they believe the best summer signing was.
Now bearing in mind every one of them has been screaming for us to buy a top striker like Gyokeres for the last 2 or 3 years, everyone of them says we will fall short and not one of them even mentions Gyokeres as potentially the best summer signing…funny that.
Further, about half of them have the top four as being the same top four in the exact same order as last year and the rest have the same top four but with Arsenal slipping back down the table. So now Arsenal have done exactly what the “experts” in the media have been insisting we must do in order to improve, they now declare we won’t improve and that we will, in their opinion, do worse than we have done in the last three years during which we did not take their “advice”.
So, if ever you needed evidence of their gross ineptitude and fickle behaviour, there we have it. Yet they still have the temerity to refer to themselves as “experts”!
The Athletic came up with: Liverpool, Arsenal, Man City & Chelsea, with none of the Arsenal writers included in the voting. And one of them thinks that they’ll still be asking if City will still be judged by nexed May.
…next May