- Arsenal v Forest: The referee who reverses all the normal statistics
- This Arsenal story has been manufactured to meet our publishing requirements
By Tony Attwood
It is rather interesting that while several websites report the number of players injured at the moment, they generally don’t seem to put the figures in order of injury numbers so that we can see how one team compares with another.
I am not sure if this is just the usual case of each newspaper and website copying all the others, or whether an attempt to hide the extraordinary variance between the number of injuries of one club against another. Would you believe that Manchester City have ten times as many injuries as Fulham, five times as many injuries as Liverpool, and almost twice as many as Arsenal?
Possibly you would; I must say I was taken aback, but there it is. Those numbers seem to be right. and in case you find such things interesting, here is the full list in the order of the number of injuries.
- Fulham 1 player injured
- Liverpoll: 2 players injured
- Everton: 3 players injured
- Newcastle United: 3 players injured
- Nottingham Forest: 3 players injured
- West Ham United: 3 players injured
- Bournemouth: 4 players injured
- Brighton and Hove Albion: 4 players injured
- Burnley: 4 players injured
- Manchester United: 4 players injured
- Wolverhampton Wanderers: 4 players injured
- Leeds United: 5 players injured
- Arsenal: 6 players injured
- Aston Villa: 6 players injured
- Brentford: 6 players injured
- Chelsea: 6 players injured
- Tottenham Hotspur: 6 players injured
- Sunderland: 7 players injured
- Crystal Palace: 8 players injured
- Manchester City: 10 players injured
Meanwhile, we might note as one or two publications have, that Ange Postecoglou never won a north London derby while in charge at Tottenham. But then to be fair, we have to add he was only in charge for four games before being booted out in the normal Tottenham fashion. Indeed, when allowed to stay longer, it normally takes these Tottenham managers a while to get going, which is why their constant changing of managers seems so odd.
Which leads me to look not at the clubs that have changed managers this month, but rather which clubs have had the same manager for the longest time. The answer is… Manchester City since 2016 and Arsenal since 2019. After than comes Eddie Howe at Newcastle who joined in 2021.
Which made me wonder how many managers the top teams had had in recent years. But I couldn’t find an up-to-date chart – there are several that stopped totalling up these things a year or two ago (probably because the numbers just grow and grow), but nothing that seemed to be right up to date. Of course, I probably missed it and you can point out to me the up-to-date totals. But TransferMarkt totalled it up last year so I’ll make do with that. Their total is for permanent managers since 1992/3, and this was published in October last year.
The top five at the point they published were Southampton 21, Chelsea 18, Tottenham 18, Newcastle 18, and Aston Villa 14. And although it is true that Chelsea won the league in 2015 and 2017 they are something of an exception. The others have just had manager upon manager but failed to win the league.
Arsenal were bottom of this table with five managers, Liverpool have had nine and ManC have had 11 all of which seems to add to our general thought that having lots of managers doesn’t actually help win the league. Of course, it can be argued that clubs keep changing their managers because they don’t win the League – but the point is that this process doesn’t normally help resolve that issue. Arsenal you will recall stayed with Arteta through three seasons of coming 8th, 8th and 5th, and then three more seasons of coming 2nd, 2nd, and 2nd. Changing managers at any stage during that process might have won Arsenal the league, but more likely would have taken Arsenal back down to 8th, or lower.
Actually, only 24 clubs have won the English top-level title, including seven which have won the Premier League. Arsenal are third in the list of champions with 13 titles. Nottingham Forest are in a group of five clubs that have just won the league once – that was in 1978. The others are Sheffield United, West Bromwich Albion, Ipswich Town and Leicester City.
Forest, of course, have a bit of a problem with a new manager coming in without too much knowledge of what players he has and what they can do, and coming from a club that missed relegation by one place last season.
Meanwhile, the Football Association has finally charged Chelsea FC with breaches of Regulations. In fact they have done it quite a few times: 74 times in fact. So they haven’t quite overtaken ManC whose case is still waiting to be resolved.
