Are Arsenal the biggest “bottlers” in the Premier League?

 

 

 

• Is the Premier League fixture computer biased?

By Jacko Jones

‘Bottle jobs’ is a term that’s echoed across English football, from Gary Neville branding Chelsea “billion-pound bottle jobs” to Manchester United’s infamous collapse against League Two side Grimsby Town. 

Curious to dig into how fans really feel about their teams, the football ticketing experts at SeatPick analysed more than 100,000 Reddit posts to uncover the sentiment behind teams being labelled as ‘bottle jobs’ and who gets crowned it the most. 

Biggest Bottle Jobs In The Premier League

Fans think Arsenal are the biggest bottle jobs in the Premier League 

SeatPick shows that fans think Arsenal are the biggest alleged bottle jobers, with the most mentions of the term per 10k submissions (55.95). Out of the almost 200,000 (181,159) Reddit submissions, bottling was mentioned 56,033 times, showing just how ingrained the label has become in football discourse. Arsenal’s media-generated reputation for late-season slip-ups clearly hasn’t gone unnoticed, with fans quick to pile on whenever the Gunners stumble.

But moving on, if there’s one phrase forever tied to Tottenham H, it’s “Spursy” and the numbers back it up. Collins Dictionary defines ‘Spursy’ as: A Spursy performance is to have success in reach but to ultimately chuck it away. With 24,590 bottling mentions (51.61 per 10k), Tottenham sit in second place, showing just how synonymous the club has become with falling short when it matters most. Despite moments of promise, the lack of silverware before last season’s Europa League triumph had made Spurs an easy target for rival fans looking to dish out the bottle job label. 

It might come as a surprise that Manchester City ranks third with 47.49 bottling mentions per 10k. With six league titles in seven seasons, Pep Guardiola’s side are now dubbed bottlers, which seems weird.  

Following shortly behind is Manchester United, placing fourth with 47.45 bottling mentions per 10k. Once the epitome of “mental strength” under Sir Alex Ferguson, Man United now find themselves heavily associated with bottling. For many, United’s inconsistency over the past decade has left them as much a punchline as a powerhouse.

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Data for this article was supplied by Seatpick who analysed fan discussions for the top Premier League clubs using Reddit data from 2020 to 2024.

1. Each club’s subreddit was taken from Academic Torrents, using the top 40,000 posts and comments ranked by Reddit score.

2. After cleaning and filtering by date, they measured:

• Total activity (posts, comments, words).

• Mentions of “bottling” and related terms in English (“bottled it”, “bottle job”, “choked”, etc.) plus common slang in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Dutch.

• Sentiment around each mention, using short text snippets.

5. The teams were then ranked by the most ‘bottling’ mentions per 10k posts. 

6. All data was collected and finalised on September 11 and is accurate as of then. To see the full dataset, please see here.