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By Tony Attwood
I knew the Arsenal record against Bayern was bad before I looked it up, but I didn’t know it was going to be THAT bad: won three, drew three, lost eight. And the last five have 18 goals for Bayern, five for Arsenal. Looking at this record and their own position in the Bundesliga, they are probably thinking of putting out the second XI. For in the last five games, including those three consecutive 5-1 defeats, we have just one draw, a 2-2 on 9 April 2024.
But maybe now there is just a fractional bit of levelling up, for their current position is 41 points for 11 games, 19 points above the club in second place. Arsenal have played one more game but have only 29 points. On the goal-scoring front, Bayern have 41 to Arsenal’s 24.
That makes it look easy for Bayern, but isn’t their league very unbalanced? I decided to look and found the Premier League’s bottom five clubs have scored 60 goals between them this season in 60 games. In Germany, the bottom five has scored 50 in 55 games. The difference is there, but it is tiny. And so there is no escaping the fact that this Bayern team are very good. Although we might add, they are 11 points above the sixth club, Arsenal are 10 points above the sixth club.
So Bayern and Arsenal each are the best in their league, by some distance, and we can’t argue that the German league somehow lacks the depth that the Premier League has.
Further, Bayern has won the league in Germany 13 times in the last 14 seasons! Before that, things were a bit more balanced, but still, the nearest we have to that is Manchester C winning the league six times in seven seasons from 2017/18 onwards. But now in England ManC are seven points behind the leaders, while in Germany Bayern are six points ahead of Leipzig in second place.
Of course, I would love to see Arsenal win the league again and again… except there is a part of me that also wants competition. Yes, the three titles in a row is wonderful, and it must have been fantastic to be at Highbury in the 1930s to see that. And I did personally enjoy enormously 1997/8 through to 2004/5 with three league titles, five second places, and three FA Cups, and was frustrated by those runners up places. But the fact is that for football to be truly football, it needs to be competitive.
Five consecutive Real Madrid wins at the start of the European Cup years made the competition look a bit pointless, as did their repeat of that feat from 2015/6 on, but they have only won it twice in the last seven years, which is slightly more encouraging for everyone else.
Of course, Spain and Germany are not the only countries that have given themselves over to the same team constantly winning the domestic League. In France, PSG have just won their league 11 times in 13, and of course their supporters, like those of Bayern and Real Mad celebrate as if each was the first title. But it does all mean that the domestic leagues, in Germany and France, have become less and less interesting.
Untold regularly runs the comparison tables of where the club is today compared with after the same number of games in previous years, because the club’s position varies. I can’t imagine anyone bothering to do this in France or Germany because the answer is always the same. Just as I can’t imagine any bookie taking bets of PSG and./or Bayern Munich to win their domestic league each season, because they always do. And although Spain does have two teams vying for the title each year, with Atletico Madrid popping in there every now and again (two titles in the last 20 years, I think), although I may have lost focus in counting, but it is hardly a competitive league like England
Of course I want Arsenal to win the league this season and next season and the next, but I think I would like to see that in the sort of context that we had almost 100 years ago in the 1930s – a decade in which Arsenal won the league five times. But as the current series on the Arsenal History website shows, it was never a foregone conclusion.
Which is why Arsenal’s position at the top of the league is not just wonderful for Arsenal supporters like me, and quite probably you, because Arsenal are top – but it is wonderful because we haven’t won the league since the Unbeaten Season. And at least we can say no one is going to emulate that achievement this season.
As for Bayern and PSG in their one team leagues… of course I want Arsenal to win our league this season, but not by a saunter, year after year after year.
