Are English clubs really exhausted before they take on Europe?

• If people who buy football clubs can’t see they are being stupid, who are we to tell them?
• The key question that is never asked in the never ending attacks on Arsenal

By Tony Attwood

According to the Guardian, “Arsenal’s drab 1-1 draw with Bayer Leverkusen showed Mikel Arteta’s team will require more than set pieces to prevail in the competition.”

Or put another way, “Arsenal drew away from home without having to play well and are well placed to get a win in the return match,”  (Untold Arsenal).   The problem is of course, that the previous sentence (not actually a comment from this blog, but it could have been) doesn’t make great headlines, and the media is much more interested in great headlines than in actual insight.   But then it was ever thus.

And indeed the media does have agendas.   For example, a while back the Telegraph carried the tale that “the Premier League’s domination of Europe was an embarrassment for Uefa.”   Now the same publication is running the story (written as it happens by the same journalist) that “Exhausted English clubs look like punch-drunk boxers in Europe.”

So what is it to be – dominators who are causing the rules and regulators to look again at how they are allowing this to happen, or clubs getting “a rude awakening in Champions League this week, with three teams close to exiting the tournament.”

Well in a sense, both.   What makes the Premier League, and indeed the Championship, not like Spain, where a couple of teams always win?  Or come to that, not like Germany, where one team almost always wins?  Or not France, where one team always wins.  And it is not the Russian Premier League where (although hardly reported in the  UK) the same team (Zenit Saint-Petersburg since you asked) has won the league six times in the last seven seasons.

It is, of course, competitiveness and variety – which, as we have seen of late, ManC tried to remove from the Premier League through spending more money than everyone else; something for which there is still no punishment.

So while some pundits make fun of the fact that Arsenal have not won a major trophy since 2020, it is still worth noting that they have won the FA Cup 14 times, which is more than anyone else.  

It is this variation that gives excitement to English football, and it is this exciement that Manchester City attempted to take away from the league via their financial dominance.  But the excitement is still there as Manchester United and Liverpool are tied on the number of times they have won the league, with Arsenal in third place.

But we did lose that competitiveness for a while, for in the eight years from 2018 onwards, only Liverpool and ManC were winners, with Liverpool very much bringing up the rear.   And the media, so often out of touch with the majority of supporters, seemed to think this was jolly good. 

Yet it made 18 other clubs in the league realise that they couldn’t compete, so the most interesting thing became the relegation scrap.  However, those silly days have gone and Arsenal, through careful planning, and a fair bit of spending, while still heading for a profit, have managed to put together a challenge, which really does smake the whole thing more exciting once again.

Indeed, Arsenal’s succes this season really has taken a lot of football reporters by surprise.  For prior to the ManC run of wins starting in 2017/18 (in which they won the league six times isn seven seasons), came with Mancheser United winning five titles in seven seasons.   And that’s the danger.  When the run stops, the club slips back.

But the league is supposed to be a “competition” and it isn’t a competition if we can guess who will win before the season starts, and it is being removed from football.   If ManC are let off the hook, we can of course, have a league like Scotland, where, since 2012, Celtic have won the league 12 times and Rangers once.   Or a league like that in Germany, where one team has won the league 12 out of the last 13 seasons. 

 Of course I wnat Arsenal to win competitions, but not so much that befroe the season starts I can’t actually put a bet on Arsenal winning because it is so obvious that this is what will happen.

And yet people in Germany, Scotland, Spain, France and elsewhere seem to accept the situation as inevitable, and that is what ManC aimed to give England.   The 110 charges against them gave us a bit of hope that this might be stopped, but it seems that legal argument and perhaps threats have stopped the League from foiling ManCs plans.

But that doesn’t mean we should not give in.  Yes, of course I want Arsenal to win – but not so that the league gets to be like the ManC era where you can’t even put a bet on the winner before the season starts because everyone knows what the result will be.  Say yes to competition, and no to Germany, Spain, France etc.