How a new part of league football has been thoroughly weaponised.

 

 

• Who runs football? PGMO? The clubs? And what happened to the Combination?
• Do Arsenal need a goalscorer? And indeed did we need one last summer?

By Tony Attwood

There are many issues that the media that covers league football choose not to cover, and one of these is the issue of yellow and red cards.  And that is interesting since the media regularly runs articles concerning the way Arsenal play.

Now you may not know, unless you have studied the raw data, that Tottenham are the worst offenders in terms of cards this season by quite a long way – they have picked up 91 yellow cards and four red cards.   Chelsea are the team that excels with the red cards, having had seven in the league so far this season.

However, what does stand out is that Arsenal are bottom in both respects with 49 yellows and no reds.   So Tottenham have almost double the number of yellow cards than Arsenal and four reds compared to Arsenal’s zero.

 

 

Now there is only a limited link between the number of yellow cards gained and the position in the league.  And I have to admit I expected a closer link than I found, expecting the clubs with the most yellow cards also to be the clubs nearer the bottom of the league.  In fact, only five of the clubs in the top half of the card table (ie the clubs with the most yellow cards this season) are in the bottom half of the league.

What this means is that although a yellow card might have an impact on a player for the rest of the game or if he has already picked up sufficient cards to mean that one more and he misses a game, this does not relate to where the club is in the league.

So yes, although Arsenal are top of the league and have the lowest number of yellow cards this season, Manchester City have the seventh highest number of yellow cards but are second in the league table.

There is a certain amount of linkage in that Arsenal, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Manchester United are all in the top five in the league, and in the bottom six for the number of cards each club has, but the linkage is fairly general.   One might call it a tendency for clubs that get fewer cards to be higher up the league, but there is not enough linkage here to call this cause and effect.

So in terms of league position, there is little or no inducement for players to avoid yellow cards.   But the one club that has a much higher number of cards this season than we would expect is Manchester City, whose players have accumulated 73 cards in getting themselves into second position in the league.  This compares with 49 for Arsenal, who remain the only club not to have had a single red card in the league this season.

Now this pattern from Arsenal must clearly be a policy introduced by the management to the players – a policy of keeping the yellow card number low while also keeping the defence on its toes.

And what is particularly interesting is that Arsenal has conceded the lowest number of goals in the league this season.

Now that is quite a feat.  The lowest number of goals conceded and the lowest number of yellow cards.  One might imagine that keeping out the goals could add to the number of fouls on attackers, but obviously, in Arsenal’s case, that has not turned out to be so.

It is, however, another factor emphasising Arsenal’s ingenuity in this matter that the media is ignoring, unfortunately.   But it does follow a pattern.   The journalists lay off Manchester City and its players despite them being found guilty of over 110 misdemeanours; there is no talk in the media even of why it has taken so long to resolve the matter.   And the journalists won’t compare Arsenal’s yellow card tally with Manchester City’s either.  In short, bad news for ManC is ignored.  Good news from Arsenal is ignored.

But we do get articles such that on 8 May in the Telegraph, headlined, “There is an ingrained psychological flaw in Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal.”   That was on 8 May 2025.  Yet here we are a year later, and the same author comes out with an article that tells us  Mikel Arteta has weaponised Arsenal fans like never before

Now, I suppose you could argue that this is not really the writer’s fault; he doesn’t write the headlines and is told by the editors what to write about.  But even so…  Weaponised – when the club had fewer red and yellows than anyone else!!!

To see just how far journalists will go in knocking Arsenal, consider this…

“All or Nothing: that was the portentous title of Arsenal’s fly-on-the-wall documentary, chronicling Mikel Arteta’s early efforts to prove his managerial pedigree. In each of the four seasons since this series was commissioned, he has had to resign himself bleakly to the nothing option.”

Arteta took Arsenal from eighth position to three consecutive seconds, behind a team that has had maybe 20 times the revenue to spend on players more than any other club.  That club that is still holding off the rest of the league over the issue of 110+ proven rule breakages.

ManC have certainly weaponised a part of football.   The part of football called “football journalism”.