Arsenal won the league last season – does that mean they will do it again?

 

 

By Tony Attwood

• Transfers 21 July: Arsenal now targetting 38 different players!!!
• Different ways to see the world of football

To begin: apologies for forgetting that WHAM had a bigger ground than Arsenal.  My mistake.  Can’t think how I could have forgotten them.

Looking back through history we can see that Arsenal, as a club, do have a habit of doing things in bunches. Certainly those three second placed finishes made it feel as if we could never bet out of that run.   Although fortnately most people who started complaining and demanding the manager should be moved on, didn’t actually know too much about Arsenal’s history.

For example, Arsenal came second three seasons running from 1998/9 on to 2000/1 and then came first and second across the next four seasons.   In short Arsenal had eight seasons in that run in which they came top of the league three times and second in the league five times.  During that spell they also won the FA Cup four times.

Such runs are rare, of course, but Arsenal did manage a similar cup run between 2013/14 and 2019/20 during which time they won the FA Cup four times across those seven years.

But what is particularly interesting is that across the last four years of three second-place finishes, followed by the winning of the league last season, Arsenal did not have its best attack (20 more goals were scored by the side in 2023/24), nor its best defence (five games were lost last season, compared to four in 2024/25), nor its lowest number of draws (seven last season, compared to six in 2022/3 and five in 2023/4.

What’s more the 85 points was four fewer than the 89 gained in coming second in 2023/24.  Curiously, the one attribute that stood out in our title winning campaign last season was that the side contained its highest scoring player since Aubameyang in 2019/20.  He got 29 goals in the season in which Arsenal came fifth in the league.  Last season Viktor Gyökeres got 21 goalss.

In short, although last season was a great standout season, with Arsenal winning the league for the first time since the unbeaten season of 2004, Arsenal did it without also doing the most obvious things, like having more wins, having fewer defeats, scoring more goals, or getting more points than in other recent seasons.  The one thing Arsenal did get better at than in any other recent seasons was that of not losing games.

Last campaign, Arsenal lost just five matches, the same as 2023/24.   In 2007/8 Arsenal lost only three games but came third in the league, and of course in 2003/4 Arsenal lost none and won the league.

Now what this suggests to me is that there is no simplistic way of improving a side in the PL – we might take a look and suggest the defence looks a bit leaky, but an individual factor like that doesn’t by itself determine if a club wins the league.

And thus such individual facts don’t determine which players we need to sell and which to buy.  Just like scoring 71 goals doesn’t guarantee winning the league, but then nor does scoring 91 goals in a season.

To test out this emerging view that each season really is different, and the notion that one change to a squad or playing style can make a huge difference, I took a look at our greatest era: the run from 1932/3 to 1934/5 with three consecutive titles.

And here again there was a huge difference between each season.   In 1932/33 Arsenal scored 118 goals and Cliff Bastin got 33.  The following season (obvously also winning the league again) we got 43 goals fewer, and Bastin dropped from 33 goals to 15.

I have no idea if then everything changed somehow, but the goals total show up to 115 scored (from 75 the season before) while the goals against stayed pretty much the same (58 instead of 49).

And my point is that there is no one way to win the league – it is influenced by the players we have in our team, and numerous other factors as well.  The manager in needs to know when to keep everything the same and when to make changes.

Plus of course one of the big factors is that the other clubs in the league don’t just wait for the top team to turn on its style  They are forever working on ways to bring the league leaders down.  Which of course is one of the many things that clubs such as Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Aston Villa will have been working on this summer.

They will be fully aware that Arsenal clearly had the best defence in the league, and so for games against us, but we did let in some goals, and they will be studying and and when that happened. 

And they will have noticed that we had by far the best defence in the league, and so be looking for a way to catch that defenc out.  And I am certain every trick in the book, and some that aren’t, will be tried out.

Now of course Arsenal will be aware of the studying going on relating to last season’s success including the gap between the top few clubs.   Last season the gap was seven points between first and second, and again seven points between second and third.  14 points all told.

The season before it was ten points between first and second and three points between second and third.  13 points all told.

In 2023/24 the gap was two points between first and second and seven points between second and third.   Nine points all told.  In short in recent years the top three don’t just win the league by a minor amont – they really take the title in style, striding away from the rest.

As we know, after 2015/16 when Arsenal came second, the club seriously slipped away from the title challenge, but ifwe look at the top three of the last four seasons, both Manchester C and Arsenal have been there for each of the last four campaigns.   Arsenal and ManC have been in the top three for each of the last four seasons, while Liverpool have been there twice, and Manchester United twice.

That little table shows us where the domination now is – another tclub might edge its way into that group, but it is going to be hard, especially if we also remember that it is Liverpool 20 titles, Arsenal 14, Manchester C 10.

And to go a step further, in terms of runners up places it is Mancheseter United 17, Liverpool 15, Arsenal 12.  And the dominance of this small group of clubs not just in recent years but across the whole era of professional football in England.  Of course the media made a lot of fuss about Leicester winning the leaguein 2016, but since then they have been found guilty of breaking financial regulations from 2023/4 onwards.  They’ve appealed of course, but will play in the third tier (League One) next season, 11 years after winning the league, and six years after winning the FA Cup.

From a distance the Leicster scenario looks like arrogance – they left the third tier in 1992 but somehow seemed to have a belief that the club could then take on the league’s financial wizards and get away with whatever it wanted.  And maybe they did have a good case, but even so, taking on the league never seems a clever idea.