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By Tony Attwood
Between 2017/18 and 2023/4 there were (rather obviously) seven Premier League championships, and six times the winners were the same: Manchester City.
But if you thought that was tedious, then consider this. Between 2012/13 and 2025/26 there were 14 German league championships, and Bayern Munich won 13 of them. Gamble on Bayern M winning the league and your winnings would not cover the cost of the fuel to drive you to the bookies.
Between 2012/13 and 2025/26 there were also 14 French league championships, and PSG won 12 of them. And between 2011/12 and 2025/6 ther were 15 Scottish league championships (although the first two were called the Scottish Premier League and after that they called it the Scottish Premiership), and Celtic have won 13 of those. Rangers won the other two.
And as a person interested in the history of football (and I am hoping you might occasionally have glimpsed at my History of Arsenal site), it has often struck me that such repetition really takes a lot of the fun away from football. And yes, I know that I didn’t do any protesting when Arsenal had eight consecutive seasons of coming first and second under Wenger, nor at his unbeaten season. But runs of the same team winning the league over and over again are becoming more and more commonplace, and it all seems to be getting a trifle tedious.
So I tried to imagine what I would feel like if we had the same issue in England, with the same club winning, as I just put it, over and over again. Now, contrary to popular belief, I was not around when Arsenal won the league four seasons out of five (coming second in the one season they didn’t win) under the management of Chapman and his successors – although my dad (now, of course, most sadly no longer with us) most certainly was.
But my point is that four league wins in five seasons is Arsenal’s best so far, and it happened in the 1930s. And as we look forward to the new season, might we be looking forward to another amazing run of that nature?
Naturally I would love to think so, but if we do achieve something like that, I do hope we do it, as we did under Chapman in the 1930s, through skill on the pitch, skill in terms of spotting brilliant players available at a reasonable price, and through highly skilled tactics.
Of course the 1930s were quite different from today, in that players were subject to a maximum wage, and so players didn’t move from one club to another to get more money (or at least they didn’t move to get more money within the rules of the game), but rather they primarily moved to play for ever better clubs.
So how does all this take me to that headline? Well, given my current focus on Arsenal repeating last season’s triumph and winning the league again, I began to wonder if the World Cup is important and might it get in the way of another Arsenal league triumph?
I guess my problem is that having seen Arsenal play some teams last season whose only interest was in trying toing to get a 0-0 draw by any means possible, I wonder if the England manager might call on such players who are English to use the tactics to get England the win they want. The point is, we have countries like Curacao in the World Cup and such countries – wherever they play in the world – will have a different approach to football from that of England.
The Caribbean nation has a population of roughly 155,000 people. But under the rules, they are as entitled as any other nation to enter the World Cup. and have a party along the way, as are Andorra, Outer Mongolia or San Marino. But the chances of accidental serious injuries rise considerably when playing these countries.
The way these competitions are organised is based on the democratic notion that every country, and it seems, territory, can enter the competition. But what the larger countries with multiple players playing football professionally need to do is ensure that they are playing in a way that is going to avoid accidental injuries caused by lack of tactical skill and lack of experience within the opposition. But because the managers of larger nations knows they have a massive backdrop of professional players to choose from, they tend not to worry too much about such matters – they just want the win.
Which is why I get worried every time I see an Arsenal player in the team of a large nation playing one of the minnow states. It’s not the fear of losing; it’s the fear of an Arsenal player getting a totally needless injury caused by a lack of skill of the player from the smaller nation. It won’t be deliberate; it will be accidental, but the result could still be months out of football, thus detracting from our chance of winning the League.
