Manchester City’s two nil win should have come as no surprise to any Gooner

By Andrew Crawshaw

My recent look at squad values using data from the website transfermarkt.com indicated a total value of the City squad as being well in excess of £900m whilst that of Arsenal was virtually £500m.

To put this discrepancy into perspective mere are the stated values of the two squads starting 11s broken down by position 😡

Arsenal	Value £m	position	Man City	Value £m
Petr Cech	3.0	GK	Emerson	50.0
Hector Bellerin	40.0	RB	Walker	50.0
Mustafi	25.0	CB1	Stones	55.0
Sokratis	20.0	CB2	Laporte	50.0
Maitland-Niles	7.0	LB	Mendy	40.0
Guendouzi	2.5	MF1	Bernardo Silva	50.0
Xhaka	40.0	MF2	Fernandinho	15.0
Ramsey	45.0	MF3	Gundogan	40.0
Mkhitaryan	35.0	Forward 1	Mahrez	50.0
Özil	45.0	Forward 2	Aguero	80.0
Aubameyang	75.0	Forward 3	Sterling	90.0
	332.5		Total team value	570.0

So City’s starting team was more valuable than our entire squad.

Even when City made changes – Aguero, Mahrez and Sterling, they were replaced by as high or even higher value players. On came De Bruyne £150m, Sane £90m and Jesus £80m meaning that the end the team value was £670m

Our substitutes were Lichtsteiner £1.5m for Maitland-Niles, Lacazette £60.0m for Ramsey and Torreira £30m for Xhaka effectively leaving our team value unchanged.

There are very few contests in the world where you would expect a team to beat another who has twice the resources – at least not without a large slice of luck or some kind of external intervention. With the PGMO in charge of the game I think we all knew in our hearts that any possible intervention would never come our way and so it proved.

On a positive note, their margin of victory this year was less than last season and Guendouzi put in another strong performance.  There are still things to improve but hopeful and his value is certain to rise from its current low figure.

Less positive were the ‘heart in mouth’ moments when we were attempting to play out from the back. Our Women’s team were the same at first with their new coach and it has taken them six months to look comfortable with this tactic. I hope the men learn far more quickly!

On Sunday City were the better team, they were far more sure of their tactics and on a player by player measure they were more skillful. We announced them as PL Champions a couple of weeks ago and nothing happened today to make us alter that view.

On the flip side they displayed a snide side to their game throughout and were allowed to get away with too many blatant and niggly fouls that our players were invariably punished for and they wasted time from the first minute to the last without ant sanction by the match officials.

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