How football is failing 3: we have lost the abilty to analyse

 

 

• How football is failing to sort itself out Part 2: Green football off the agenda
• The season is over but slowly journalists are realising something is not quite right…
• How football is failing to sort itself out: Part 1 – violence grows

By Tony Attwood

Part of the central argument put forward on this website is that the media describes football in a particular way – a way that is somehow agreed between them and which is then accepted by supporters because that is all they see and hear.

The most obvious issue here is the refusal to consider even for a moment that there is something wrong with the refereeing situation.   While the media will happily reflect critically on the fact that the top two this season just finished were the top two the year before, and the three clubs that came up also went down, and how the gap between the top six or seven and the rest is growing, they won’t ever reflect on what PGMO is and does. 

And that is not just one part of the media, it is all the media.

And it is particularly noteworthy that this approach is continuing across the media, when only last month the Guardian published a fulsome article on what it called, “Disruptive thought leadership”.

As that article says, citing George Orwell’s novel “1984”, if you “limit critical thinking, abstract concepts, the ability to debate and dissent” you stifle debate.  Which is exactly what football journalists do.

Summarising the situation they add, “where once we had opinions, we now demonstrate thought leadership.”    Of course that article does not bother itself with the way newspapers and on-line reporting cover football, nor the fact that all we get is a unified vision of football, that has little relationship with what we actually see in football matches.

Take the current debate about the way the league table looked at the end of the season.  As the Telegraph put it, “The entertainment on a week-to-week basis remains enrapturing but when you dig below the surface you find a repetitive picture developing with the same teams competing for the same positions.”

There is a point there for this season in the PL compared with the last; the promoted clubs were all relegated, while the top two were the same.   

But that story breaks down if one starts to analyse it any further.

Take Arsenal’s progress for example.  There is no way that Arsenal’s recent figures can be considered to be one of repetition.  This is growth and development, as each part of Arsenal’s game is re-worked and improved.  Here is the journey under Arteta…

 

	F	A	Pts	Pos
2019–20	56	48	56	8th
2020–21	55	39	61	8th
2021–22	61	48	69	5th
2022–23	88	43	84	2nd
2023–24	91	29	89	2nd

 

Another way to look at things is to take a single statistic over the last few years and see how it has changed.  There might well be a site that does this but I couldn’t find one so I built this table myself.  In the position column, the lowest number of cards in the season is counted as 1st, the highest as 20th.  This table counts yellow cards for all reasons…

 

Season	AFC cards	AFC Position*	Most carded
2023/24	62	2nd	100 – Chelsea / Wolves
2022/23	52	2nd	84 – Leeds / Wolves / Nttm F
2021/22	60	8th	101 – Leeds U
2020/21	47	4th	73 – Sheffield U
2019/20	86	20th	86 – Arsenal
2018/19	72	16th	77 – Watford

 

*Arsenal’s position in the yellow card table takes the club with the least cards as 1st and the worst offender as 20th.  And what we see here is a clear move from 2019/20 when Arteta joined Arsenal as manager part way through the season.

Now of course this table is complicated because the attitude of referees under PGMO direction changes year by year, and we know that this year they were giving out cards far more freely than normal, at the start of the season.   And indeed Arsena’s number of cards went up although their position in the card table stayed the same.

To get a broader perspective we can look at the most cards ever given in the Premier League.   Three of the four highest totals for cards were in the past season.

• 2023/4: Chelsea 105 yellow cards
• 2023/4: Wolverhampton 104 yellow cards
• 2021/2:  Leeds United 104 yellow cards
• 2023/4: Sheffield United: 95 yellow cards

Now that is an interesting statistic because we can then immediately ask the question, did this help?  Did it stop serious and dangerous or maybe just niggling tackles?  

The trouble is we don’t know because journalists who are paid to spend their time digging around for stories don’t investigate this (and sadly Untold Arsenal doesn’t have either the time or resources to do the research necessary to resolve this – we are dependent on other people having the raw figures.)

Somehow, although football is based on statistics (what is the league table if not a statistical table?) people writing about football don’t want to use them.  Instead they have opinions, and as the Guardian article cited above notes, “use buzz words that have lots of buzz but no real meaning.”

This is the referees’ escape route: the journalists won’t write about them and their work, and anyway even if they did, probably all we would get is a load of buzzwords, with no insights and no statistics.