How Arsenal’s progress has been screwed by the rest of the league.

 

By Tony Attwood

• Lower points that last season? In fact Arsenal are actually doing quite well

In that article noted above we showed that Arsenal have been given just about the worst possible sequence of fixtures in the first 30% (that is the first 11 games) of this season that is imaginable, playing most of the top teams from last season away from home.

This has given journalists a field day.  Given that they don’t ever do statistics, (although some of the blogs have noticed the issue) either because they want to stick with their prejudices or because they can’t do the maths, few if any of the mainstream commentators, either in the broadcast or written media seem to have picked up what a tough run of fixtures Arsenal have had this season.  (See here for another example)

And to do Arteta and the rest of Arsenal credit, they have not made any complaints – or at least none that I can remember.  They have simply got on with the job and let the media run countless stories about how Arsenal have fallen apart, and how the new men brought in have been failures.

But what we haven’t seen is a review of other top clubs and what sort of openings to the season they have each had.   So let’s have a look at the club now being called by the media the “runaway leaders.”   Liverpool FC.  

 In their 11 games in the league, they have played four games against other “top” clubs of which two have been at home and two away.   Liverpool’s away games this season have been against Ipswich, Manchester United, Wolverhampton, Crystal Palace and Arsenal.   We might argue that those away games against Manchester U and Arsenal were tough games.  Two games in fact.

Arsenal on the other hand, away from home, have played away games against Aston Villa, Tottenham Hots, Manchester City, Bournemouth, Newcastle and Chelsea.  Here we might argue that five games out of a total of six were tough – which is almost half of Arsenal’s fixtures this season.  (Indeed the loss to Bournemouth shows just how the strain of that run of matches was affecting the squad).

Now we all know what happens with a run of poor results – the media gets on Arsenal’s backs – and that is exactly what they have been doing.   But noticeably they have been doing it without hardly ever (if ever) mentioning the nature of the fixture list.

And so they can then start looking for other explanations.  The prime one is that the players aren’t up to it and that Arteta has got his transfer policy wrong, with not a single mention of the difference between the Liverpool and Arsenal fixture programmes.

One article published by the Premier League itself has sought to explain how the fixture programme works, although without mentioning that there might be something seriously biased about the way Arsenal has had so many difficult fixtures all in the early days.

In this piece the man called the “Fixture-list compiler” (Glenn Thompson, of Atos, an international IT services company), says that the Premier League, the Football League and Atos representatives “will review the fixtures over a number of days, looking at every date in the season to make sure that wherever possible we have met everything we have been asked to.”

And that gives us something of a clue as to what can go wrong.   The dates are looked at individually – not in terms of how matches of a certain type bunch up together or how one team might be given an advantage or disadvantage.  Instead it suggests, which club gets what is pure chance, and anyway, since everyone plays everyone else twice, does it matter?

Well, probably yes.  Because if the tough away fixtures are all bunched together near the start of the season that means that psychologically the team (in this case Arsenal) facing such a run is going to have a much tougher time.   Also it means that while an injury that takes a player out for say three games, will normally affect the player for maybe one match against a tough opponent and then two more against modest opponents where his absence might not be crucial, where games are bunched like this, one player’s absence either through injury or phantom cards, really does matter.

And indeed if we look at this opening to the season, it is clear that Arsenal have had many, many more injuries this season than in recent openings to the seasons.

But of course everyone knows that if Arsenal were to mention their concern about the way their fixture list has been fixed this season will bring responses of “special pleading” and “looking for an excuse”.

And anyway does it matter that Arsenal get a lot of these games at once?   Well, yes it does if this run of games coincides with a multiplicity of red cards (you’ll recall all the fuss about three red cards to Arsenal in a handful of games) and a multiplicity of injuries.   Yet in Arsenal’s case both happened – but was there a link?

This is hard to prove of course, but obviously the tension among players when playing a series of away games against other top clubs is going to be higher than with other matches.   Hence a possible link with more red cards and more injuries.

That last point is not proven but certainly is likely enough for the programmers of the fixture list to ensure that normally no club opens with a series of games against its main rivals, either at the top or bottom of the league. 

Indeed the fact that this has not even been considered by the fixture arrangers and by the media quite possibly tells us quite a lot about the sort of problem Arsenal is facing.