- Prices at Arsenal: going up, but in the end old age starts to catch up too.
- The gap is fairly ludicrous but second place looks on for the third time
By Tony Attwood
Imagine a club which has scored more goals in the league in one season, than in any other season for the last 70 years. And then remember that 70 years ago when the club did score more goals, it also played four more games.
To see which team was the best goal-scoring team, you might try and get a really true picture by considering goals scored per league game. Last season the average number of goals scored per game in the league was 2.34
The last time Arsenal scored more than 2.34 goals per game was 1934/35. In that season Arsenal scored 2.73 goals a game. So there is the truth.
Last season Arsenal scored more goals per game in the league than in any season for the past 69 years.
And what was the response of the media, and their fellow-travellers? Well, obvious of course. Arsenal obviously need a new striker.
Clearly this season hasn’t been so good as last season, but then equally clearly, Arsenal has been decimated by injuries this season. So, maybe we should have a look at the actual injury figures since the media are so reluctant to report them.
There are two ways to measure days lost through injury. One is through the number of injuries suffered, which lead to the player missing at least one game because of the injury. The other is the total number of days lost by players through injury during the course of the season.
Unfortunately, these figures are contentious as different websites present different numbers. I am using the numbers from Physioroom, which is a site we have often quoted in this regard. If you look elsewhere, you can find other numbers, but the story told will be pretty much the same.
Arsenal have suffered the most separate injuries this season with 27, followed by Berighton and Tottenham on 22 each. Liverpool have 14, which shows just how much Arsenal have suffered in this campaign.
At the bottom of the table is West Ham with six, which shows they have absolutely no excuse for being 16th in the league. A stadium given to them for nothing by the state, sell-out crowds, and hardly any injuries – and they are still 16th. No wonder the directors have put the club up for sale. If they had any decency, they’d give it away.
But, of course, there is more to it than a simple number: some player injuries last longer than others, and some players are much more essential to the team’s well-being than others. I suspect most people would agree that the players we really, really didn’t want to lose this season were Saka and Odegaard, and we lost both. Saka of course is still out, and Odegaard is back – but he took a very long time to come back to his brilliant best even though he was back on the pitch, playing for Arsenal.
These factors show how difficult it is to measure injuries – it is not just the players injured, but how long they were out for, and how long it takes for them to recover their top form, once they are back, that are also key measurements.
Given this, it is difficult to consider injuries between teams, and one can only do it roughly. For example, a set of figures produced by Sky back in January were based on the number of injuries which have caused a player to miss at least one match. This table showed Brighton way out in front of everyone else for days lost, and Arsenal in fourth position in that chart.
To get a complete picture, one would need to consider how many players have been injured, how important each player was to the team, how long each was out for, and indeed whether there was a suitable backup.
As far as I know, no one has tried to create a chart which includes all that data, including variant mathematical ways of calculating the importance of each player. So we don’t have anything like the level of information needed to reach concrete conclusions.
But we can say, for example, that according to the BBC’s figures last season, Arsenal were 19th in the league measuring a number of separate injuries suffered by clubs. Arsenal had 23. This season, with a quarter of the season left to go Arsenal are already on 20 injuries.
But even though we don’t have anything like the data needed to measure the impact of injuries fully, we can see the benefit of…
a) Having players who can adequately cover in different positions
b) Having alternative tactics which can be used when key players are injured.
The first of those can be measured to some degree by looking at the squad, but the second is harder to work out because we don’t get to see what happens on the training ground and thus what different players can achieve.
But perhaps the biggest lesson of all is that the club needs to build a team that is not utterly dependent on one or two players being fit. And yet, what else does the club do, given the brilliance of players like Saka, Odegaard and Saliba?
Which brings us to the “buy a goal scorer” problem. Not all goal-scorers do deliver upon a transfer to a new club, and some goal-scorers get injured (not least because defenders target them).
So, thinking that a new number 9 could solve our problems could be a real problem in itself. Such a player might deliver, he might not, he might get injured… So a team based on goal scoring by lots of players is always a better investment.
I suspect most journalists know this. And yet they keep on saying Arsenal needs a goal-scoring centre forward either because that is simpler and they don’t think their audience can cope with the complexity of the multi-secordinig argument, or because the media consistently winds up Arsenal, because they know some Arsenal supporters will take the bait. And the one thing the media will always do, is copy what the rest of the media does.
