- Football’s insanity: sacking managers over and over again
- Secrecy still dominates why and how yellow cards are given out
By Tony Attwood
Liverpool will win the league this season, that is for sure. What is less sure is how many people realise just how modest Liverpool have been in the 21st century (which you may have noticed, we are now a quarter of the way through). For this is only the second time they have won the league this century. Whereas toward the end of the last century, they won it eight times in 14 seasons.
Manchester United have won the league eight times this century, and Arsenal have won it twice, Liverpool have won it (at least at the time of writing) just the once. Manchester City have won it eight times, the same as Manchester United; Chelsea have had it five times.
And to complete the lineup, Leicester have had it once. Which leads me to reflect on where they are now….
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Liverpool | 33 | 24 | 7 | 2 | 75 | 31 | 44 | 79 |
| 2 | Arsenal | 34 | 18 | 13 | 3 | 63 | 29 | 34 | 67 |
| 3 | Manchester City | 34 | 18 | 7 | 9 | 66 | 43 | 23 | 61 |
| 6 | Chelsea | 33 | 16 | 9 | 8 | 58 | 40 | 18 | 57 |
| 14 | Manchester United | 33 | 10 | 8 | 15 | 38 | 46 | -8 | 38 |
| 19 | Leicester City | 33 | 4 | 6 | 23 | 27 | 73 | -46 | 18 |
Manchester United are 14th in the league, one place above Wolverhampton Wanderers. Leicester are heading down into the Championship from which they were promoted last season.
So in these 25 years, six teams have won the league, and come next season only five of them will be in the top league fighting for the title.
Which makes the league sound very competitive. But we may also note that only three teams have won the Premier League more than once – and winning it just the once, doesn’t really make a club that big or that powerful, as the case of Leicester City shows.
So we can be fairly sure that the League winners next season will be one of the clubs that have already won it during this century. That’s not an absolute guarantee, but it is very likely that the champions in a year’s time will be one of Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea, or Liverpool. And given the way Manchester U have been playing last season (when they came 8th) and this season (they are now 14th) we can probably reduce that to four clubs. (Tottenham of course, not ever having won the prize, are not part of our reckonings).
But could any club “do a Leicester” in the sense that Leicester won the Championship in 2013/14, came 14th in the Premier League in 2014/15 and then won the league in 2015/16?
What we do know is that Leicester City used a clever piece of trickery to get themselves up to the top of the League, as we covered that in detail a few years back. First, we noted their ability to get penalties which we described in detail in 2020. Rather pleasingly it was Untold that let the cat out of the bag in June 2022 when we started looking at Leicester City’s figures for tackles, fouls and yellow cards per match.
In our report, we compared Arsenal’s and Leicester’s records and found some utterly astonishing and unbelievable figures.
| Club | Tackles | Fouls | Yellows |
| Arsenal 2019/20 | 584 | 421 | 86 |
| Leicester 2019/20 | 742 | 418 | 41 |
| Difference | – 112 | +3 | +45 |
| Percentage difference | LFC 27% more | LFC 1% fewer | AFC 109% more |
However one looks at these figures, they are ludicrous. Leicester committed 25% more tackles than Arsenal, yet the number of fouls committed by both clubs were the same, and more insanely still, Arsenal got double the number of yellow cards that Leicester got. Worse when we went back one more year and compared 2018/19 figures in the same way we found the same abberations. (See here for all the figures in the original report). Leicester were getting this special treatment for over a year!!!
But then even more strange events followed, for following our reports, which of course none of the media picked up on, Leicester’s figures suddenly changed and soon they were in line with other clubs!
However, Leicester then had another trick up their sleeves. For as we moved on and looked at penalties, we then found more ludicrous figures. The details are at “Leicester heading for all-time record number of penalties.”
And there again, once our report was published (at which moment Leicester had received over four times as many penalties as Arsenal) the numbers dramatically changed. Leicester’s penalty numbers collapsed, and they started to sink down the league.
Yet again no other media picked up on the revelations – and that is interesting because these were not opinions, but were clear official statistics. Statistics that showed that Leicester were on track to receive a record-shattering 24 penalties in their favour that season. Arsenal were on track to get five.
But as we said in our article in June 2022, “… no sooner had we published our little piece on Leicester’s penalty record (which predicted that they would double the all-time record for penalties in a season), than the issue more or less stopped, and in 2021/2 they were back to more normal levels.”
Now we are once more in an era of extraordinary numbers as we have found that alone among the top clubs Arsenal are giving away more penalties than they are awarded. Could it be once again that there is something odd going on?
Whatever the answer one thing is for sure. PGMO will never admit that anything ever has gone wrong.
