By Tony Attwood
The point was put to me yesterday that “in recent years” Tottenham have done better in the league than Arsenal. That didn’t feel right to me so I went and looked, and being an honest chap, I then had to admit I was wrong. Or looked at differently, right.
Across the last ten seasons, Arsenal have come above Tottenham four times, and thus obviously Tottenham have come above Arsenal six times in the league.
- 2015/16: Tottenham were fifth, Arsenal second
- 2016/17: Tottenahm were second, Arsenal fifth
- 2017/18: Tottenham were third, Arsenal sixth
- 2018/19: Tottenham were fourth, Arsenal fifth
- 2019/20: Tottenham were sixth, Arsenal eighth
- 2020/21: Tottenahm were seventh, Arsenal eighth
- 2021/22: Tottenham were fourth, Arsenal fifth
- 2022/23: Tottenham were eighth, Arsenal second
- 2023/24: Tottenham were fifth,, Arsenal second
- 2024/25: Tottenham were 17th., Arsenal second.
But then I thought I might look a bit further at the average position of each club across the ten years. Tottenham’s average placing is 6.1 – obviously seriously reduced by their collapse last season. Arsenal’s average placing is 4.5 – so clearly Arsenal have a better average position than Tottenham over the last ten years.
Of course, this is trivia, and of course Tottenham’s ranking is greatly reduced by last season’s utter disaster, but still – over ten years Tottenham have come above Arsenal six seasons running from 2016/17 to 2021/22. Arsenal, however, have been on top during the past three seasons.
But there is a bigger point. This all came about from a discussion a few of us had, which was not football-related but which focused on the assertion that the bigger the problem, the smaller it seems. Which is to suggest that we focus on trivia (such as which club has been above the other the most in the last ten years) and not the big stuff. So the question then was, right, what is the big stuff? And curiously, we agreed on two points: the big problems in football are debt and the sponsorship of clubs by oil states which are so rich they can each individually bankrupt the Premier League through legal cases.
These, we agreed, were issues that are so big, we can’t even see solutions, and so we stop debating the point. Arsenal are losing money year after year and we just accept that is ok.
But here’s another one: Lucas Paqueta of West Ham was cleared of doing anything wrong in relation to a spot-fixing investigation. The word is he is about to sue the FA for being wrongfully accused. If he did and won, that would severely hamper investigations into player activity in the future. The FA are retaliating by saying he refused to “comply with the investigation”. He says it was an investigation that threatened his entire career – it took two years to complete. The ramifications of these cases are enormous.
But in discussing football, we set aside such worries, so we stop even thinking about the fact that the big four clubs in Turkey, Beşiktaş Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray, and Trabzonspor) are in such enormous debt that there is no way they can pay their bills, and the whole of the league is teetering on the brink. If they were to go bust the clubs around Europe to whom they owe money would in many cases then be in trouble.
As for Tottenham they are reported now to have a gross debt of £1.10 billion according to Sportscasting which looks utterly unsustainable, but everyone carries on as if this is quite all right – the owner (now a convicted criminal) has got it covered. But they are still over one billion pounds in debt.
How can we ignore these matters and just carry on with football as if everything is fine? The answer is we use what psychologists call the “big problem paradox” (you can read about it in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology if you are really interested), In effect, the bigger a problem seems, the less concerning it feels, and so the more easily we ignore it.
The problem seems to be that in these cases, almost everyone seems to assume that it is not really a problem because it can’t be, because if it were that big, someone would have done something about it.
Yet as just about the most significant and detailed report into the problem has announced, seven clubs were issued with winding up orders in the last year for which we have financial details. It is happening, and the problem is in every division and league of English football.
Effectively, we live in a society in which when big issues come along (be it child poverty or climate change) we manage to feel abstracted from it. It doesn’t directly affect us today, and if we think of our football team, well, surely they have people there who wouldn’t be so stupid as to let this happen. (If you want to go into the issue of how we manage to think in such a silly way there’s an article here )
But the reality is, this is what we do: if we find a gigantic problem, we assume it is so big other people are fixing it. Football finance is a gigantic problem, and in effect, no one is sorting it out. Or even thinking about it.
