- Voting on who will win the league: we can already guess the top three
- Arsenal start season at ManU where things look a bit strange
By Tony Attwood
“Creativity was a problem for Arsenal last season when their hopes of keeping up with Liverpool foundered on a chronic lack of ruthlessness, causing them to draw too many winnable games.”
That sentence from the Guardian today summarises the ceaseless attack on Arsenal from the media. But it’s not an “Arsenal are crap” type statement that you can read on blogs and hear in stadia; no, it is more subtle and far, far more telling.
For it suggests that by looking closely at Arsenal, the journalists who are not employed by any football club (and most likely never have been) have sussed the problem at Arsenal FC, which the directors and employees of the club simply can’t resolve – or quite possibly, simply can’t even see is there.
And I think it is helpful to pause for a moment and ask, “Is this likely?” The answer, of course, is no, because if a journalist is that good at spotting such problems, he or she would be offered gainful employment by the club at a salary way above what he or she is earning now.
What’s more, if the employment opportunity didn’t work out in the long term, the journalist could quickly go back to the newspaper and write up the whole experience – the real inside story on why Arsenal can’t win the league.
In fact, even Untold Arsenal, which is neither staffed by professional journalists nor football insiders, has been able to reveal quite clearly what the trouble with Arsenal last season was. We actually revealed it during the season, and not being ones to leave a good story alone, we’ve gone back to it in the summer.
But since the Guardian is making such a ludicrous claim here, here it is again. In table form…. It is the Premier League Injury Table 2024/25. And just in case you think we are massaging the numbers in order to get at some n’er-do-well journalists, the source is Physioroom – the regular website that we quote for injuries.
They ask the question on their season summary page: Which team has suffered the most injuries this season? And here is the complete table that they provide. The two teams in the midway point are in bold.
| Position | Team | Total Injuries in 2024/25 | % of Liverpool injuries |
| 1 | Arsenal | 27 | 193% |
| 2 | Brighton & Hove | 22 | 157% |
| 3 | Tottenham Hots | 22 | 157% |
| 4 | Aston Villa | 21 | 150% |
| 5 | Manchester Utd | 20 | 143% |
| 6 | Ipswich Town | 19 | 136% |
| 7 | Manchester City | 18 | 129% |
| 8 | Chelsea | 17 | 121% |
| 9 | Newcastle Un | 17 | 121% |
| 10 | Crystal Palace | 14 | 100% |
| 11 | Liverpool | 14 | 100% |
| 12 | Wolveryhampton | 13 | 93% |
| 13 | Leicester C | 13 | 93% |
| 14 | Brentford | 12 | 86% |
| 15 | Everton | 11 | 79% |
| 16 | Nottingham Forest | 10 | 71% |
| 17 | Southampton | 10 | 71% |
| 18 | Fulham | 9 | 53% |
| 19 | Bournemouth | 9 | 53% |
| 20 | West Ham | 6 | 43% |
So what we can see is that Arsenal had the most serious, game-missing injury total, getting around double the number of injuries that the champions had.
If we consider injuries to be the result of chance, then Arsenal have been very unlucky. If we consider injuries to be caused by reckless play by Arsenal players, then the training regime has been awful. If we consider the fact that other clubs target Arsenal because of Arsenal’s skilful players, feeling also that referees are less inclined to give penalties and free kicks for fouls against Arsenal, than against other teams, then we can put it down to referee bias.
But whatever way we look at it, we can see that the statement at the start that “Creativity was a problem for Arsenal last season when their hopes of keeping up with Liverpool foundered on a chronic lack of ruthlessness, causing them to draw too many winnable games,” is utter tosh. It was injuries that was the problem.
(Unless of course, one means that Arsenal’s creativity induced other clubs to kick Arsenal players to bits, and that the referees did nothing about it, perhaps on the grounds that “if you are going to play that fancy stuff you are going to get kicked and it’s your fault.”)
The fact is that very few clubs could cope with losing their entire forward line, along with several mid-field players and defenders, and still come second. And yet Arsenal did; they adjusted their style of play as more and more players were chopped down, and still managed to come second.
Yes, I know that was a long way behind Liverpool, and yes, everyone has the same referees, but Arsenal seem to be suffering more injuries than others. Of course, it could be argued that it was all down to chance, but I suspect the Arsenal management think not.
In fact, I think Arsenal’s management expect to see the same again – after all, as clubs got away with cutting the Arsenal team to bits last season, why not try it again? Which is why Arsenal have been so active in buying in new men. If we had West Ham’s injury level, spending this much money would be insane. But knowing that your entire forward line could be missing for a month does tend to lead to the obvious solution: have more players ready..
