By Tony Attwood
- Chelsea v Arsenal: how some refs are handing out twice as many cards as others.
- All that money and nowhere to go: the Chelsea ground and games v Arsenal
The Arsenal results against Chelsea really are quite extraordinary. Not just the fact that Arsenal have beaten Chelsea 20 more times than the reverse but also the failings of Chelsea this decade. For Chelsea have won just one game in the last 12 between the two clubs in league and cup, (a 0-2 win in 2022).
But there is more than this because if we just take a look at the last seven league games between the two clubs, what we have is Chelsea winning none, two draws and five wins for Arsenal. In terms of goals Chelsea have scored six goals while Arsenal have managed to knock in 17. In fact I was rather surprised by this so I checked it twice, but that really does seem to be how the results have fallen.
What we have to recognize is that in 2003/4 when the club had a run of eight seasons in which they came first or second almost every time, with just one slip down to third.
But then since 2011/12 there has been a great variety of seasons. In those 14 campaigns they have won the league twice, and yet they have also in that run had a couple of seasons in which they have ended up 10th and 12th. In fact in the season between those two titles, the club did indeed come 10th.
And then again in the last three seasons as Arsenal have come second each time Chelsea have come 12rth, sixth and fourth. So one might be tempted to see real progress at Stamford Bridge as the club edges its way up to the top spot, and yet their recent history doesn’t suggest it might all end well.
There has been a similar erratic run in the FA Cup. Three times in succession they reached the final and lost in 2020, 2021 and 2022, and since then have gone out in the third round, the semi-final and the fourth round.
And lets be fair, in 2021 they did win the Champions League. So yes a team that really can deliver, but also a team that seems to be able to fall over at the last moment Yet, we have to admit that what makes this game so interesting, at least in potential, is that while Arsenal are top of the last six games table, Chelsea are second.
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arsenal | 6 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 12 | 3 | +9 | 16 |
| 2 | Chelsea | 6 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 12 | 3 | +9 | 15 |
But on the other hand they haven’t beaten Arsenal in any of the lasts six matches.
And leaving aside rather outlandish Fifa competitions like the Club World Cup and the Intercontinental Cup, they were winning important competitions if not exactly season after season then at least quite a few times. Indeed six trophies
- 2021 Champions League
- 2019 Europa League
- 2018 FA Cup
- 2017 Premier LEague
- 2015 Leage Cup, FA Cup
Now it is true that they did also win the Conference League last season, but then I look at he clubs they were up against and think, well, yes of course they should win that competition. But in essence, after getting proper serious trophies six times in seven seasons, just a diddly cup in the last four years and a fair bit of talking about where the club can move to because their current ground isn’t really good enough, is a bit of a come down.
But lurking behind all of this there is something else: an approach to the transfer market and women’s team that we have never seen from any other club.
Now I am sure you will recall Chelsea’s selling off of their women’s team to another organisation that the club effectively already owned, and thus through a bit of a slight of hand, they got out of a hole in terms of financial fair play and similar regulations. But that was only a part of their rewriting the rules to suit their needs. Indeed a Uefa report stated that the Chelsea 2024 squad was “comfortably the most expensive ever assembled”, 24% higher than the previous record by Real Madrid in 2020. In effect Chelsea spent getting on for £2bn in transfer fees in the five-year period ending in 2024.
Quite how they have done it and what their plans are, I will try and examine in the next piece.
