- Arsenal one of the sensible six, so we can watch our full squad
- Journalists turn on Arsenal as a way of avoiding considering the neighbours
By Tony Attwood
The Guardian is running a series of articles on “The best 100 male footballers in the world.” Each day they release another group, and so far they have covered those from number 11 to number 100 in their list.
You can find the whole list here except for the last ten which I guess will be released tomorrow. But here are the Arsenal players so far in the list.
- 15: Declan Rice
- 26: Bukayo Saka
- 28: Viktor Gyokeres
- 29: Gabriel Magalhaes
- 33: William Saliba
- 45: Martin Odegaard
- 56: Eberechi Eze
- 58: David Raya
- 70: Martin Zubimendi
- 90: Mikel Merino
Now we must remember that these are of course the top 100 players in the world this year in the opinion of the Guardian writers, who have often been quite critical of Arsenal – and yet still ten of the 90 are in fact Arsenal players.
And although I am not suggesting they should be in the list Kai Havertz and Gabriel Martinelli may, if they can have a year without injury find themselves knocking on the top 100 door in one year’s time. It all seems, in fact, rather positive.
However for a fan of particular club, judging such a list is always difficult because one sees Arsenal players far more than the players of every other team, so it is hard to get a perspective. But to have 10% of the world’s best players in the Arsenal team is rather an achievement.
Real Madrid have seven in the list so far, Barcelona have five, PSG have eight, Liverpool eight, Tottenham has one, Manchester City has eight.
So what we are clearly seeing is a small group of clubs – which now includes Arsenal – seeking out and buying the very best talent in the world. For the implication here is that to get anywhere a club needs to have eight or more of their players seen to be in the list of the best 100 male footballers in the world.
Of course I have no idea which players in the top ten on the Guardian’s list will be playing in England, and the data from the final ten will of course make some difference to our perspective, but this list does give us a clear insight into how football is going – if we didn’t know it already.
For the fact is that the top clubs are now hoovering up the best talent between them, leaving lesser clubs out in the cold and with a long way to travel.
If we take as an example the plight of Tottenham Hotspur, of whom I was writing earlier, for them it is not just a case of buying one or two new players. To compete with the top group of club, including the likes of Arsenal, they will need around six or seven of the best 100 players in the world in their squad, and having looked at the list from numbers 11 to 100, they so far have one.
And the fact is that while in many leagues they would only be competing with one or maybe two clubs that have multiple top players in the squad, in England they are competing with Arsenal, Manchester City, and Liverpool (who have eight players listed)
To give another example let us consider Aston Villa who clearly are what one might call “wannabes” near the top of the Premier League. They have one player listed, in this list of 90 players. And my suspicion is that they might not have any more in the remaining top ten to be revealed tomorrow.
So the implication is that for any club to climb into the list of top European teams they are either going to have to have a stunningly brilliant youth policy or a lot of money to spend on players – or most likely both. Even Chelsea who spend money as if they were printing the stuff, only have six such players.
So yes, there are clubs with six or more players from the top 100 best players in the world, and there are other clubs that can do quite well for a few seasons, but simply don’t have a) that depth of top players at the moment and b) the funding to keep replacing them when needed and then finally c) the in-depth youth recruitment and retention to keep producing some of the top players of the future, from their own youth academy.
The fact is that top players go to clubs which already have top players. Which makes the league far less open and competitive than it once was, and that is a shame, but that is how it is. And thankfully for Arsenal supporters, Arsenal got themselves into this elite group while there was still a chance.
