- When we talk about Tottenham going down, are we talking about the wrong London club?
- Why is it that the Premier League uses the same referees with the same clubs over and over again?
Untold does a fair amount of chatting about Tottenham, what with them being our nearest neighbours and full of pretensions with their new stadium and everything, but really, in trying to cover Premier League football from an Arsenal point of view, we ought to spend a little time also looking at Chelsea as well.
The table below is built on the last ten league games for each club and as you can see over that period Manchester City have crept above Arsenal with Manchester United right on our tails.
Obviously, we’d like to be above ManC not below and further away from ManU – that goes without saying, but what I would like to draw attention to is the foot of the last ten league games table.
As we all know, Arsenal have slipped badly of late, and there is no denying that. But what we also have here is not just a case of Tottenham being 18th in the league table as they are across the whole season, but actually bottom of the league for the last ten games. Meanwhile, Chelsea are seventh in the league across the season, but 18th in a table just measuring the last ten games.
Now, of course, there is no chance of Chelsea going down, but their collapse in form really is something quite extraordinary to behold, and it does suggest the collapse of their entire footballing and financial model, with all those clever ways of by-passing the regulations. Chelsea’s problem is that they used all of those, but they didn’t actually take the club to the top of the league.
And thinking of both Chelsea and Tottenham, I was also reminded of the ceaseless attacks on Wenger under the “Fourth is not a trophy” banner after Arsenal moved to the Emirates. Wenger too managed a club that had spent its money on stadium work, but he kept Arsenal in the top four, which is a lot more than these other London clubs have done
So I do wonder about the impact of the fact that in June last year, Chelsea agreed a four-year plan with Uefa’s financial control body over its future spending, with all the numerous loopholes that Chelsea had formulated now being closed down. This doesn’t mean that I think Chelsea will be relegated, but they will most likely get the next worst thing, which is next season without any European football, and all the financial problems that brings.
Meanwhile, it also appears that any new player that Chelsea now signs can only join the club’s list of players who can play in Europe if the club’s transfer balance is positive. Next season, if they lose over 60 million euros they get fined again.
Chelsea, however, has announced that it is now a profitable enterprise, and of course we shall see. But this future restriction on what Chelsea can do financially might not matter so much if it were not for that “last ten games” table above, which suggests that with their current resources, they, like Tottenham, are playing the role of a club about to be relegated.
Of course, Chelsea are not going to be relegated – they are 17 points above such danger – but the penalties and warnings they have been given do together suggest that they might at best be a mid-table club for some time to come.
And yet there is still the same oddity here. For how come Cheslea know all about their punishments for financial wrongdoing, while Manchester City have none, and sail on regardless, while the media now act as if the 110+ cases in which they were found guilty don’t even exist.
This implies that if Arsenal continue to falter and ManC win the league, ManC will still not be punished for their past misdemeanours. If that is the case, then it will mean quite simply that the league is out of the control of the 20 clubs that are supposed to run it.
There is always the tiny chance that the idea we have floated of the other 19 clubs resigning en masse and setting up a new Premier League without ManC, could happen, but there is not even a whisper of that.
Surely ManC are not simply being allowed to get away with it are they?
