- Which clubs are mentioned the most on social media and why the stories are mostly untrue
- Why are the media so much against Arsenal?
By Tony Attwood
Arsenal currently have four players injured according to the EPL Injury table – Ben White, David Raya, Chuck Madueke and Jurrien Timber. Raya is said to be 75% certain to play, Madueke is rated 50/50 and Timber is given 25%.
Raya’s commentary after the last game was that “‘ I had a dead back, a dead glute and a dead shoulder, but I’ll be fine. Ice bath, I’m going straight away to the ice bath.'”
And although it does not affect our game this weekend, it is perhaps worth noting that Manchester City are showing zero injuries at one end of the injury table, and Newcastle United and Wolverhampton are at the other end of the chart with six players down each.
We might ask how that has been achieved – could it be that referees are faster to penalise clubs for naughty tackles on ManC players, or is it all just a coincidence? (And as you may have noticed if you have been reading my ramblings over the years, like most people who have gained a research degree in a subject with a load of maths in it, I am very reluctant ever to believe coincidences as the reason why things happen – there is normally a causal reason for almost everything if one only bothers to look.)
Now, in this regard, we are fortunately aided by Sky Sports, who have produced an interesting table totalling the number of injuries per team across this season and indeed across the last season.
And what we find is that Tottenham are way out in front of everyone else in that table of injuries, which of course might be down to chance or it could be the way they play – or even something dodgy about the turf at the increasingly notorious Unsponsored Stadium. Put another way, once more, is it chance or is it cause and effect? (While also asking, “Why does no organisation want to be associated with the name Tottenham Hotspur and its stadium?)
And while pondering that, here’s another issue to contemplate. Tottenham are recorded as being the club whose players made the most tackles in the just finished league season, and they are recorded as the club that made the second highest number of fouls in the season. And of course there’s an obvious link – and it suggests that tackling and dirty play can result in multiple injuries to a club’s own players. (Data available from Who Scored).
Now I pick these facts up just using the statistics that WhoScored and similar sources make public, and they suggest to me a cause and effect. But Tottenham don’t seem to have noticed that cause and effect yet – or at least if they have noticed, they haven’t done anything about it, in terms of changing their style of play.
Fortunately, I’m sure that as they are not reading official League data on tackles and injuries, they won’t be reading an Arsenal supporting blog, so there’s no worry about them learning anything from us. So I can explain freely.
And that’s handy because there is another statistic in this area, which is fascinating, and this concerns the number of times individual clubs’ players are fouled.
Aston Villa players are fouled 41% more times (according to referees blowing their whistles and indicating a foul) than Burnley. Now I can understand why Burnley are not fouled so often – their players have neither been good enough at accurate passing nor at picking up passes before the ball is nicked away from them. But why are Villa being fouled so often?
Now I can’t answer that exactly from the data that is publicly available, but I can tell you that precisely the same situation arose in 2024/25. And in the year before that. Villa are regularly the second most fouled team (at least according to the refs).
So what explanation can there be? One possible explanation is that all the other clubs have got together and agreed the way to beat Villa is to foul their players because, in the words of Corporal Jones, “they don’t like it up em”. But another is that Villa players are not fouled more often but are utter masters at conning the referees, going down clutching an ankle, etc., after tackles, and persuading the ref there has been a foul. Of course, it might just be pure chance that they get kicked more, but it seems unlikely that such a scenario should run on, season after season.
Unfortunately, there is quite a belief among journalists that their readers can’t do maths and don’t like numbers, which explains why the media don’t dig deeper into this kind of thing, but I am utterly certain that Villa and other clubs in this sort of position know exactly what is going on. They know that they are getting more free kicks from fouls than almost any other team.
There has, however, been one team that tends to come close to Villa in terms of the number of times they are fouled this season, and I will come to them in the next episode shortly in the next article. I hope you’ll join me for that.
