Just how much better were Arsenal than the rest last season?

• Just how much better were Arsenal than the rest last season?
• Why do we bother with the world cup at all?

On 14 August last year, a bunch of so-called “pundits,” sometimes known as “experts” and a so-called “supercomputer” gave predictions for the ultimate top four in the Premier  League in the 20205/26 season.

Now, as you may recall, the actual table ended last season, with Arsenal first, Manchester City second, Manchester United third and Aston Villa in fourth.    But what made it difficult to see how badly some of these pundits had done was the fact that the actual table of predictions didn’t include any votes that gave a top four position at the end of the season for Manchester United and Aston Villa.   What we did find, however, were 22 votes for Liverpool to win the league, from the 34 experts whose opinions were sought in the writing of the article.

I guess this once again confirms, first, that the experts who are presented to us on the radio and in newspapers are generally no more knowledgeable than the rest of us regular fans are.   And that basically they make things up to suit themselves.    

Indeed, only six out of the 34 pundits asked gave Arsenal as the ultimate winners of the league.   Which just goes to show that predicting who is going to win the league is tough.

And here we might also particularly note that 65% of the “experts” actually predicted Liverpool as the ultimate winners of the league.

But although there is of course expertise in the way managers select their teams and set them up to play, there must also be luck as well, and a certain amount of influence from the referee – sometimes by chance, sometimes deliberate.

Yet what really did strike me last season was that the variation Arsenal brought into the team during the course of the campaign did mean that some clubs were not quite sure how to deal with the players they were facing, or the overall tactics Arsenal were utilising.   True, the number of changes Arsenal made during the season to its first team squad was not huge, but it was enough for Arsenal to use some different tactics which could cause a bit of confusion.

I do think it can be particularly good to utilise the approach Arsenal used from time to time in having players changing position – the centre forward being a winger and then a centre forward again now seems to be a favourite activity with a number of clubs, but it also means that the team sheet the opposition manager gets one hour before kick off might not tell him everything that it used to…

In fact, that league table of course ended Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa.   While the speculations from the media earlier in the campaign had lots of votes for Liverpool to reach the top four.

So we might ask, quite why do these experts who are paid to go and watch matches at least a couple of times a week and pontificate on what will happen by the end of the season be so far amiss?

I think we must all admit that part of the problem is that there are elements of luck within football, along with the vagaries of decisions made by referees and an endless stream of online rumours.  So it is not an easy task to judge what’s real and what’s not.

But also we might say from the results that there is a fair tendency of pundits to suggest that what will happen this year is going to be only a slight variation on what happened in the previous year.   They tend not to expect major upheavals and changes from one season to the next.   They rarely foresee new tactics working.

Of course to be fair to them, another factor that they really cannot judge very well is going to be injuries, and I have no doubt that there is a tendency of the defenders of some of the clubs that people feel are heading for the title, to go in particularly hard on their rivals, thus making it harder for them to continue their progress at the top of the league in the latter parts of the season.

Clubs will of course always go for players who can play in multiple positions, but I also suspect there is a growing interest in players who can start out by appearing to take up one position but then switch to another part way through the game.