Does one player make all the difference?

By Tony Attwood

There was a really interesting piece in the Guardian recently which claimed that “the power of one is overhyped.”   The theme is that we all too easily think that one man makes a team – but as we try to investigate the statistics surrounding the issue, we don’t find this to be the case.

If we look at where we are today and compare with the same moment last season we see this …

Last season:

POS		LP	CLUB	P	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	PTS
1		(1)	Manchester United	29	22	4	3	73	27	46	70
2		(2)	Manchester City	29	22	3	4	71	21	50	69
3		(4)	Arsenal	29	17	4	8	58	39	19	55
4		(3)	Tottenham Hotspur	29	16	6	7	53	35	18	54
5		(5)	Chelsea	29	14	7	8	49	34	15	49

This season

POS		LP	CLUB	P	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	PTS
1		(1)	Manchester United	29	24	2	3	69	31	38	74
2		(2)	Manchester City	29	17	8	4	51	26	25	59
3		(4)	Chelsea	29	16	7	6	58	30	28	55
4		(3)	Tottenham Hotspur	30	16	6	8	51	37	14	54
5		(5)	Arsenal	29	14	8	7	55	32	23	50

Last season we were in third place, this year it is fifth, and clearly we are five points behind where we were last season.

But let’s take a look at goals scored.  Last season we had scored 58 goals after 29 games, and this season it is only 55.

But, according to some, writing at the start of the season, we would score far far fewer goals, because last season we were being carried by Robin van Persie.

And yet without him we are just three goals worse off.  Maybe he wasn’t quite as important as we thought.

A similar sort of “crisis” has hit Arsenal over a number of seasons – when we sold Henry, Vieira, Fabregas, Nasri.  In each case we made a significant profit, but the particular speciality of the player didn’t seem to be a failing point in the following season.

One point that always struck me as people have (quite reasonably) raved over the ability of Henry, was that as I saw the games, it wasn’t actually a case of Henry, Henry and Henry, although of course he got some wonderful goals.  It was more a case of Henry and Pires.

Time and again I watched Henry meander out to the left wing, and as he did so two things happened.  First, two players went to try and stop Henry moving towards goal.  Second, Pires took over Henry’s position as a centre forward.  If Henry could manage to get the ball past the two defenders and launch it towards Pires, Pires would stand a chance of scoring, simply because he was as likely as not, without a marker.

Now that of course is one simple analysis of one ploy.  But it came to mind on reading the Guardian piece, because for once I agree with their view.  Football, might be portrayed by the simplistic media as a one-man game, because that  makes it  all the more simplistic to write the sort of headlines that the media love.  But it is not like that.

Which is why we didn’t collapse when Flamini was sold despite the fuss that was made.  Nor when Henry or any of the others went.

Of course this is not just an Arsenal issue.  There is some talk that Tottenham will lose Bale this summer.  Will that cause the collapse of the current team?

According to the Guardian with Bale, Tottenham “have won 44 of 92 Premier League games – a 48% win percentage – and averaged 1.74 points. In 14 games without him they have won 57% of matches and averaged 1.79 points.”

Of course this is not a complete analysis in way, but it is a starting point.  Another review the Guardian has done is for Gerrard at Liverpool.  It seems to make very little difference if he plays or not.  In fact “his impact in Liverpool’s 140 matches against others in the Big Six – Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham and Manchester City – is interesting too. Liverpool have won more matches (37% to 35%), scored more goals (1.30 to 1.21) and conceded less (1.19 to 1.30) when Gerrard hasn’t played.”

But the Guardian then goes on to disprove my initial theory about Henry.  “Arsenal scored significantly more goals (2.03 v 1.50) when Thierry Henry played, won 61% of matches compared with 52%, and had a higher points per game (2.07 v 1.80).”

Ah well, so much for being there.

But maybe Henry was an exception.  There’s not enough data around, but even though I failed in my Henry/Pires theory, the fact is that we have not totally collapsed each time a major player has gone.  But what is true is that at the moment we are not the Invincibles – because that group was a complete unit.

However harking back to that wonderful team doesn’t do much good either.  They were unique.  No one believed (apart from Mr Wenger) that an unbeaten season was possible.  It was – but the chance of seeing it happen again seems small because even the clubs with 100 times the amount of money that Arsenal had to build the Invincibles have failed to do so.

Here is Arsenal after 29 games that season

POS		LP	CLUB	P	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	PTS
1		(1)	Arsenal	29	22	7	0	57	19	38	73
2		(2)	Chelsea	29	20	4	5	52	22	30	64
3		(3)	Manchester United	29	19	4	6	55	29	26	61
4		(5)	Liverpool	29	12	9	8	42	31	11	45

and compare once more with the figures today:

POS		LP	CLUB	P	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	PTS
1		(1)	Manchester United	29	24	2	3	69	31	38	74
2		(2)	Manchester City	29	17	8	4	51	26	25	59
3		(4)	Chelsea	29	16	7	6	58	30	28	55
4		(3)	Tottenham Hotspur	30	16	6	8	51	37	14	54
5		(5)	Arsenal	29	14	8	7	55	32	23	50

There are a lot of similarities – but the difference is not that we had Henry, but rather that we had the meanest defence.  The goal difference as you will see is identical.  Yes, so even with that wonderful attacking style and Henry at the heart of everything in the unbeaten season we had scored 57 by this stage.  This season it is 55.

One other thing is that the clubs at that moment in the unbeaten season, places 6th, 7th, 13th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th are not in the Premier League this season.

So maybe it is not only about winning – it is also about sustaining your position over time.  It was after all only nine years ago and 40% of the Premier League at that time have now gone their own way.  Some of them have not just gone down to the Championship – some have gone very much further.

Remember Charlton – they were very much a top 10 team in our unbeaten season.  Then the fans started crying out for a change of manager, to “take us up to the next level”.    And that’s what they got – except that the next level was a lot further down than they could have imagined.

So any conclusions?  First, it is harder than some people think to stay at the very top for a very long time.  Second, vast amounts of money do not guarantee league success.  Third, an individual player might become a talisman, as Henry seemed to be, but that does not mean that losing such a player always spells disaster.

Next, our defence is tighter than it was last season, and (and this is the most unexpected one for me)…

No team this season is anywhere near the sort of defence we had in the unbeaten season.  By this stage in that year we had let in 19.   Man City has let in 26, then Chelsea, Man U and ourselves on 30, 31, 32.

The books…

• Woolwich Arsenal: The club that changed football – Arsenal’s early years
• Making the Arsenal – how the modern Arsenal was born in 1910
• The Crowd at Woolwich Arsenal FC: crowd behaviour at the early matches.

The sites from the same team…

• Referee Decisions – just what are the refs up to this season?
• The Arsenal History Blog from the AISA Arsenal History Society
• School sports minibuses: providing your child’s school with a bus
• Parent News – what is going on in schools these days?
• Teacher News – UK schools from the teachers’ perspective