By Tony Attwood
For this season we decided to create a Big 7 mini league, bringing Newcastle United into the table on the grounds that with more wealth available than any other club they ought to be able to buy their way to the title with a bunch of blind monkeys running the show and an FFP system up the creek. Not to mention a media that opened the season being rabidly anti-Arsenal.
So rabidly anti-Arsenal were they that although there was a club whose position vis a vis financial fair play could have been written about, instead they wrote about Arsenal with headlines such as… Arsenal have ‘no excuses’ as £23m FFP fine confirmed”
In the end it was down to Untold to point out that Reports of Arsenal being in breach of FFP turn out to be media makebelieve. Just as we had said all along.
But the story served its purpose, for those clubs who were being closely investigated pushed attention away from their own plight very successfully, and in order for the mindless journalists who were suckered into the story to retain some credibility (not that they had much to maintain), they then the make-believe £23m story.
Oh what jolly pranksters these newspaper chappies are!
For it was all drivel. Arsenal were not fined and were not warned and so yes, quite rightly had no excuses because there was nothing to excuse. Oh how we laughed at their jolly jape.
But it was in fact the final flurry of a media desperate to get Arsenal one way or the other, and since then the club they generally said would most certainly fail to make the top four has not just scrambled its way into the top four, but are actually top!
No newspaper has dared to say Arsenal have done this by cheating, but now the FFP story has gone away, they are desperate to find something to get Arsenal with.
So we move on and now we come to the league table built out of games between the seven big clubs. And seven it is when one looks at the full league table and see what Newcastle have done in the league this season forcing Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea out of the coveted Champions League places so far …
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arsenal | 14 | 12 | 1 | 1 | 33 | 11 | 22 | 37 |
| 2 | Manchester City | 14 | 10 | 2 | 2 | 40 | 14 | 26 | 32 |
| 3 | Newcastle United | 15 | 8 | 6 | 1 | 29 | 11 | 18 | 30 |
| 4 | Tottenham Hotspur | 15 | 9 | 2 | 4 | 31 | 21 | 10 | 29 |
| 5 | Manchester United | 13 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 18 | 19 | -1 | 23 |
| 6 | Liverpool | 14 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 28 | 17 | 11 | 22 |
| 7 | Brighton and Hove Albion | 13 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 22 | 17 | 5 | 21 |
| 8 | Chelsea | 14 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 17 | 17 | 0 | 21 |
Indeed it is quite interesting that Arsenal are 16 points above Chelsea after 14 games. Which is quite a lot really. And we did decide to kick Chelsea out, bring Newcastle in and keep it as a big six. But perhaps we will wait a bit longer, just to see what Chelsea do in the January window.
Anyway, we asked a super computer (well actually me and a battery-driven calculator that cost £2.50) to work out a league table for the Super Seven (© Untold Arsenal) relating to matches they have played against each other.
So here we go… and as before we are adding a points per game (PPG) column because Manchester United have played twice as many big seven games as their neighbours.
Why this is so is a mystery so we asked the supercomputer but unfortunately, it replied that it was too busy working out the weather patterns as a result of global warming to do a proper job on this, but it was probably because they had a bigger squad and wanted to wait for everyone else to get loads of injuries before having to play them. And of course the League concurred with the request.
| P | W | D | L | Pts | PPG | |
| Arsenal | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 9 | 2.25 |
| Man U | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 11 | 1.83 |
| Liverpool | 5 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 9 | 1.80 |
| Newcastle | 5 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 8 | 1.60 |
| Man C | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1.33 |
| Chelsea | 4 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0.50 |
| Tottenham | 5 | 0 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0.20 |
Anyway moving on we thought it would also be fun to look at the current form guide which in the past has been fairly reliable in telling us which teams are riding high, and which ones are falling over their own shoelaces.
And it is interesting that for the last six matches, at the top there is a preponderance of the bigger clubs. Only Chelsea in 15th in the “last six” table are really in the mire actually being a traditional top six club now in the bottom six for the last six, which is rather jolly.
Form Guide: last six games…
| P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | PTS | ||
| 1 | Arsenal | 6 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 13 | 3 | +10 | 16 |
| 2 | Newcastle United | 6 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 12 | 2 | +10 | 16 |
| 4 | Manchester City | 6 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 11 | 5 | +6 | 12 |
| 5 | Liverpool | 6 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 8 | 5 | +3 | 12 |
| 6 | Manchester United | 6 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 7 | 5 | +2 | 11 |
| 8 | Tottenham Hotspur | 6 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 11 | 11 | 0 | 9 |
| 15 | Chelsea | 6 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 7 | -3 | 5 |
And the form guide is interesting because it does tell us which teams are slipping and which are rising up – and it emphasizes a) just how much Newcastle have found their way forward this season after the new signings have been bedded in, and b) how far adrift from the real world Chelsea are at the moment. Maybe that early managerial sacking malarky wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Anyway Arsenal go into the Christmas break in early November top of the league and top of the form guide, and one can’t really ask much more than that.
The media against the Arsenal
- Momentum is building in media to get Arteta banned from the touchline
- The ludicrous media
- How the media got their predictions so wrong, but no one apologised.
