Personally think Man City should be given a six point deduction. Not for the pitch invasion, but for this



Or at least phone child services, Bernardos, something please. Fuck me.

Couple of real haircuts up there.

Depressingly true at least in short / medium term

I’m not sure the city talk is overblown though. The tweet about how much city would’ve won the league by over last 6 seasons or whatever was sobering. Has any team been that dominant over third place and the rest during pl era?

Funkstain wrote:

Depressingly true at least in short / medium term I’m not sure the city talk is overblown though. The tweet about how much city would’ve won the league by over last 6 seasons or whatever was sobering. Has any team been that dominant over third place and the rest during pl era?

Gap to 3rd, Premier League era

92/93 Man Utd 12 points
93/94 Man Utd 15 points
94/95 Blackburn 12 points
95/96 Man Utd 11 points
96/97 Man Utd 7 points
97/98 Arsenal 13 points
98/99 Man Utd 4 points
99/00 Man Utd 21 points
00/01 Man Utd 11 points
01/02 Arsenal 10 points
02/03 Man Utd 14 points
03/04 Arsenal 15 points
04/05 Chelsea 18 points
05/06 Chelsea 9 points
06/07 Man Utd 21 points
07/08 Man Utd 4 points
08/09 Man Utd 7 points
09/10 Chelsea 11 points
10/11 Man Utd 9 points
11/12 Man City 19 points
12/13 Man Utd 14 points
13/14 Man City 4 points
14/15 Chelsea 12 points
15/16 Leicester 11 points
16/17 Chelsea 15 points
17/18 Man City 23 points
18/19 Man City 26 points
19/20 Liverpool 33 points
20/21 Man City 17 points
21/22 Man City 19 points

The best team is better than the third best.

I am analysis.

Has permiaN left the forum?

There's nine years there where only two teams won it (Man Utd and the Arse). Only 7 teams have ever won it. And of those 7, three of them only once. And of those three, two will (I confidently predict) never win it again. And it's still probably the most open of the major leagues.

You're just going on the past 5 years though. You could have said from mid 90s to early 2000s that it was like La Liga or Scots Prem as only two teams were winning it then. But those teams are different than the two at the top now. While the previously dominant two are scrapping it out in the Europa places. You don't get that in those leagues.

It'd be nice if there were 4 or 5 teams in with a shout of winning it, but I don't know if it's ever been like that. Not in the past 30 odd years I've been watching it. The gap between the top two and the rest is wider than it has been before though.

Ah wait so by 'open' you meant - historically, even with so few winners and runners-up, it's still the most open league possibly, due to overall number of winners? Will check out other leagues list of winners in last 30 or so years.

Because we clearly agree on the first definition I used - 'many teams have a chance of winning it' - that has been low since inception, with only 3 seasons having a 4 point gap to 3rd, which seems common to many top leagues.

On the second definition I used - 'competitiveness, or chance of lower placed team of beating top 2' - that I think used to be the case, but in the last 6 years or so has really decreased. Look at total points of 1st and 2nd in those years - I'd wager that most of the 2nd team's points totals would have won the league on many occasions in the previous 20 years. It's certainly more of a shock now when Liverpool or ManC get beaten.

edit: or maybe that's just recency bias in action? there was that long unbeaten run by Arsenal, similarly long home unbeaten by ManU, and of course Chelsea's dominance for a couple of seasons and an amazing home unbeaten record; so maybe I'm just talking bollocks as usual

German league: 6 winners in last 30 years
Italian league: 5
French league: 10
Spanish league: 5

So, 7 seems OK there but not particularly stand out

Plot points per million spent per season per club. That'll give you your trends.

doping as in drugs / dodginess?

or doping as in financial doping?

or both

Anyway after an exhaustive statistical research session, I've concluded that there is a mild trend towards lower competitiveness in the league (defined by chances of a lower positioned team beating one of the top 2 at the end of the season): before 2016/2017 the top two would lose an average of 11 between them, compared to 9 since then. However it's not difficult to find another 6 year period in which that average is lower - 2002 until 2009, a larger sample, comes back with just over 8 games lost. So that's meaninglessly mild / remains to be seen.

Average points to win the league is about 2 higher than it was pre 2017, which is actually slightly skewed lower delta, due to Chelsea's two seasons of >90 points and ManU's comeback in 2006 - if you take those out, it's more like 4 points, and the last 6 seasons have seen 5 of the highest 6 ever points totals, with the team coming second during that period winning the league 3 times on average pre 2017 points totals (which happens only twice in all previous seasons)

So it seems: 

the top two teams are drawing away from the rest, slightly - in terms of total points - probably because they are drawing less and winning more, rather than losing less.
But that slightly is enough to make things less interesting as they pull away faster and stay away more consistently, and the gap to the rest is certainly bigger on average in the last 7 years than it has been in any other similar period in the PL.

the question now is: will that trend continue? Or will ManC implode / Liverpool get tired / Chelsea or Newcastle get loads more money to spend / Utd stay awful forever

You could also put the current situation down to two teams really having their shit together, versus other teams not having their shit together.

Man U, Spurs, Arsenal and Chelsea could be pushing City and Liverpool much closer with the right managers, recruitment, philosophy, or whatever in place, but they haven't been able to get it right for one reason or another.

It's not just that the top 2 are steaming ahead, it's that the rest have fallen behind.

Yeah but one of those teams is Spurs so you can’t expect much.

Me da, 40+ year season ticket holder (except when he lived in the States obv)