Money has made EPL harder to win

MANUEL PELLEGRINI believes this season’s Premier League will be won with fewer than 80 points. The Manchester City manager argued that the increasing financial resources of all teams in the League mean points would regularly be dropped by the leading clubs.

Saturday was an object lesson. A couple of hours before Manchester United lost to Bournemouth, City struggled to overcome a Swansea side that arrived at the Etihad Stadium managerless and having won one game since August. Only a late goal by Yaya Touré prevented Swansea from taking a point, which Pellegrini conceded was the least they deserved.

“This will be a very difficult league to win,” he said. “The number of points teams have now is not normal. Maybe this season’s teams are stronger and the games are closer. This season will be one of the closest there has ever been.”

Only three times has the Premier League been won with fewer than 80 points.

The argument employed by Pellegrini and the Manchester United chief executive, Ed Woodward, is that the vast influx of TV revenues has made the League a more even contest. In some ways it is as unequal as it has always been. In 1997-98, when Arsenal won the league with 78 points, the top five clubs accounted for 45 percent of the money in the Premier League. By 2013-14, this had gone up to more than half.

The difference is at the bottom. Then the five poorest clubs accounted for 5 per cent of the league’s revenue. Their percentages have nearly trebled. Every club that competes in the League now is, financially, as big as Manchester United were in 1998. They can all afford someone.

And they will need those players because, if the League is won with a very low points total, plenty will be required to stay up. On four occasions when the league has been won with 83 points or fewer, 39 points have not been enough for survival.

As Manchester City prepared for the Champions League draw today, Pellegrini insisted that his main priority was still winning back the Premier League title.

“The Premier League is the most important,” he said. “In the Champions League, you can have one bad game and go out in the semifinal and nobody remembers what you did. The Premier League is the work of a whole year and that’s why it must not become an obsession to win the Champions League. It is a very important title and beautiful to do it, but you must not try to win it at the expense of losing focus in the Premier League.”

As the season nears its halfway mark, City seem pretty powerfully placed. Points may have been dropped at Stoke City and at home to West Ham, where Pellegrini thought they played vastly better than they did against Swansea, but they have reached second place despite injuries to Sergio Aguero, Vincent Kompany and David Silva. The Arsenal side they meet next week have also overcome a long injury list but Arsène Wenger’s squad does not have the experience of winning titles that is scattered through City’s dressing room.

“That experience helps,” said Pellegrini. “This club has won two titles in the past four seasons and we were runners-up in the other two. Those will be important, especially in the second part of the season.” – The Independent