Don’t mistake a three-way title race for a competitive Premier League
After Arsenal’s dramatic 4-2 victory at Villa Park on Saturday, Jorginho was effusive in his praise of the English top flight. “That’s the Premier League,” he said. “That’s why it’s the best league in the world. It’s beautiful.” The Italy midfielder is not the first player or pundit to make such a claim and he will not be the last. The Premier League sells this narrative to its ever-increasing global audience and it is, by some margin, the world’s richest league, with revenues for its 20 clubs expected to exceed £6 billion this season – as much as their two nearest rivals, La Liga and the Bundesliga, combined.
The Premier League prides itself on being the most competitive of the leading European leagues. The story goes that, on any given day, a team towards the bottom of the table can beat a team near the top. This David and Goliath narrative is undoubtedly attractive to broadcasters, introducing a sense of jeopardy to the continuous diet of televised matches. However, the evidence of the last decade shows that the strong are getting stronger, and the gap between them and the weak is getting much, much wider.
Increasingly, the league has been dominated by whichever teams finish first and second, with the Manchester clubs and Liverpool taking those top two spots over the last five seasons. Of course, other leading European leagues have a similar hegemony at the top – and are often dominated by just one club. Bayern Munich are on a run of 10 successive Bundesliga titles; Juventus won nine straight Serie A titles between 2012 and 2020; PSG have finished top in eight of the last 10 seasons in France; and only three clubs – Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid – have won La Liga in the last 18 years.
This season offers the possibility of the duopoly at the summit of English football being disrupted, with three contenders for the title. Arsenal’s win over Villa on Saturday edged them back above Manchester City, whose draw with Nottingham Forest later in the afternoon left them two points behind the leaders having played a game more. More significantly, Manchester United moved to within touching distance of the top two when they beat Leicester on Sunday. The prospect of a threehorse title race is on.
Having a trio of realistic challengers has become a rarity. In 10 of the last 11 seasons, the points gap between the teams in first and third has reached double figures. The exception was in 2013-14, when champions Manchester City and third-placed Chelsea were separated by just four points. That season was an outlier. In the last 11 seasons, the average gap between the champions and the side in third has been 17 points; in the previous 19 seasons the gap was just 11 points. The teams at the very top are moving away from their supposed competitors.
The gap between the top two and the bottom three has also grown dramatically. In the first season of the Premier League, in 1992-93, the top two of Manchester United and Aston Villa won 158 points between them, compared to the combined total of 133 for the three relegated clubs – Crystal Palace, Middlesbrough and Nottingham Forest. By contrast, last season City and Liverpool amassed 185 points between them (from four fewer matches) while the bottom three clubs of Burnley, Watford and Norwich mustered a meagre total of 80 points. The points gap between the top two and the bottom three has nearly doubled over the last 30 years. It’s no longer a gap, but more of a yawning chasm.
Changes in goal difference also show how dominant the top sides have become. In the first 10 years of the Premier League, the average goal difference of the champions was +45. Over the next nine seasons, that average went up to +51. In the last 11 years, it has shot up to +57.
Manchester City’s goal difference last season was +73, the second highest in Premier League history after their own record of +79 in the 2017-18 season, when they also became the first club to reach 100 points in a campaign. In their 13 title-winning seasons, Manchester United’s highest goal difference was +58, in 2007-08. Their goal difference was just +36 when they won the first Premier League title in 1992-93, when Norwich managed to finish third with a goal difference of -4.
Perhaps the most dramatic way to illustrate the lack of competitiveness in the Premier League is to examine the number of goals the top players are scoring. Erling Haaland has scored 26 goals so far this season – more than eight clubs in the league, including Chelsea. Haaland is an exceptional player enjoying an exceptional season, but he is not the only striker scoring as many goals as entire squads. Harry Kane’s tally of 17 goals this season equals what the entire Everton and Wolves squads have managed – and they are not even in the relegation zone.
Haaland’s numbers are unprecedented, but they are part of a trend. In the first 19 seasons of the Premier League, there were only three golden boot winners who scored more than a team in the league: Ruud van Nistelrooy in 2002-03, when he outscored Sunderland; Thierry Henry three years later when he scored one more goal than the Black Cats; and Cristiano Ronaldo in 2007-08, when his tally of 31 goals was much higher than Derby County’s total of 20. However, in six of the last 10 seasons the golden boot winner has outscored or equalled a team’s total. This feat has become the norm.
If Haaland continues scoring at his current rate, there will be a handful of clubs trailing in his wake. It would be an extraordinary achievement, but his goals are symbolic of a wider problem in the Premier League. The disparity between the top clubs and the rest of the division is only growing, making the “best league in the world” not nearly as competitive as people would like.
• This is an article from The Football Mine• Follow Richard Foster on Twitter