Ken Early: City’s inability to hit their very top form should give Arsenal hope

Arsenal racing five points clear as Manchester City lose at home to Brentford, Manchester United’s revival under Erik Ten Hag gathering pace, Graham Potter struggling to make sense of his squad at Chelsea, Darwin Nuñez finally starting to get it together: what a wonderful time to suspend the Premier League for six weeks and make ready for Qatar v Ecuador.

After City’s defeat there was much talk about how Arsenal being top at Christmas augurs well for their chances. Teams have usually completed half the season by Christmas, while Arsenal have only played 14 matches. Last season the leaders after 14 matches were Chelsea, who were then one point ahead of City in second. By the end of the season third-placed Chelsea trailed champions City by 19 points. The season before Liverpool led the race after 14 matches, five points ahead of City. In the end City won the league, 17 points clear of third-placed Liverpool.

So Arsenal’s five-point lead doesn’t mean a lot yet – but City losing to Brentford means Pep Guardiola has a lot to think about during this strange winter break. He will have noticed a gap opening up between perception and reality. With Erling Haaland on pace to smash the Premier League goalscoring record, this season’s edition of City have inspired shock and awe, a sense of “how can anyone hope to compete with this”? But in terms of points they are no better than par: 32 points from the first 14 matches is exactly the average for City in the Guardiola era.

They have scored 40 goals – 18 per cent more than their average after 14 games under Guardiola – but they have also conceded 14, which is 27 per cent more than their average in that period. Their goal difference of +26 is the best in the league, but the super-dominant City sides that won the league in 2018 and 2019 had goal differences of +35 and +37 at this point respectively.

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The Haaland effect has concealed a subtle tightening of the margins, though not from Guardiola, who will spend the weeks between now and Christmas obsessing about how he can get his team back to their best. Nobody knows yet what impact the World Cup will have on the fitness and rhythm of players, but City’s inability thus far to hit their very top form should give Arsenal hope.

At this point nobody else looks a realistic contender, with Manchester United having self-sabotaged with a poor start, Chelsea searching for a system that works and Spurs apparently addicted to going two goals down in every match. As for Liverpool, just as they seemed to be stabilising things on the field there was a significant off-field development with reports emerging that owners FSG had put the club up for sale.

Jurgen Klopp suggested that his American bosses might simply be looking for fresh investment from a limited partner, but with no indication that they are under immediate financial pressure that doesn’t make much sense. If FSG believes Liverpool’s long-term outlook is positive why would it want to share the spoils with another investor? If it believe it is negative, why stick around to take the hit?

FSG bought Liverpool in 2010 for £300 million and, considering the state of the club when it arrived, the 12 years since have been a spectacular success. They have won all the major trophies and turned Liverpool into one of the best teams in the world, while boosting turnover to record levels and increasing the capacity of Anfield from 45,000 to 61,000 (from the beginning of next season).

So why stop now? FSG may have concluded that the odds have turned against Liverpool’s prospects of retaining their current status as one of the top teams.

From the beginning principal owner John Henry has energetically advocated for reforms that would make football’s snakes-and-ladders economy more like the stable prosperity of the closed American sports leagues, at least for a select group of clubs which would, of course, include Liverpool. He was a strong supporter of Uefa’s Financial Fair Play rules designed to limit club losses, and complained about Manchester City’s gaming of that system with what he saw as inflated owner-linked sponsorship deals.

In October 2020, with football’s finances hit by the Covid closures, Henry and the Glazers came up with the so-called Project Big Picture, which would have given Liverpool and eight other “big” clubs increased Premier League voting rights. With the majority of Premier League clubs against it, the plan sank without trace. Six months later, in April 2021, he was one of the instigators of the Super League breakaway, whose six-club English front infamously collapsed within two days. Later in 2021 the Premier League, encouraged by the British government, waved through Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of Newcastle United.

The failure to push through the Super League means that Liverpool still need Champions League participation to afford their expensive squad, and qualification for that competition was already getting harder to achieve even before a second trillionaire-owned club was welcomed to the scene. Faced with the prospect of a financial arms race with Saudi Arabia, FSG seems to have decided that the wise move is to cash out.

The Saudis’ first full season in the Premier League is going rather better than expected, with Newcastle in third place at the break, just two points behind Manchester City. Many of the best players in Eddie Howe’s team were signed when Mike Ashley was still the owner: Miguel Almiron, Joelinton, Fabian Schär, Callum Wilson. Garlands have piled up at Howe’s feet for this apparent feat of alchemy, but besides the impact of Saudi signings like Kieran Trippier, Bruno Guimaraes, Nick Pope, Dan Burn and Sven Botman, you can’t ignore the fact that it’s good for morale when everyone believes they are at a club that is about to follow the trail blazed by Manchester City.

Watching Chelsea lose a bitterly-contested match at Newcastle on Saturday night you had to wonder: if FSG believe there’s little point hanging around to compete with the Saudis, why does Todd Boehly apparently believe otherwise? He paid £2.5 billion for Chelsea, with an additional £1.75 billion of investment promised, meaning he has got into the league at the sort of price where FSG is thinking it’s time to get out. Does he know something they don’t know? You wouldn’t bet on it.