Arsenal away and Tottenham at home: who really has the ...

North London battles. Who has been top in recent years?

By Bulldog Drummond

Here’s an interesting league comparison that you probably won’t see anywhere else, since it runs against the message that the media wants.   Arsenal last season were better away from home than Tottenham were at home.  But the panic message is that Arsenal cannot afford to lose to Tottenham.

2023/24

Team P W D L F A GD Pts 6 Tottenham Hotspur home 19 13 0 6 38 27 11 39 2 Arsenal away 19 13 3 3 43 13 30 42

So was this some kind of fluke that can be readily dismissed as a mere oddity?  Well, to find out we could go back to the year before…

2022/23

Team P W D L F A GD Pts 1 Arsenal away 19 12 3 4 35 18 17 39 8 Tottenham Hotspur home 19 12 1 6 37 25 12 37

In fact we have to go back to 2021/22 to find a season where the normal logic of a club being at home should beat the club that is away.  But then of course these journos rarely produce figures to back up their statements, and if challenged will say that football fans don’t like maths.   Which I suppose is why none of us ever looks at the league table.

In 2018/19 Tottenham finished up above Arsenal by one point.  Their top scorer was the endlessly praised Kane.  No one seemed to notice that Aubameyang scored more league goals that season than Kane did.  Nor in fact that Arsenal  overall scored six more goals than Tottenham in the course of the season

In 2019/20 Tottenham finished three points and two places above Arsenal.  No one noticed that Kane scored five goals fewer than Aubameyang.

In 2020/21 Tottenham came 7th in the league and Arsenal 8th although Arsenal did win the FA Cup while starting its rebuilding programme.  But although Kane scored 33 to Lacazette’s 17, Tottenham only finished one point above Arsenal.   The media hailed West Ham and Chelsea as the London teams of the future, and noted that Leicester had sailed far ahead of the north London clubs but with a much smaller budget – but we should note that always Leicester got away with their last breach of the financial rules on a technicality, they are need to show a staggeringly large profit for 2023/24 to avoid having a huge points deduction for the 3 year period ending in May  2024.

Anyway, 2021/22 was the season really got the rebuilding growing, while Tottenham were swanning it with their run in the Champions League to the round of 16, and their media-celebrated superhero Kane getting 27 goals while Arsenal’s top scorer was some local kid who knocked in just 12.  The fact that Tottenham came in 7th while re-building Arsenal were just one point behind in eight was only mentioned in the context of Arsenal now being only the third London team, behind Chelsea and Tottenham.  Arsenal was merely a fading star – not even worth reporting.

So to 2022/23.  Arsenal’s rebuilding and its rise the previous season from eighth to fifth had gone unnoticed, so the continuation of that rise to second came as a total shock to the media.  Just as they couldn’t really get their heads around Tottenham ending up with 25 points fewer than Arsenal.  But there was still Harry Kane scoring 32 goals.  And surely that meant everything since Arsenal’s top scorer only got 15 goals.  (The fact that Arsenal had three players each scoring 15 was of course ignored).  As was the fact that Arsenal without Kane scored 18 more than Tottenham with Kane.

And thus finally on to 2023/24.  Arsenal came second again, which meant they could be called perennial runners-up.  That Tottenham were 23 points behind wasn’t mentioned because Kane got 32 and Tottenham magnanimously let him go somewhere else to win trophies.  Oh what an irony that became, and what a shame that journalists just don’t get irony.

Arsenal of course were nowhere near having a man who could score 32; all Arsenal had was a kid who knocked in 20 out of club total of 91.  Tottenham got 74 goals, even with Kane, and rather curiously no one quite got the idea that having multiple scorers could be a better deal than having one player who knocked in a lot of goals each season, and then left for a team that always won the German league, only to find that with him in the team, suddenly they didn’t.

But 91 goals is hardly impressive – I mean as the media quickly found out, Arsenal had had three seasons in the 1930s when they knocked in over 100.   Which is why no one thought to mention that Tottenham, even with Kane in the team knocking in 32 goals, actually scored 17 goals fewer than Arsenal without Kane.

So it seems the idea has never really sunk in: having a top scorer in the team doesn’t take the team to the top of the league.  And yet despite that by now being bleedingly obvious, there were journalists all over the place demanding that Arsenal needed to sign a new striker.   91 goals, and they demanded the whole format of team be torn up to get a striker.

Now that’s what I call journalism.  Actually no I call journalism bonkers writing without reference to facts, but it’s much the same thing.

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