Can Arsenal lift the EPL by being the best losers?

Ethan Dean-Richards 15:59 24/08/2016
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  • A new Premier League season has arrived and it looks as though some new rules are in place. Firstly, as per Pep Guardiola’s debut with Manchester City, full-backs are now central midfielders. Secondly, as per Liverpool’s 4-3 win over Arsenal, defending is now somewhat of a faux pas. Thirdly, if you’re going to win this league, then you might well have to be quite a good loser.

    The last of these rules probably requires the most explaining, but a more detailed look at the first round of games does much of the work. Guardiola’s City edged past Sunderland via an own goal and a penalty, Antonio Conte’s Chelsea edged past West Ham via a penalty and a late shot from 25 yards, Arsenal lost 4-3 at home, Tottenham drew 1-1 to Everton, and only Jose Mourinho’s United won relatively comfortably – against Bournemouth. 

    The theme here is that big teams were only just nudging past notionally smaller opponents and beneath the results the signs were that in this new Premier League season any win looks set to be a good win, even for those at the top. That means losses are more likely, too.

    There’s a clear reason behind this new difficulty level – a historically large television deal has allowed the Premier League to leverage an unbeatable transfer market position over the rest of the world, and this in turn has meant that clubs as far down as Swansea City have been able to sign World Cup winners, or that clubs like Crystal Palace can compete with Real Madrid for the signing of senior France internationals.

    But the effect this will all have on the title race seems to have been overlooked.

    No Premier League title winner has ever lost more than seven games (Blackburn Rovers managed that total in a 22-team league in 1994-95), but that mark could well be pushed for the first time in more than a decade this season – if the smaller clubs are to be more of a threat. 

    If that is the case then a corresponding change in mentality could be required at the top of the league. If losing becomes more of an inevitability, then being good at losing becomes a more important characteristic to look for in a title winner.

    What would this mean? Well, basically, the most successful team will likely be the one who recovers best from those defeats and doesn’t let them get in their way. In short, the Premier League title race could be about to become a battle of who accepts defeat better than anyone else.

    Of course this is, really, only an extension of what we’ve seen before; Premier League champions have almost always lost the odd game, but losing will now become much more ‘normal’ than it has been. Leicester City’s three defeats last season will likely be a far smoother ride than anything Manchester City or United go through if they’re to win the title this time around – and that could easily not suit them, or their rivals.

    For proof of how more losing could mix things up, look at the various managers’ experience with defeat so far.  

    City’s Guardiola is used winning leagues by a mile not a millimetre. His career win rate is a ludicrous 74.4% and his teams average over 94 points in the league, which makes his ability to deal with defeat an almost entirely known unknown. Similarly, Chelsea’s Antonio Conte won three titles in a row at his last club, Juventus, breaking points records by averaging 2.25 points per game and going one full league season unbeaten.  

    Elsewhere, United’s Mourinho has led teams to catastrophic implosion in three seasons where he hasn’t immediately strung together a long run of wins (at Chelsea twice in 2007 and 2013, and at Real Madrid once in 2013) – and both Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp and Tottenham’s Mauricio Pochettino have stepped through mini-versions of the same phenomenon; the former with Borussia Dortmund in his final season there and the latter’s 2015-16 with Tottenham, in which a disappointing draw to West Bromwich Albion started a drift that led to no wins in the final five games.

     

    The broad pattern is pretty clear. Either we don’t really know how these managers react to bad results, or we know they’ve some history of reacting badly. In the likely top six clubs there’s only one exception to this, in the unlikely form of Arsenal and Arsene Wenger.  

    No other notional contender is as used to, or as successful at, recovering from defeats as Arsenal under late-era Wenger because, together, they have seemed to be perpetually recovering from some terrible disaster or other at every point over the past 12 years. Horrific Champions League exits and big Premier League defeats have almost destroyed them on dozens of occasions, but they’ve somehow always gone on to avoid the kind of catastrophic implosions Mourinho, Klopp or Pochettino have endured. They’ve always made fourth place or better. 

    Now, obviously, this doesn’t mean that Arsenal will definitely win the Premier League this season – they have other problems, as the 4-3 loss to Liverpool showed succinctly enough – but they do have an interesting edge in knowing that they can lose and still come back – and anyone that can lose better than them would surely be doing well. 

    Ultimately under these terms, in a league where the winner might lose more than five times, contested at the top end by six or seven managers who between them have never won a league while carrying that many defeats (five for Klopp at Dortmund and Conte at Juventus the best it gets), the exact impact of the potentially higher number of defeats will be difficult to predict. 

    But if you narrow it down to the best two squads – belonging to United and City – then the fact that Mourinho has more experience of regular defeats might just lead to favouring his United over Guardiola’s City; in a battle based on who can lose best, you’d favour someone who has recovered from defeats before. 

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