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A more competitive Premier League?

Many rival fans have had a good laugh at Tottenham and their wildly fluctuating results this season.  This violent inconsistency (or perhaps downward trend) is a problem for Tottenham, attributed to a variety of factors from Ange Postecoglou’s dogmatic style to a simple lack of common sense and basic individual errors from their players.

But this is not just a problem for Tottenham — it’s also a problem across the division. Inconsistency has been a theme of the Premier League season so far. In fact, it’s been the most inconsistent in a decade, since the 2015-16 season when Leicester won the league, and one of the most inconsistent in the history of the division.

After 15 games there were 39 instances of teams winning back-to-back games. That’s compared to 47 at the same stage last season, 45 in the two seasons before that, 43 in the two seasons before that and in 2018-19, there had been 59.

Tottenham are the inconsistency poster boys, which is partly because people just enjoy mocking them, their earnest and despairing fans and their manager insisting “That’s just who we are, mate” after they make the same mistakes for the 20th time.

But their mood swings really have been extraordinary: it’s become a cliche to say you don’t know which Tottenham is going to show up for each game, broadly because you really don’t know. 

The tightness in that middle part of the table suggests a lot of the teams are of a pretty similar level, which will inevitably lead to everyone taking points off each other. 

The classic old line everyone being able to beat everyone in the Premier League might have some truth in it. You could either view this as the standard of the top teams falling or those in the middle rising towards them, but it’s more likely to be the latter, broadly because of money.

English teams have been able to outspend all but the very biggest European clubs for some time now, but it felt like it rose to a new level this year.

Bournemouth, a club with a ground capacity of under 12,000 and whose highest ever finishing position is ninth in the English top flight, could afford to buy Porto’s centre-forward, Evanilson, for £40million ($50.8m) in the summer. Brighton spent around £200million, which included plucking choice talent from legacy European giants Celtic and Feyenoord. Forest seem to be muscling in on the ‘young Brazilian imports’ market, usually the preserve of the big Portuguese clubs.

But PSR rules have meant a sort of equalisation within the division too: everyone has a lot of money to spend, but they can’t necessarily spend significantly more of it than their counterparts. In this case, the rising tide may have raised all ships.

Simply on an aesthetic/anecdotal level, the standard of the Premier League feels much higher than it was, say, 10 years ago. There aren’t as many managers playing ostentatiously negative football: instead, you have Andoni Iraola, Fabian Hurzeler and Thomas Frank, in different ways, emphasising positivity. When the clubs in the middle of the table have progressive coaches like that, it’s obvious the standard is higher, and thus more teams have the ability to win more games.

And teams really are attacking more. There were 449 goals scored in 39 games , which works out at a rate of 3.01 goals per game: this is continuing a theme, with last season’s rate of a touch over 3.2 the most we’ve seen in the English top flight since 1963-64 (3.4 per game). Prior to this last season and a half, there hadn’t been a goals-per-game ratio of three or more since 1966-67.

Many teams have instinctively attacking styles, and many are pretty dogmatic about those styles too. This inherently means more risks, which then means more mistakes. Again, Tottenham are the obvious culprit here, but also consider teams such as Brighton, Bournemouth and Aston Villa.T

The latest example of inconsistency is Chelsea losing at home to Fulham for the first time in decades. Of course, the club that is being consistent is Liverpool.   And Southampton seem too far out of touch to escape relegation.

 

 

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