The Hampshire Gooner
If you look at our points-per-game ratio from over the last six completed Premier League seasons, we average 1.92 points per game played. So far this season, we are averaging 1.67 points per game played. (Ed’s note – this piece submitted before the Man Utd game) Put simply, if we had managed to do what was expected of us at Norwich recently, we would be over-achieving currently as things stand, with an average of exactly 2 points per game played. So are we really performing that badly overall? The answer is no, we are not, as some of our tougher games this season have already been played, such as City, Liverpool and Stoke away as well as Chelsea at home.
What people seem rather too easily to forget, when lambasting the team for perceived poor performances, is that we haven’t been a genuine title-challenger now for a number of seasons. With an average points-per-game ratio over the last six completed seasons of 1.92, this gives us an average total points haul of just under 73 per season. When compared to the champions’ average of just under 87 for the same six-season period, this tells you all you need to know about how close Arsenal manage to get to the champions. On average, we managed to finish around 14 points adrift of the eventual champions for each of the last six completed seasons of the Premier League. Therefore, anyone expecting to watch a title-challenge should not be buying tickets at Ashburton Grove anytime soon.
The one surprising fact for me so far this season has not been about what has been happening on the pitch but more off it, as it must be said that buying tickets at Arsenal home games has become just as hard as it was when we first moved to the new stadium. Every match has sold out, and quickly. Within a few minutes of tickets becoming available to red members, the matches have been sold out and this includes category A matches as well. Even trying to get tickets via ticket-exchange has proven to be a very difficult task, especially if you want two seats sat together.
It does beg the question as to what the top brass at the club would have to do in order for fans in general to start refusing to go to home games? Selling the likes of Cesc, Samir and RvP seems to equal no problem in selling out home matches, even at prices breaking the £100-a-game barrier. It does surprise me, even as an Arsenal fan since the age of five, that people en masse can find such large amounts of money on such a regular basis in the current economic climate to watch a team that, in truth, will not challenge for the title at any realistic level.
Is it simply a matter of the location in which we play our home games, which means we have on average more affluent fans than many of our competitors? Arsenal do seem to be classed as the football team of the city, and, when you look at where our club happens to be based, this is not much of a surprise. If you compare the average salary of someone who sits in club level at Arsenal to that of someone who has a season-ticket at a club like Southampton, there must be a massive differential on the figures. It seems that Arsenal as a club have really cottoned on to this simple fact over the past few seasons, and basically ripped the fans off for it, forcing many of our more financially-challenged supporters to opt for watching games in the local pub instead. Hence the reason why the atmosphere at most home games resembles that of a library these days. It is therefore simple logic that means most of the current attendants at home matches have more money than footballing sense; hence the reason why games continue to sell out at inflated prices for matches we are less and less likely to be victorious in.
The long and short of it is this; don’t expect a title-challenge anytime soon, but also don’t expect a relegation-battle either just because we occasionally lose to the likes of Norwich. We will battle it out once more to earn our right to play in next season’s money-spinner (Champions League) and fans will in all likelihood still be queuing up to see more of the same next season, even if a fair percentage of them will spend most of the time moaning about doing so.
