Arsenal the mirage and Liverpool the champions

You could look at this highlight reel and think that Arsenal are a great team. The list of great attacking players is staggering. Van Persie. Lacazette, Jack Wilshire, Andrey Arsharvin, Aaron Ramsay, Santi Cazorla, Samir Nasri, Alexis Sanchez, Granit Xhaka, Mesut Ozil, Tomas Rosicky, Pierre Emerick Aubameyang, Hector Bellarin, Mikel Arteta, Fabregas, Gabriel Martinelli. Nicolas Pépé. And further down the line there was Danny Welbeck. Alex Song, Lukas Podolski, Olivier Giroud, Theo Walcott, and Iwobi.

The malaise of the late Arsene Wenger reign was painful to watch. I started following them in the 2007-08 season, thinking that they were on their way back. They had an axis of Cesc Fabregas, Aleksander Hleb and Mathieu Flamini, who raced to the top of the premiership. But unfortunately, there was an infamous match where Eduardo had his leg broken, and William Gallas threw a fit when a penalty was awarded against him. From then on, it was painful to watch. To be fair to Man United, they had Alex Ferguson's last great team, and deserved to win the league and champion's league that year. But it probably made clear that Arsenal was not going to win the league anytime soon.

From that year onwards, it was a string of many seasons of barely qualifying for the champion's league, and then getting themselves knocked out of the second round. It was an unbearable groundhog day to be an Arsenal fan. 3rd or 4th, then exiting the champion's league second round. There were the three FA cup wins in a row to sweeten the deal, but that was probably the rot. They would be standing still, and other teams would overtake them.

When Arsene Wenger came in, he was a breath of fresh air. For the first 7-8 seasons, he managed to defy gravity. He got some great players in at great prices. He always seemed to buy astutely, and he had an unparalleled knowledge of the best players from the continent. He saw that a few players, like Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry were played out of position, and got them performing at their best for Arsenal.

Then, following the Invincibles season, he somehow contrived to allow the team to be broken up. Truth be told, the Invincibles were a little old. He gambled on kids, believing that he could simply groom youngsters into being Bergkamp and Pires. And even if that didn't work, he seemed content to be doing the same job, hitting the same lowered targets year in year out.

During Wenger's early years, he seemed to have a real competitive advantage over his opponents. His players were fitter, more technical, better able to improvise and think on their feet. Slowly, and little by little, the advantages were eroded away. First, he wasn't able to take advantage of his superior knowledge of the European market to get better players. Then, his players were not the most mentally strong bunch of all. And one of the reasons, I suspect, is how much he allowed them to improvise in a match. The highly improvisional approach could be wonderful to watch when it paid dividends, but it relied too much on all the players to be totally sharp, mentally. It's always easier to be mentally strong when you don't have to think so much, when you're just doing what you were drilled to do, day in day out.

You could see the mental weakness even during Wenger's heyday. The classic example was when they lost the league to Man U during the 1999 treble season, after chasing them so closely for the entire season. And the next two seasons, they made feeble attempts to get back the league title. Finally, Arsenal won the 01-02 season, with half of the invincibles already in shape. It should have been a period of staggering dominance for Arsenal, because Man U were weakened by a few seasons of substandard recruitment. Instead, they contrived to lose the 02-03 league title to Man U, and that was during Man U's relatively barren period of 2001-2006, when they “only” won 3 pieces of silverware.

The move away from Highbury to Emirates stadium seemed to signify the transition from stylish champions to foppish weaklings.

One possible clue is that Arsenal started getting beaten in the transfer market. Arsene Wenger was infamous for stating that he was "close to signing" this or that player. The whole list was pretty shocking, although it also has to be said that very few of these players were up for transfer before 2003. In other words, up until the time when he built his invincibles side, Wenger managed to get who he wanted. Perhaps it's because Chelsea started inflating the market for good players, and Wenger was no longer willing to pay top dollar for top players. Of that list, the only one which could have taken place during the early years when Wenger could seemingly do no wrong was Claude Makalele. Maybe it was the financing of the stadium that cost them, and maybe it was a bad decision to spend so much on a larger stadium when that stadium wasn't going to get you ahead in the revenue stakes. Perhaps things got even worse when David Dein left in 2007 because of his role in Arsenal's recruiting during the time he was there.

Anyway, here's the list. Read it and gawk: Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Didier Drogba, N'golo Kante, Paul Pogba, Gareth Bale, Luis Suarez, Yaya Toure, Claude Makalele, Lionel Messi, Gerard Pique.

Other teams caught up in different ways. Sam Allardyce pioneered a more scientific approach towards football, one that was based on analytics, and more well rehearsed moves. Jose Mourinho played a more cynical form of football. One that could be attacking, but just as likely could be super defensive. Chelsea got funded to the tune of billions of dollars. Chelsea and Man City ended up becoming the wealthy aristocrats of the English Premier League. In the 15 years between 2004 and 2019, they won a combined total of 9 titles. It's only because of the astonishing ability of Alex Ferguson's Man U winning 5 titles, and a freakish fluke of Leicester winning in 2016, which broke the dominance of those two clubs. (Plus Manchester United, being one of the best supported clubs in the world, are also quite rich, without the need for cash injections.)

Perhaps if Arsene Wenger had ceded his position to a hungrier, and more innovative coach, it would have put Arsenal in better stead for the future. As of right now, they may have gotten their man in Mikel Arteta, it's too soon to tell. Mikel Arteta is a disciple of Pep Guardiola, but it's hard to really know how good he is.

Now, the styles of the best teams in the EPL are dominated by very heavily planned and highly technical game plans. There's a lot of pressing here and there. A lot of positional discipline. A lot of defending from the front and carefully rehearsed attacking. There are approaches dominated by the coaches Guardiola, Pochettino and Klopp, and not surprisingly they are the three most admired coaches in the EPL. Nowadays even Mourinho can't keep up, because his tactics, a lot of which revolved around trying to stifle the opponent's game plan, seemed helpless against the new ethos of attacking with overwhelming force.

It used to be a group of four teams which always took the champion's league places. (Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool). Now it became a group of 6 which rotated the 4 places amongst themselves (those 4 plus Tottenham and Man City). And it could well be possible that Arsenal drops out of this elite group. At least when Liverpool and Man U drop out of this group, they find their way back. I don't know about Arsenal.

And that leaves up with Liverpool. Inexplicably, they managed to buy good players and transform all of them into world class players. Jurgen Klopp just seemed to have a great and innovative idea for what to do with those guys. “ In this Liverpool team full-backs are attackers, midfielders are defenders, wingers are goalscorers, centre-forwards chase and counterpress.” As an attacking force, they are irresistable. I think that Liverpool as irresistable attacking force was given a preview during that 2014 season where Luis Suarez was their best player. Nobody from that team is around anymore, but the approach is similar, and this time around, more solid.

The question, then, is whether they could get Liverpool to carry on and turn into a dynasty. Alex Ferguson was one of the first to recognise that Jurgen Klopp could be a great manager, possibly as good as himself. At Dortmund, he was able to win the Bundesliga twice, and remains the only team other than Bayern Munich to have won the league since 2009. He got Borussia Dortmund to the finals of the Champion's League, only to leave 2 years later because he felt that he had pushed them far enough.

Liverpool will almost certainly be able to win yet another title in the near future. But how long can Klopp hang around, and can he build Liverpool into another dynasty in the manner of the boot room? Liverpool has won their first league title in 30 years. It's hard to overlook the enormity of this achievement. This is the first breaking of a league title drought in a long time that was achieved without a wealthy benefactor. There was Man U winning after 20+ years, there was Leeds winning the last pre-premier league league, in around 20 years. And of course there was the Leicester fluke, taking advantage of the time when all the other teams were lying fallow or screwing up. Chelsea, Blackburn and Man City broke long droughts, but they were bankrolled. Liverpool are hardly a poor club, but this has to be some monumental achievement.