Paolo Boffetta – Why The Top 6 Will Be A Real Dust Up In The Premier League This Season
I have to take my hat off to the brilliant Paolo Boffetta who, doing a podcast we did a couple of years ago, predicted that the Premier League would have a season like we are having now, at some point in the future. At the time Paolo was talking about how each year it seemed that a couple of the big clubs would falter and that meant that the others could take advantage, yet this couldn’t go on forever. He was of course absolutely right and he knew that at some stage or another we’d have a league where any of the top 6 could win it, and here we are.
Just The Right Amount
As we all know, looking at a team on paper is absolutely nothing like watching them on the pitch and you have to take a great deal of factors into consideration when you are deciding which team is better than another. What needed to happen for such an even season to come along was that a certain number of teams needed to be playing at around 75% and other teams would come up to 125%, and that is just what has happened. For example Manchester Cit and Liverpool don’t yet look as dominant as they once did, whereas Spurs and Everyone are playing well beyond what is expected.
The Bottom Winners
Another reason why this is taking place and why it is so hard to pick a winner this year is that the bottom clubs are just so good that they are having a huge impact on what happens up at the top of the table. The reason why so many state the Premier League to be the best in the world is this, on any given day, any team can beat another. With the exception of perhaps Sheffield United, every team in this league is to be feared.
Established
It is always nice to see some level of consistency in the league when it comes to managers and with the exception perhaps of Spurs and Mourinho who only came in this time last year, all the managers of the top 6 clubs have been there for some time. This means that they have their teams at their best, they know them well and the teams are, and should, be playing at the level and in the style that the managers want, this is a very important factor in why this will be such a closely fought league.
Ultimately it is just harder for teams, no matter what they are spending, to win titles year after year as they used to in the past. A lot of this is because the money that clubs have is higher than ever before which means that every one is able to buy big, and over the years certain clubs like Spurs and Leicester have managed to catch up with the rest of the league leaders.
