Arsenal and Mikel Arteta dragged into the old net spend argument now…
Arsenal have spent a whole lot of money to win the square root of sod all. And when the Liverpool fans start talking net spend…
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Football365 are muppets
Stop slagging man city off and all the rubbish that halland is leaving in 2025 because all you do is put fake news.
Craig
(Okay Craig. Consider it done – Ed)
Slot’s not Klopp, but we’re happy
This seems a little petty but I’m having one of those days, so petty it will be. We’re now half way into a 12-game run that was slated to define our season.
On here recently there was an article – ‘Why Liverpool could lose 10 of their next 12 games with Arsenal, Man City, Madrid awaiting Slot’s side’ as the metadata title, but with the headline title of ‘Arsenal, City, Madrid top three: Ranking difficulty of opponents in gruesome Liverpool fixture list’.
I remember reading it and thinking it totally undervalued a club who until maybe April last year, were not out of the question of a quadruple. Yes Klopp moved on, yes history suggests there could be problems, but it didn’t really reflect the fact that the core of the club remained. This was also a club who’d undergone open heart surgery on a new midfield and would no doubt be better a year on.
A quick review of those results would be as follows –
Game 12) TBC
Game 11) Liverpool won
Game 10) Liverpool won
Game 9) TBC
Game 8) TBC
Game 7) Liverpool won
Game 6) Liverpool won
Game 5) TBC
Game 4) Liverpool won
Game 3) TBC
Game 2) Liverpool drew
Game 1) TBC
Half way through, and we’ve dropped 2 points, and that was in our second hardest game on paper.
Thoughts on upcoming games –
Game 1 – Real Madrid – have lost 2 out of 4 Champions League games and aren’t firing in the league. They aren’t a form team presently, so there is a big chance of backlash.
Game 3 – Man City – currently on a 3 game losing streak and are below Liverpool in the league and Champions League. Means nothing in November but is nice to see.
Game 5 – Newcastle – mix bag of a season and currently well off the pace.
Slot deserves a lot of credit for how he has handled the transition, as do the players. While we could still lose the remaining 6 games on that list, I think the club is in better shape than expected.
This isn’t to say we’ll win the league or anything, it’s simply to say we are on the right path and that’s all you can ask for, at any football club. And to be honest, I’d take where we are today, over where anyone else is presently.
Barry (Perth)
And another thing…
Not an Arsenal fan but also don’t have any tribal grudges either. One of my best mates growing up was (and is) an Arsenal fan so caught plenty of games under Wenger.
My gripe is Arteta.
I usually don’t care for the opinions of people who speak about clubs they don’t support – there are so many intangibles around what matters when you are a fan, that someone who isn’t, misses a lot of content. But here I am regardless.
From a distance, I don’t get him.
Rough stats are he’s been at the Club as a manager since December 2019 (coming up to 5 years) and he has finished in the league –
19/20: 8th (half season)
20/21: 8th
21/22: 5th
22/23: 2nd
23/24: 2nd
24/25: TBC
Looks like progress no doubt. Lots of putting the pressure on between 22/23 and 23/24. Used to be a joke Spurs winning the “putting the pressure on” trophy, but I digress.
Trophies won –
19/20: FA Cup
20/21: Charity Shield
23/24: Charity Shield
So into his 6th season at the club, and can point to a new manager bounce FA Cup win, and the season opener that only matters if you’re point scoring about who is the biggest biggest club. I don’t have the time to work out if there are finals they made and lost, but possibly there are.
Best Champions League finish –
23/24: QF exit
And finally, over that time what is the net spend under Arteta –
€664 million (According to Transfermarkt)
So to summarise, he finished 2nd twice, won one major trophy, and only Chelsea and Man United have a higher net spend.
Arsenal fans, why are you so unwavering in your support?
Barry (Perth)
MAILBOX: Arsenal and their ‘rancid unicorn turd’ will win nothing; bring in Xabi Alonso
Five places or four?
I was going to write in with a mail this week pointing out that we should be talking about finishing in the top 5 instead of top 4. Last season’s Newcastle and Man United fuelled aberration aside, England has pretty much always been in the top 2 in Uefa’s coefficient, so surely this year would be the same?
Quite glad I didn’t send it now.
Mike, LFC, Dubai
The new CL format: Is it a winner?
We’re now at the half way stage of the new Champions League format and probably still too early to judge if it’s a success or a failure. Detractors say it’s just a new contrived way to ensure the “top” teams progress to the knock out phases. But have they ever really struggled anyway? There may have been the odd surprise but generally the last 16 included the teams expected to qualify at the start, sometimes in 2nd place but qualify non the less.
Where I do think it’s already being a success is for the “minnows”, last season, the bottom 8 teams won a total of 5 games out of a possible 48, this season so far, the bottom 12, 8 plus the additional 4, have won 6, in the same number of games. Not a staggering increase but they do have another 48 with a possibility of a win.
This is fantastic for supporters of these teams as even though their wins may be against other “minnows”, they are still a win in the Champions League. Fans of the 4 additional teams also get to welcome possible European giants. Take RB Salzburg, would their fans rather see home and away games against Inter Milan and Benfica, as last season, or single games against Real Madrid, Atleti, PSG and Leverkusen?
Howard (9-24 games could be interesting) Jones
High-flying co-commentators
It occurred to me that I haven’t seen any mailbox entry concerning the insane decision by TNT to invite Noel Gallagher onto the commentary team for City’s game against Sporting. Forgetting for a minute his complete lack of football expertise this is the world’s least charismatic rock star with the worst kind of soporific Mancunian accent, it was dreadful!
Apart from Will Ford reporting on Danny Murphy’s butthurt this seems to have passed us all by like it’s normal. Perhaps due to how obviously terrible an idea it was we’ve collectively thought, like Salt Bae at the World Cup final, ‘they’ll never try that again’. But what if they do? What if the future of football coverage is celebrity co-commentators?
Will our ears be infected with Piers Morgan at Arsenal games, or Simon Cowell at Brighton. Might we get Ricky Tomlinson and Slyvester Stallone teaming up to describe the Merseyside derby, or Mick Hucknall blasting out ‘If you don’t know me by now’ as United slump to another embarrassing defeat.
I suppose in the abstract it’s intriguing, who wouldn’t want to hear Rock Balboa try to pronounce Abdoulaye Doucoure, but excruciating in reality and it’s just the kind of idea you can imagine TV execs wetting themselves over.
Dave, Manchester
Fake contributors could not laugh this hard
So…I highly doubt F365 would go even the shortest of lengths involved to maintain dummy contributor accounts. What a ludicrous notion. That said, I’ve seen the accusations bandied about (especially in the comments sections) and definitely had a few pointed my way. Always thought it must be because I write in from Los Angeles instead of, I dunno… Formby ?
Well, I’ve never felt anyone has had to post their bona fides to contribute to this mailbox. It won’t blue tick-verify any of this stuff just because I assure you I’m not plastic, that I’ve arrived Lime Street Station more times than the Hollywood Bowl, or been sat on three of four sides of Anfield, both before and after the new Main Stand went up.
I can’t prove I’ve traveled on our away fixtures too, and haven’t missed more than a half-dozen matches on telly since my adolescence. I can’t prove that despite die-hard allegiance I’ve never gone full kit w*nker, here nor abroad. Also can’t prove I’m not a bot, that these aren’t AI-generated paragraphs.
All I can presently verify in this mailbox is that I am genuinely entertained and that my laughter at you is always, always real. Like when I laugh at recent letters where one by one, so many deeply deluded fans slowly come round to hoping / believing 3-4-3 is viable when we (and a host of others) swerved Ruben Amorim precisely because of his insistence on an outmoded system.
Or when I laugh because we passed on Amorim as Arne Slot was the clearly better choice, but that Slot was only available because he himself had avoided Spurs like the plague a year prior. I laugh even harder at the mere thought of Spurs… at them finally winning a Carabao or something, then placing it under lights in their glorious cheese room next to an Audi Cup. Lately I’ve laughed hardest at Everton uprooting to the docks, because the shadow we cast across Stanley Park blotted out their sun for decades.
No… no prawn sandwiches here, no fake accounts, and definitely no quarter. Only the drinking of all your milkshakes and the dying from the laughter as I wipe my very real mouth. I write into this mailbox as true as they come, and when I’m knives out laughing at your clubs (as you try to do mine I’m sure), it doesn’t get any more genuine.
Eric, Los Angeles CA (Also haven’t seen a single Liverpool letter in any mailbox this season make mention of league title or seventh European Cup. Real contributors… fake news.)