Well...yes. We finished 4th
We won more games than anyone outside the top 3.
We lost fewer games than anyone outside the top 3.
We scored more goals than anyone outside the top 3.
We conceded fewer goals than anyone but City, Chelsea and Everton (Liverpool contrived to concede significantly more which, I guess, is why they failed to win the title).
In brief, by every reasonable metric in terms of overall league performance we were about 4th best. The word 'good' is a bit vague but I'd say that's a pretty good team.
And yes, we got 79 points, that's more than in the 97/98 season when we did the Double.
Football has moved on, you need to do better than that to win the title these days, but it's a decent tally, only two fewer than Chelsea and seven fewer than Champions City.
It's the most points we've got since 2008 and, it's also the
smallest gap between ourselves and the champions since 2008.
The bit in bold is significant IMO, I would call that progress.
I'm interested how you would back up the claim that our points total 'means nothing'? Surely in assessing league performance it's pretty key.
We got hammered in the 3 away games against the top 3 (I thought we played well at City actually and on a different day, with a different ref, that would have been closer, I didn't see the Liverpool game but heard we were hopeless, I did see the Chelsea game and we were hopeless!)
Against those sides at home we won one and drew two. Not good enough overall and showed up our title credentials. But the league isn't determined over 3 games, it's over 38. And it's surely better that way round than getting better results in those games and then keep losing to teams we 'should' be beating and overall doing worse. The ideal is both, obviously.
Last year we did seem to make some progress, the league points tally was encouraging and the FA Cup win finally got the monkey off our back about not winning trophies. It seemed like a good platform to push on and whatever you think of Wenger he deserved the chance to lead us on if he wanted to (for his sake he should probably have retired on a high, but there you go). And we seemed to be making good signings in the summer. I'm completely baffled as to how we can suddenly be as crap as we've been this season although it has to be said at the tail end of last season we were struggling through games a bit and maybe that's carried on to this season. We're not good enough to win the title and I agree about the style of football but we're a better team than our results and performances are suggesting so far. I'm a bit baffled at how clueless we're looking tbh.