Quote Originally Posted by HCZ_Reborn View Post
PSG don’t have the best squad not even close


And yes I generally believe the club with the best at the very least first XI win the prizes in the league, in a knockout competition that’s less of a certainty because you can win every game up to the semi final but if you have one off game you’re out all the same.

Arsenal are 2nd in my view as a result of having a better squad than the 18 teams below us yes. Chelsea have a squad full of decent players but mainly ageing players who aren’t performing….the situation the club is in is down to a mixture of Boehly and players who are just not performing (I believe Chelsea should be top six with their squad)

I think the power we ascribe to managers/coaches to affect results is vastly overstated. It’s hard to guage how good a manager Pep is because he’s throughout his managerial career always had the best material to work with. You could argue he’s underperformed with Bayern and in Europe with City.

Obviously a club like Man City will want a coach like Guardiola over say Frank Lampard, but when you have the squad they have it’s still 5-10% at most of the difference.

They have top quality in every position and depth. We have good quality in almost every position and less quality in depth


Sometimes you do get a manager that can get more out of a team than they appear capable of, and in that regard you’d have to look to Eddie Howe…they have a good spine of Isak, Guimares, Botman and Pope as well as players like Almiron. But they have been set up to be compact and devastating on the break. Most pundits make them favourites to beat us on Sunday but I absolutely do not believe they have a better team/squad than us and that will be borne out by the fact that we will finish above them at the end of the season.

Despite the fact that I think recruitment in central midfield has been lacking, we have very good players. Yes I think Saliba, Partey, Martinelli, Saka and Odegaard would get into almost any other side….the system helps but it doesn’t change the fact that these are good, capable players better than most others in the premier league currently (with the exception of Man City)
Yeah, PSG are probably not close to having the best players in the world. I mean how can they when they only have the most expensive player in the world playing for them. Or what about the 2nd most expensive player in the world, oh he plays for them too. Eff it, maybe we need to find out who the best player at the last World Cup was, darn it, he plays for them too. What about their last game, I mean their last starting lineup....no, again it only contained 3 WC semi finalist and 2 QF, surley some team on this earth must have fielded only WC winners last week? No?

Alright lets get serious, to closely equate where you finish in the league to the quality of players you have available in a squad is a bit lazy if you ask me. I mean lets use us an example; we added Jesus, Zin, Viera, Saliba , Jorginho, Trossard and recently Kiwor to our 1st team this season. According to you, none of them are among the truly exceptional players that are better than most of what the opposition have except Saliba. So largely our success this season has been achieved with the same set of players we had last season who finished an uncompetitive 5th. So are we saying our league position last season misrepresented the quality of our players seeing as the same set of players are suddenly better than everyone else except Man City?

Its confusing and gets more confusing considering the fact that Chelsea spent an extra £600m+ to ensure their team remained better than us, who they finished ahead of last season. Yes you point out that they have ageing players, but they stayed and £600m worth of EXTRA talent was added.... should that probably not to a neutral person suggest they have a better squad of players than they did last season when they finished ahead of us?

And then we have the "anomaly" of the same Chelsea, a top six side according to you, being considerably below the likes of Fulham, Brentford, Villa and Brighton (non top 6 side)... surely if the quality of players is so closely linked to League position, the variance should not be this much?

I mean is not safer and probably more accurate to err on the side of history that shows a teams performance can fluctuate even with the same set of players. Can't we simply say players can under/over perfom in a particular season without that necessarily affecting their quality. Xhaka is playing great now, but any poll of Gooners would definitely still sell him off and get someone else doing his job. Maybe it because we've watched him for 10 years, so we recognise an anomaly when we see it. Or it could just be prejudice, though I still feel its the former.

Now getting back to the power we ascribe to managers, I could not disagree with you more. I could use Chelsea again as an example but lets look at Villa . Gerard left this season with almost a 1/3 of their games played and only a point above the relegation zone. With just over 20 games under Emery they are already chasing Europe. Gerard's Villa played 12 games and only had 2 wins....Emery, using the same team has played 21 games and mastered 13 wins ( his 1st win was his first game against Man U BTW). Gerrard used a year to get 13 wins in 40 games, Emery has matched it in 5 months! He has used the same set of players only adding 2 players this January at the combined cost of less than 20m. Villa are scoring in every game and defending better than they ever had. (showing that be learnt from his mistakes with us). Coaches make significant differences and they don't need the best players to do this, or are we really going to say the Villa players given to Emery are better than what Lampard was given with Chelsea?

It all matters, and I am certain if you give Lampard :cough: sorry, I mean a poor manager the Citeh team, he would not come close to winning the league this year, even if he had Messi on the bench.