The Title Race - 2024/25

How many points to win the league?

  • Total voters
    301
  • Poll closed .
It all depends on whether City get ducked points by the American model favoured by the Premier League. Personally I will give up if we get punished by relegation or a massive points deduction, particularly because the Scum got away with murder
 
bridgeno1 said:
So this is what Opta has as final positions and points scored this season. City have an 81% chance of the title, Arsenal 13%. Hmmm. Arsenal to get 80 points only? Not sure but let's see.

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We've had historically high Premier League winners/runners up in recent years, but 81 is still not that unusual for the second placed team. City have been a total outlier in terms of consistency.

Arsenal didn't manage 80+ for fifteen seasons, and it's far from a guarantee that they'd go up again after last year. There was a reason why 3 titles in a row was such an achievement, and they're equally likely to drop off a little, as they are to do the "one last push" and go that big higher.
 
bluenova said:
We've had historically high Premier League winners/runners up in recent years, but 81 is still not that unusual for the second placed team. City have been a total outlier in terms of consistency.

Arsenal didn't manage 80+ for fifteen seasons, and it's far from a guarantee that they'd go up again after last year. There was a reason why 3 titles in a row was such an achievement, and they're equally likely to drop off a little, as they are to do the "one last push" and go that big higher.
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Yeah makes sense. I think Arsenal's current fixtures are vital - Villa away (won), Brighton home and then Spurs and City away. If they lost both the Spurs and City games it could well set Arsenal on a very negative trajectory, as could injuries to Saliba/Saka etc. Win the Spurs game and draw or win at the Etihad and the opposite could happen I guess, as could a big transfer between now and Friday.
 
One point that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that I think it's very, very difficult to go through to the end of the campaign in a tight title race where there's no margin for error and also win the Champions League. In 2018/19, where we won 14 in a row at the end of the PL season to hold off Liverpool, we got knocked out of the CL in the quarter-finals. Ditto last season, where closed out the PL with nine straight wins to finish ahead of Arsenal.

If we'd had a couple of extra CL semi-final matches to fit in during the closing weeks of the campaign, there's every chance in my view we could have slipped up somewhere and gifted our rivals the league title. That said, I reckon both times we'd have had a pretty decent shot at winning the CL instead, with wretched fortune having contributed to each of the CL exits.

In 2022/23, on the way to the treble, we got lucky with a couple of things in the April. The first is that we drew Sheffield United in the FA Cup semi, which fell between the two legs of the CL quarter-final tie against Bayern. I don't think we could have rotated so heavily against far stronger opposition in the form of either Brighton or the rags yet still won the other semi-final. And Arsenal obligingly blew up in the title race, handing us the prize when we still had three PL matches to play.

Anyway, after seeing the 35-year trophy drought from start to finish between 1976 and 2011, I just count myself lucky that we seem set to continue challenging on all fronts in the near future. We may win some and lose others, but that's life. The main thing is that it's just a fantastic time to be a blue.
 
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