TambourineMan Liverpool better = more points
Liverpool worse = less points
Liverpool more points = harder for us to win
Liverpool less points = easier for us to win
QuincyAbeyie Well, I haven't argued it has no effect. That would be silly.
I'm arguing against the emphasis on what other clubs are doing in our reckoning.
Yes, Arsenal should recognise we're playing in a football league with other clubs, and if any of those other clubs accrues more points than Arsenal we don't win the league.
During the window Arsenal has to set specific rivals aside and go back to understanding how the details of player trading can efficiently improve Arsenal's general results.
The control of our general results ends up a dialectic question, and throws up contradictory valences.
Arsenal can only control its specific outcome, not those of other clubs which yes, do affect the final league outcome.
Arsenal's specific outcome (but not the league winner) is determined by all Arsenal's league results against clubs in general.
Any specific Arsenal result against another club has an incremental importance to Arsenal's outcome.
Specific results between clubs other than Arsenal have very little importance to Arsenal's outcome.
Accumulated results of other specific clubs (for example when a mediocre club ends up "on the beach" near the end of the season) develop a lesser, subtly mediated importance to Arsenal's outcome.
It's true the better results any specific rival club is accumulating, the greater Arsenal's motive to efficient improvement of its outcome will have to have been throughout the season to exceed these better results when they crystallise in the rival's own outcome.
But then the aggregate of all these motives induced by rivals' results is that Arsenal must maximise its own results at all times without reference to any specific rival club, full stop, and start doing so from before the very first match of every season, no matter what any other club does.
The real constraint Arsenal faces is reproducing these maximal results only for itself as a football club, for season after season, subject to the mortality of Arsenal's players, the limits of its revenues, and the distracting rise and fall of rival clubs' fortunes.
This in turn demands Arsenal sustain an entirely different kind of self-generated motivation without reference to its rival clubs.
The complicated side of such a free-standing discipline to success is that it incrementally loses sight of the problem of winning individual league seasons, and becomes sustaining success for its own sake but under a new definition, as in the Wenger years.
One example of this is when a club lets a represented chronology of seasons shape its strategy, speaking of "rebuilding" because it imagines substituting any immediate outcome for a suspended image of greater and sustained long term success. This has been Arsenal throughout the Project™, and the habit and dogma of proper rebuilding Arsenal has acquired now risks its stagnation as Almost FC.
Manchester United has an opposite, even more problematic imbalance, as Rashford recently noted:
“People say we’ve been in a transition for years but to be in a transition you have to start the transition. The actual transition has not started yet."
So United, the club that has refused to rebuild, ends up appearing to be forced into a perpetual but denied rebuilding. United's leaders still talk with a belligerent deficiency of self-awareness about winning a league title before 2030.
Arsenal's submission to a truer rebuilding has involved creative self-destruction as part of which an impressive cathartic malaise took hold at one stage. It's fitting that one name given to this miserable ordeal was "Arsenalisation".
There's something about the occasionally disturbing sterility and erasure of the Arteta era that was vital to the relative progress Arsenal has made since "Arsenalisation". The outsized cardboard cutout of Wenger Arteta had installed at Colney incarnates the concept: not Arsenal itself with all of its foibles, but its hyperreal facsimile that plays the grimly effective almost-football of an algorithmic drone swarm: juego de herradura.
So it is that each season, at the end of another cycle of 38 matches, Arsenal and its fans are compelled to acknowledge the results some other rival club has been accumulating ... unless, of course, Arsenal wins the league, in which case our glorious real prize will be to continue ignoring every other club and its fans, as it will turn out we've correctly been doing.
If you're the tortoise you never see Achilles. You just win. We need to become the tortoise. The irony is that no one knows the way of the tortoise better than Achilles: and here Arsenal is, having finished second for three seasons running.
