awooga83
Similarly, at the start of a league season you can lose games and still go on to win the title. Your argument essentially boils down to there being a margin for error in the Champions League league stage because you can lose games and still qualify. Well, there's also a margin for error in the Premier League: we could have lost to Coventry and still win the title. There is a huge margin for error in the PL given that nobody wins every game and the average number of games where points are dropped by the winner is 10+. There's an even greater margin for error for clubs whose objective is to qualify for Europe and clubs who want to avoid relegation? They could lost most games in the season, put together a run in the last 5 games and survive.
You're looking at this through an Arsenal-centric lens when we're talking about jeopardy across the competitions as a whole. There are two teams involved in every match, and most Premier League games don't involve Arsenal. We played Burnley when they were already relegated and had nothing to play for, and Palace on the final day in similar circumstances. There are also plenty of late-season games between mid-table sides where neither team has anything meaningful riding on the result, yet goals scored in those games aren't suddenly discounted.
So I don't accept the premise that every Premier League game inherently carries enormous jeopardy simply because it's a league game. That's quite evidently untrue.
If the argument is that CL games count for less because there's a margin for error and you can lose some while still achieving the objective, then logically that principle also applies to individual PL games. The difference may be one of degree, sure, but that doesn't change the crux of my argument: there are Premier League games that carry little or no jeopardy for one or both teams involved. Anyway, I've made my argument, and it's quite clear that the same logic can be applied to the PL., and that it really just demonstrates the absurdity of the position, because no one is going to start discounting goals scored against relegation candidates while giving extra weight to goals against top-six sides. Once you start deciding which goals "count" based on the quality of the opposition or the jeopardy of the game, you're applying an arbitrary weighting that nobody consistently applies elsewhere, and on this basis, neither do you.
