Fun debate, isn’t it? Which is the best Premier League team of all time? We’ve got ourselves a top 10 for you to disagree with here.
Some (pretty fluid) ground rules. We’ve gone for a single season, but obviously plenty of these teams had multiple seasons of greatness. We’ve tried to pinpoint the absolute peak season, which was fun because we got to leave out the Treble winners. Oh yeah – that’s because this is specifically Premier League. Our League. The proper stuff. None of that foreign muck.
When two or more iterations of the same team are included, we’ve applied arbitrary but we like to think fair rules about whether there has been enough evolution for them to be a significantly different or separate side. So we couldn’t just cheat and have United 99 and United 2000. Consider theirs a shared entry if you like. Or don’t. Up to you.
One thing we absolutely haven’t used to determine the rankings is the drab strict numbers of final points totals. For one thing, the league has changed a lot over 30 years with more and more points hoarded at the top these days in football’s own sordid little version of trickle-down economics, while for another we obviously know better than such drudgery as results. We’re also quite strict here that by definition the best teams will all be teams who won the title, and going purely on points muddies that.
Anyway, here’s our list…
10) Arsenal 1997/98
P38 W23 D9 L6 GF68 GA33 Pts 78
There are plenty of contenders for the 10th spot on this list. The dreamers would probably opt for Leicester’s miracle men, which would be fair enough. But there is no denying that literally everyone else was crap that year and, quite simply, we don’t think that Leicester side beats any of the other sides on this list, or – crucially – this Arsenal one.
There’s also wider context to consider. This Arsenal side is a vitally important one in the whole Premier League story. Without Arsene Wenger snaffling the title – and The Double – in his first full season we might never have had the rivalry with United and Ferguson that became such a defining feature of the Premier League’s first decade. It might well also have just meant United winning the title every single year, which would have been dreadful dull. They didn’t even have a nonsense like Erling Haaland to make that interesting.
Arsenal had been in the post-George Graham doldrums for a few years but did a couple of very important things in August…
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