Ranking things across eras — teams, players, or anything — is a fool’s errand. How do you compare Tom Brady to Johnny Unitas? George Mikan to Shaquille O’Neal? Soccer’s no different. Club rosters are far more cosmopolitan than they used to be, wins are worth three points instead of two, and money disparities have created a far less even playing field at the club level (not that it was ever totally even). How would we possibly go about comparing the 1968 Manchester United team that won the European Cup, to the Chelsea team that did the same in 2020-21? It’s pretty much impossible.
We’re going to do it anyway, of course, and while there’s no perfect way to attempt this exercise, that’s never stopped this fool before. So first things first: let’s define the basis of the rankings themselves.
If you wanted to simply grade teams by point totals or points per game, then you’re going to end up with the 2017-18 and 2018-19 Manchester City and 2018-19 and 2019-20 Liverpool teams atop a “Best Ever” list, and it would be difficult to argue with that. If you wanted to order teams by resume and accomplishment, then the treble-winning 1998-99 Manchester United and unbeaten (but with many ties) 2003-04 Arsenal will likely take the top spots, followed in succession by England’s other European champs.
Either approach would be fine. Hell, they might be better than the path I chose, but I wanted to try to add something interesting to the conversation.
We know the recent City and Liverpool teams have been awesome, but they’ve been playing in an era of great financial disparity. The distance between the top and bottom teams in the Premier League is massive compared to how it once was: the standard deviation for points per game was in the 0.2s as recently as 1992-93, but it was up to 0.55 in 2018-19, meaning the average variation from team to team is far greater than it was in a different era.
We expect the best teams to be better (and richer) now, so what was really the bigger…
Source : espn
