How much are Arsenal’s injuries responsible for our place in the league.

By Tony Attwood

Sky Sports have presented a list of “days lost” to clubs by players being injured or ill.

It is an interesting list and is combined with a note from Sky that notes that this is fractionally under 10% higher than for the first 26 games last season.

Then they suggest that “the reason for this is a higher rate of squad rotation” this season, although looking at the figures I really can’t see how this works.  Irrespective of whether you put out different teams each week, there are still only 11 players on the pitch each time.

A player might be injured because of the thuggery of the opposition, poor refereeing, not being warmed up properly, not training properly…

So we can see the numbers of players out, but the cause cannot be taken from this.  This seems to be clutching at straws.

But to try and take this further I’ve added some extra columns, and this really now becomes very simple for seven of the clubs in the top ten for injuries are in the bottom half of the league table.

In other words, as a general rule, the lower you are down the league the more injuries you are likely to get.  Or as you sink down the league you pick up injuries.

Pos	Club	League position	Days lost	Percentage of worst	Percentage above the best
1	Liverpool	6	1029	100%	373%
2	Crystal Palace	13	861	84%	312%
3	Newcastle United	17	760	74%	275%
4	Southampton	14	709	69%	257%
5	Sheffield United	20	683	66%	246%
6	Leicester City	3	680	66%	246%
7	Burnley	15	670	65%	243%
8	Manchester City	1	603	59%	218%
9	Leeds United	11	561	55%	203%
10	Brighton and Hove	16	557	54%	202%
11	West Bromwich A	19	554	53%	200%
12	Everton	7	537	52%	195%
13	Manchester United	2	493	48%	179%
14	West Ham United	4	470	47%	170%
15	Tottenham Hots	8	433	42%	156%
16	Wolverhampton	12	428	42%	155%
17	Aston Villa	9	425	41%	154%
18	Fulham	18	413	40%	150%
19	Arsenal	10	354	34%	128%
20	Chelsea	5	276	27%	100%

There is a remarkable range in these figures.  Arsenal have had injuries to a level of only 34% of those of Liverpool this season.  And they have injuries of 128% of the level of Chelsea.

What these figures show is that the number of injuries suffered by Chelsea at the foot of the injury table and of Liverpool at the top, are way out of line with everyone else.

There is a fair amount of bunching of injuries around the middle as we might expect, suggesting again that Chelsea and Liverpool are just way out of line with everyone else.

But then we could say that of Arsenal; with just 354 player days lost Arsenal are way above Chelsea but still they are 19th on the list.

What we can see is that there is no direct relationship between league position and injury level except that as noted, the clubs with the lower levels of injury tend to be higher up the league.

As for the cause, that remains unknown.  Is it playing style, training technique, or sheer good or bad luck?  Under Mr Wenger it was the training technique that was blamed by outsiders, but the data really didn’t add up – it was mostly a case of people highlighting the numbers when things were bad for Arsenal but ignoring them when things were good.

The sadness is that we have not been able to make the most of these low figures for Arsenal injuries by pushing ourselves up the league.  But although there is a negative relationship between position in the league and position in the injury table, it is only general.

Generally the more injuries a club gets the further it slips down the league, and vice versa – but “generally” is the key word.

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