Herbert Chapman at the Arsenal: the changes made for the 1st season

Here is the story so far…

• 1: Taking over from failure
• 2: Approaching a 100th anniversary at Arsenal of mega-importance.
• 3: The Arsenal that Knighton left behind
• 4: Knighton is removed
• 5:  A  new manager
• 6: What happened to Chapman at Leeds?
• 7: Success at Huddersfield, and concern at Arsenal
• 8. Why did Chapman leave successful Huddersfield
• 9: Arsenal wait for the right moment
• 10: Why Knighton had to go
• 11: Chapman – the man who moved from club to club
• 12: “What made him such an amazing manager
• 13: The Man of Revolutions in a period of no rights
• 14: Chapman reforms Leeds City and is banned from football for life
• 15: The making of Huddersfield Town
• 16: What went wrong at Leeds?
• 17: Chapman banned from football for life, but football goes on
• 18: Chapman wins the league at Huddersfield
• 19: Chapman leaves Huddersfield and replaces Knighton at Arsenal
• 20: How Arsenal moved from 20th to 2nd in one season under Chapman

By Tony Attwood

The league table at the end of Chapman’s first season (1925/26) shows Arsenal second in the league, which compares amazingly with where Arsenal had finished the league in the two seasons before that date.

This was an astonishing performance not least if we compare where Arsenal had ended up in the two previous seasons, each time missing relegation by just one place (fortunately for Arsenal just the bottom two going down, with no play offs or any other fancy ways of sorting end of season issues out).

So in one season Chapman had increased wins by 57%, and cut defeats almost in half.   Goals scored were up by 89%, although goals against stayed at or close to the level of the last two Knighton seasons.

To put this into a different context, Arsenal fans were now seeing their team score around twice as many goals a game as the previous season.

So what happened in this first Chapman season?

To take one step back we should perhaps first look at the previous season’s end.  In the final ten games in League Division One under Knighton, Arsenal picked up two wins, one draw and seven defeats.  They scored nine goals (of which five were in one game!) and conceded 16.

And although that win over Burnley with five goals scored sounds rather hopeful, the fact is that Burnley ended up 19th in the league (Arsenal you may recall were 20th) and in conceding 75 goals they had the worst defence in the entire First Division.  Their collapse had been utterly extraordinary, and undoubtedly deserves a volume on its own (and maybe a Burnley supporter or two have put such a volume together, although I have not been able to find it, so perhaps not).

In the first three seasons after football resumed following the end of World War I, Burnley had come 2nd, 1st and 3rd in the First Division.   Then something went seriously wrong for in the following seasons (from 1922/23 through to 1924/25) they came 15th, 17th, 19th and in 1925/26, 20th.   I am sure somewhere someone will have explained why – if you know please do write in and tell the rest of us!.

Arsenal’s change in fortune was just as dramatic although in a different way.  In Knighton’s final years Arsenal had come 17th, 11th, 19th and 20th (the clubs placed 21st and 22nd descending into the second division).  In 1925/26, Chapman’s first season Arsenal came second.

And of course, this achievement had other effects.  In Knighton’s final seasons Arsenal scored 40 and 46 goals.  In Chapman’s first sesaon they scored 87 goals.  However, we do need to put this into a bit of context, for Burnley and Manchester City who were both relegated got 85 goals and 89 goals respectively.

Now this seems strange – until we note that not only did 1925 see the arrival of Herbert Chapman, it also saw the arrival of a new offside law, which reduced the number of opposition players that needed to be behind the ball for a player to be onside.  For this season, for the first time, it was two defenders to be in front of the attacking player, rather than three.  As a result, goals shot up – at both ends of the pitch.

Indeed Burnley and Manchester City, the two clubs that were relegated at the end of Chapman’s first season at Arsenal, each conceded over 100 goals.  Sheffield United who came fifth in the league also scored over 100 goals.

At this time of course Goal Difference was not calculated as a way of separating clubs on the same number of points, but if we did calculate it for this season the range would be between +32 for Huddersfield Town, the champions, down to -23 for relegated Burnley.  Arsenal were on +24.

The 87 goals Arsenal scored was by far and away the highest ever in the first division for Arsenal up to this point although back in 1891 the club had gained promotion from the second division to the first, scoring 91 goals in the process.   The first time Arsenal exceeded this in the First Division was in 1931 in winning the league for the first time under Chapman, when 127 goals were scored in that one 42-match season.

In 1924/5, Knighton’s last season at Arsenal, the top players – and the top scorers – are shown in the table below…  The players marked with an asterisk in this list, also played 27 games or more in the following season.  As we can see only half of the top-performing players from Knighton’s team, managed 27 or more games the following season.

We can then compare this with the top players in Chapman’s first season

In short, in his first season, Chapman not only took the club to an unprecedented second in the league, he more than doubled the number of goals scored from two seasons before (although with some help from the change in the rules about off-side).

The series continues…