100 seasons in the top division: 1988/89 part two – winning the league
By Tony Attwood
In the summer of 1988 Arsenal let two players leave. Graham Rix went to Caen on a free transfer, and Seve Williams went to Luton Town for £300,000. In addition, Kenny Samson left the club in December and went to Newcastle United.
In the last piece (linked above) we noted that Arsenal won the opening game of the 1988/89 season 5-1, away from home. Sadly, for the first home game a week later, around 35,400 turned up at Highbury only to find Arsenal beaten 2-3 by Aston Villa. And although, of course, no one knew it at the time, this was a very poor Villa side – they had just come up from the second tier and soon faded away in Division One, ending up 17th.
Indeed, after five games, that win at Highury was still their only win of the season and they stood 11th. Arsenal were slightly better in seventh place.
But then Arsenal started on a run of 11 games in league and league cup unbeaten (including six wins), which took them to mid-November.
However, by then, the old Arsenal failing of having games that should have ended as Arsenal victories ending as draws seemed to have eaten deep into the fabric of the club. Worse, the players seemed to have lost the ability to score winning goals. Between 25 October and 12 November, Arsenal played five games and drew three of them
There was a warning sign in those results, but the full extent of the problem did not get seen until 23 November, when Arsenal lost 1-2 to Liverpool in the League Cup. That didn’t really matter of course; it was just the League Cup, but it was followed by a defeat and two draws in the League. Arsenal were starting to look fragile.
However, on 17 December Arsenal beat Manchester United 2-1 at home – the start of a run of nine games unbeaten. And indeed results were positive, and defeats only to Nottingham Forest and Derby County left the table at the end of the season, reading
| Pos | Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arsenal | 38 | 22 | 10 | 6 | 73 | 36 | +37 | 76 |
| 2 | Liverpool | 38 | 22 | 10 | 6 | 65 | 28 | +37 | 76 |
| 3 | Nottingham Forest[ | 38 | 17 | 13 | 8 | 64 | 43 | +21 | 64 |
| 4 | Norwich City | 38 | 17 | 11 | 10 | 48 | 45 | +3 | 62 |
| 5 | Derby County | 38 | 17 | 7 | 14 | 40 | 38 | +2 | 58 |
There was no European football as a reward, as the rioting by Liverpool supporters had seen to that, but Arsenal still had won the league for the first time in 18 years. During that spell, they had come second just once, but had in consecutive seasons dropped as low as 16th and 17th. The recovery had taken a long time to come together, but now finally, here it was. There were celebrations for this victory, and hope for the future.
For Arsenal had achieved this feat by scoring more goals than in the famous Double season – the last time they had won the league back in 1971, and indeed only once in all those years (1983/4) had they scored more. What’s more, this was also the meanest defence since the Double season – although with all such stats we do have to remember that Arsenal now only played 38 games a season as opposed to the 42 games up to 1987.
This now meant that since that Double Season of 1970/71, Arsenal had won the FA Cup, the League Cup and finally, the League. It had taken a while, but Arsenal had got there.
But there was another point here as Arsenal had won the League Cup, been runners-up in the League Cup and won the First Division in three consecutive seasons – the sort of Arsenal achievement that hadn’t really been seen since the 1930s. This was not to say that anyone was comparing George Graham as manager with Herbert Chapman, but with two trophies in three seasons, it certainly felt as if Arsenal were reclaiming their place at, or at least near, the top table of English football.
Indeed, this season felt like more than a title – because with the evolution of the George Graham team, it felt like the start of a serious challenge to the northwestern domination of 1st division football.
Since 1976, Liverpool had won the 1st Division nine times. Added to that, it was noticed by those who felt the capital city should be putting up more of a fight in such matters, that Everton had won the league twice in the last five years. Worse from a southern perspective, teams from the north west had come runners-up eight times in these years.
London’s challenge to this domination (which was further bulked up by the occasional rise of a Midlands team such as Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest) consisted of Queens Park Rangers and Watford.
Looked at another way, this was the eighth consecutive season that Liverpool had come either first or second, and in fact, since 1975/76 that club had either been first or second in every season except 1980/81. While of course, we all wanted Arsenal at the top in each competition, there was, I clearly recall, a feeling that there really was a need for teams from the south of the country to do more to step up to the challenge.
The media, of course, picked up on this, but then ran stories saying that it would be pretty difficult for any London or indeed southern team to win the league again, because life in the south had become too soft. Footballers who lived away from London were not tempted by the nightlife, we were told. I am not sure anyone believed it, but the media quite liked to run that sort of story, and it meant that the journalists didn’t actually have to go out and do any real investigating.
Indeed stories linking football and London went back to the era after the first world war, when it was said that clubs from the rest of the country liked having matches in the capital city, as after the game their players would be free to visit the West End which in the inter-war period was notorious as being the centre of prostitution, with the players from the north not being required to return home until catching the last train out of Kings Cross.
There is, of course, no evidence to support the fact that northern clubs liked to come to London for this reason, and it may well have been part of the anti-Arsenal propaganda campaign that sought to denigrate the club in relation to its election to the first division upon the expansion of that league after the First World War. On the other hand, that might just have persuaded a few club chairmen to vote Arsenal into the first division in 1919!
But to return to 1988/89, there were 20 clubs in the league, but the plan was hatched then for the League to return to its original 22 club size for the 1991/2 season in order to increase the number of high-profile fixtures before the “Big Five” finally did break away and form their new super league (eventually called “The Premier League”.)
The thinking from the point of view of what, at the time, were seen as a “big five” clubs (Arsenal, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur) was that they needed more financial independence by getting more money for the clubs whose games were being shown on TV, rather than sharing the money between all the clubs.
Eventually, it was Greg Dyke of London Weekend Television who suggested that the only way for English football to keep up with developments in Italy and Spain was for the big clubs to take control of their own affairs – and play fewer games.
The breakaway did not occur until 1992/3 and probably would not have happened had the FA, who saw the Football League as their rivals, proposed that the 1991/2 season would have an expanded 1st division of 22 clubs. The Premier League continued with 22 clubs until 1994/5 For 1995/6 it was reduced once more to 20 clubs at which size it has stayed ever since.
So to be clear, the top league had 22 clubs up to 1987/8 Then 20 clubs up to 1990/91. Then 22 clubs until 1994/5. Then 20 clubs until – well, you get the idea.
As for 1988/9 Arsenal lost only two of their last 13 games, and ended, as the table above shows, with the same number of points and the same goal difference as Liverpool, taking the title because they had scored more goals than Liverpool. But it was not a saunter to the end of the season for the club, as they lost at home to Derby County, drew at home with Wimbledon, and then beat Liverpool 2-0 away from home on 25 May to take the title.
Next time – 1989/90 and the arrival of a giant screen on the pitch to help us watch the Tottenham v Arsenal game.