United breaks through for English lineal soccer honors in 2020-21

Manchester United has had little about which to boast since the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson in 2013. In 2020-21, though, United finished second in the Premiership and won the lineal championship across England for the year.

The years since Alex Ferguson retired at Manchester United, eight of them now, have not much resembled the 26 previous years under his management.

It's been a trophy here and there, but not two or three every year. There was one season, 2016-17, when José Mourinho coached the team and Zlatan Ibrahimović hit 28 goals in 46 appearances. That year, United won the EFL Cup, the Community Shield and the Europa League. And finished sixth in the Premiership (Word of note: Mourinho and Ibrahimović are back together this year at AC Milan, trying to climb through Serie A.).

Since then, four years come and gone, and United hasn't won a trophy, anywhere. They haven't gone so long without a trophy in a very long time. There was a run of seasons, 14 of them, 1968-69 through 1981-82, Matt Busby's retirement and the first dozen years of aftermath, when all United won the whole time was the FA Cup in 1977. Ferguson arrived in 1986 and, starting with 1990, United had more than two decades of true greatness.

United started playing in 1878 and opened its stadium, Old Trafford, in 1910, but it took another 35 years for United became United. Then, for 25 years after World War II, Busby's Manchester United teams won frequently and dramatically. Following that lull through the 1970s, United found even greater heights under Ferguson, in part, because of the European tournament's huge expansion during the 1990s.

Perhaps, United is waiting on its next great coach. It's amusing to remember that United hired Busby and Ferguson, more than 40 years apart, off the Scottish National Team. 

Anyway, we have some good news for Manchester United, which dominated the lineal championship across the top level of English professional soccer in 2020-21. United won two championships and held each for a long time – an 11-game title from late November to late January, and a seven-game title from early March to early May.

Before 2020-21, United was two wins, three draws and seven losses in lineal championship games going to the start of tracking with the 2015-16 season. Now, United has 20 games of title, still well behind Liverpool, which has 55 games of the title, 51 of them from 2018 to 2020. 

Manchester City had one eight-game championship, improving its second-place historical total to 34 games. United now is third with 20 games of championship, followed by Chelsea and West Ham (17 each) and Tottenham Hotspur (16).

Liverpool flies past City to capture 2019-20 English Big Six

Liverpool blitzed through the English Big Six just as it dominated the Premiership in 2019-20, taking this elite division by a whopping six points over two-time defending champion Manchester City.

Manchester City entered the 2019-20 soccer season defending the first two championships of the English Big Six, amassing a record of 17-0-3. City was riding high.

Along with all of that, City entered the season defending all four English domestic championships, an unprecedented achievement. 

But the end of all this was signaled on Nov. 10, when the Citizens ventured to Liverpool and faced a rival on a collision course with the Premiership title. With it's 3-1 win, Liverpool was off. The Reds didn't lose at all in the Premiership until Feb. 29, by which time they had 26 wins and a draw. 

When play resumed in June after the covid pause, Liverpool no longer was such a dominant force – four wins, a draw and two losses. One of those losses came at Manchester City. The Citizens already had a strong hold on second place. But it wasn't as good as the hold Liverpool had on first.

At the bottom of the Big Six, Everton and West Ham are going down. Everton finished 12th in the Premiership and West Ham 16th.

The teams coming up will be Arsenal and Southampton, which took second place with a total goals tiebreaker over Crystal Palace. Arsenal turned in a peculiar performance even for a Middle Six winner, winning only four of its 10 games. But the Gunners didn't lose any, and that does come to matter. As these standings show, Southampton and Crystal Palace each lost two games that Arsenal didn't.

It does seem odd, finding Manchester United lingering in the Middle Six, especially when they came up third in the Premiership standings. Against this Middle Six, though, United won only two home games and one road game. The two United beat at home, Bournemouth and Watford, also are the two teams being demoted to the Third Division. United lost to both of them on the road.

Watford and Bournemouth had both just been promoted to the middle, and now they're headed back to the bottom. 

Leicester City, which had just been demoted to the bottom, will return the middle after a dominant Little Six(ish) performance in which it lost only two of 14 games.

The other promotion goes to Sheffield United, which had just rejoined the Premiership as the second-place team in the 2018-19 Championship and produced a fine Little Six(ish) runner-up performance. Norwich City, which won the 2018-19 Championship, flopped in the Premiership, finishing on the bottom of the league ladder and the Little Six(ish) standings.

 

Southampton ends 2019-20 English lineal with six-game streak

Liverpool expanded its all-time top total of English traveling championship to 55 games in 2019-20, but the lineal was on the move after the pandemic, ending the season with Southampton.

The way Liverpool was dominating the traveling championship across English soccer, it seemed nothing short of a global pandemic could stop them. But by the time the disaster arrived in March 2020, the Reds had already fallen to Watford, and many travels awaited the title when play resumed in June.

In fact, Crystal Palace already had snatched the title from Watford when play resumed, and Liverpool took the title right back from Palace with a 4-0 home win on June 24. However, Manchester City, the other top English club, took the title from Liverpool with a 4-0 win at City on July 2.

At that point, historically (beginning with the 2015-6 season), Liverpool had established itself as the run-away leader in England with 55 games of title, 51 of them on the last two seasons. Manchester City was second with 26. Could City now tack up a big run with the title and approach Liverpool in the all-time standings?

No. City went to Southampton on July 5 and suffered a 1-0 loss. It was Southampton's first traveling title in four tries. And Southampton held on for five defenses to close out the 2019-20 season, interrupted and extended by the pandemic.

Liverpool leaving English Big Six behind

Liverpool is shooting for the all-time English record for most consecutive domestic league games without a loss. Included in the Reds ongoing streak are six wins in as many outings against the English Big Six in 2019-20.

Liverpool has gone 43 consecutive games without losing in the English Premiership, approaching the record of 49 set by Arsenal in 2003-04.

Through 26 games, it's 25 wins and a draw for Liverpool. No one is beating them, not even in the English Big Six, where the Reds have won all six of their game and appear poised to knock Manchester City off the perch it held the first two seasons of the internal pyramids.

Liverpool is newly promoted to the Big Six after being demoted from it following the 2017-18 season.

City, which thoroughly dominated the first two years of the Big Six, remains a strong second-place club, but only in the sense that it is well ahead of the two third-place clubs. At the bottom of this group, West Ham United and Chelsea are ticketed to the Middle Six in 2020 if they don't rally.

Nobody wants to win in the Middle Six this year. The top club is the one that simply doesn't lose. That would be Arsenal, which has fought to draws in six of its eight games, which, paired with two wins, put the Gunners in first place.

Crystal Palace, Southampton and Watford all are within three points of Arsenal, but Palace has a game at hand on Arsenal, while Southampton and Watford both have two games at hand. Any of these clubs also could drop into relegation territory.

Remarkably, we find Manchester United facing almost certain relegation to the Little Six(ish) in 2020. United has failed to win a Middle Six game in six tries.

In the English Little Six(ish), we find Leicester City cruising to a comfortable lead. Across the Premiership, Leicester is positioned to be the league's second Champions League qualifier now that Manchester City faces UEFA sanctions over finances. In the Little Six(ish), Leicester City has a five-point lead over second-place Ashton Villa, promoted back to the Premiership this year.

Liverpool leaves Premiership behind with 25-game unbeaten streak

Liverpool is blowing through the Premiership, winning 24 of 25 games so far, and drawing the other. Now, the Reds suddenly have produced a huge lead all-time in the lineal championship.

With an all-time title streak of 19 games last season, Liverpool broke open a fairly tight race for the all-time traveling championship in English soccer.

This season, the Reds are topping that, topping the Premiership, topping just about everything. Already, they have accrued 25 games of lineal championship in 2019-20, one more than last year's all-time record of 24 games. This year's 25 games is, in fact, the entire season, so far.

Additionally, the Reds ended 2018-19 with five games of title, bringing their new streak up to 30 games. In their first 25 games of the Premiership this season, Liverpool's only blemish is a draw against Manchester United at Old Trafford in October. Since then, Liverpool has won 16 consecutive games in the Premiership.

Put it all together, and Liverpool, well down in the standings through 2017-18, now is well above everyone in the standings. In these first five years of tracking, starting with 2015-16, Liverpool now has 53 games of title, blowing open its lead. The second-place team, Manchester City, has 25 games of title.

Manchester City again dominates English Big Six

Manchester City has embarked on an historic crushing of top English competition for the last two years, one lopsided win after another, cruising to two straight English Big Six championships.

Manchester City took another happy romp through the English Big Six in 2018-19, winning nine of its 10 games and finishing well ahead of everyone else.

In two years of the inner pyramid, which comes to 20 games, City has outscored its opponents 54-16, an astounding mark of dominance against this level of competition. The Premiership is easily the deepest league in the world and it makes a strong argument for being the best. The Big Six is the cream of that league. For some one team to tear through that competition and come out of it with a goal differential of almost two per game in its favor is all but inconceivable.

If Paris Saint-Germain outscores its French Big Six opponents 59-15 in 20 games, which it has, big deal. Everyone knows that Ligue 1 is an inch deep. The English Big Six goes all the way down, and then some. Liverpool, which won the 2019 Champions League, wasn't even in the 2019 Big Six because it had been relegated a year earlier.

And look who is being relegated from the Big Six this year – Manchester United (!) and Southampton. Mind-blowing truth: in two years of running the English Big Six, it already has demoted Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United. The only teams that have survived the two years in the top tier are Manchester City, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur.

Hotspur lost the 2019 Champions League final to Liverpool. In the English Big Six for 2018-19, Hotspur finished fourth, losing six of 10 games. Chelsea finished a distant second place to City with 16 standings points, 11 back. West Ham United came in third at 13. Hotspur and United actually tied for fourth, but Hotspur won the first tiebreaker, which is victories.

Southampton, which won the Middle Six in 2017-18, won only one game in the Big Six a year later and will join Manchester United in relegation to the second level.

Somewhere back in the mists of time, Monty Python sent up a Beatles documentary with a news reporter offering this account of one rock star: "He was born in Liverpool, raised in Liverpool, educated in Liverpool, and his football team is Everton." Something like that. Anyway, it's how the English Middle Six came up in 2018-19, with Liverpool winning it and crosstown rival Everton coming in second.

Liverpool went unbeaten in the second tier with seven wins and three draws. At the bottom of the Middle Six table, Burnley went winless after claiming the Little Six(ish) championship in 2017-18. Joining Burnley in relegation is Leicester City.

Watford, which finished at the bottom of the Little Six(ish) ladder in 2017-18, came all the way to top in 2018-19. The second promotion to the Middle Six goes to Bournemouth, which finished tied for the position with Newcastle. Bournemouth prevailed on total victories.

Liverpool cruises through English traveling title

Three points for a win cost Liverpool the Premiership in 2018-19, but no rule could overwrite the Reds' dominant performance with the English traveling championship.

The Premiership race in 2018-19, the hottest ever between two teams at the top, showed as clearly as ever that "three points for a win" motivates playing to win while also raising the question of whether it really is the best way to pick the league champion.

Here we are at the end of 2018-19, Manchester City has 98 points and Liverpool has 97. No other club in the league is 25 points from the lead.

Three points for a win gave Manchester City the Premiership title. City finished with 32 wins, 2 draws and four losses. Liverpool was 30 wins, seven draws and one loss. The Manchester side finished with two more wins, but Liverpool took three fewer losses.

With three points for a win, it is more prosperous to win than to not lose. It's been the international standard in soccer for 25 years, going back to the 1994 World Cup. In your old-style league giving two points for a win and one for a draw, Liverpool wins that race with 67 points, compared with 66 for Manchester City.

A well-known pro hockey league, the NHL, came upon an ingenious way to split the difference. It breaks ties and decides winners with overtime, followed by a shootout. But it doesn't excessively reward the winner or dock the loser of a game that goes overtime. The winner of that game gets two points and the loser gets one.

Under that scenario, Manchester City has 66 points in hand, adding a point for each draw, and there is a point still on the table for each overtime, so its possible upper limit is 68. Liverpool has 67 points in hand with a possible upper limit of 74. To maximize its standings points and reach 68, City would have to win both of its overtimes. But Liverpool still would tie for the title by winning only one of its seven overtimes, and it would win the title outright by winning only two. One can be pretty confident that Liverpool would have won a championship decided that way.

We've considered three systems here, two of them come up for Liverpool, and only the three-point system comes up for Manchester City. That doesn't mean the three-point system isn't the one that picks out the best team. We can dream up 1,000 competitors that come up with different results than the three-point system, and all of that put together wouldn't prove that three points for a win doesn't pick out the best team. It very well might.

Who won the Champions League, again?  Of course, the Champions League and the Premiership are separate competitions and Liverpool winning the Champions League doesn't imply that it should also have won the Premiership.

Here might be a consideration in favor of Manchester City: head to head. The two clubs drew, nil-nil, at Liverpool, and City won, 2-1, in Manchester. At two points for a win, though, Liverpool still would have won the league.

What we have shown here is not that three points for a win doesn't pick out the best team, but only that Manchester City won the Premiership because the league gives three points for a win instead of two.

As far as the traveling championship at the English top level, it was Liverpool, unquestionably and by a landslide. Not only were the Reds' 24 games of title during the year the most recorded in four years of tracking England, but its 19-game streak running from August through the end of December was more games of title than any English club had ever accrued in a whole season.

It also sent Liverpool rocketing from near the bottom to the very top of the all-time standings with 28 games of championship in four years of tracking. City, which broke Liverpool's traveling title streak in January, lasted only two defenses before losing, 2-1, at Newcastle United on Jan. 29. City is second all-time with 25 wins.

West Ham is third all-time with 17 wins, followed by Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea with 16. All three of those clubs held the title between the time Newcastle took it from City and April 14, when Liverpool took it from Chelsea in a 2-0 home field win.

Liverpool held on for four defenses through the end of the regular season and now takes the championship to the start of the 2019-20 season.

AS Roma declines ICC, Euro and world titles still stuck

The world and European traveling soccer championships have been stuck together for two years. We thought we might have a solution, but not quite.

This enterprise began tracking traveling championships across big league baseball in 2011, designating one championship within each of the leagues and another across both leagues. Before long, a problem arose.

It became easy for two of the championships to get stuck together. For example, the National League champion could simultaneously be the interleague champion. Nothing terribly wrong with that, but the more two titles run together, the less interesting it is to run them separately. So, methods are needed to un-stick titles.

In baseball, it's easy enough. Interleague play occurs regularly, and in those series only the interleague title can be contested. A team entering an interleague series with that title and its league title could lose the interleague title and retain the league title. Also, because baseball often ends in split series, we decreed that tiebreakers would come into play for the league titles. But the interleague champion would be considered to have defended it successfully in a split series. To be the man, you have to beat the man, a man once said. It's quite possible to get two different results from the same series that way and unstick the titles.

The matter arises here because anyone who looks at these standings a little bit will notice that the European and world traveling soccer championships have been stuck together for two solid years through the 2018-19 season.

One problem is that there isn't a lot of international club competition between continents, so we should expect some continent's championship to run with the world championship quite a lot.

It only took a year. We started in 2016-17 with Barcelona as the world champion and Real Madrid as the European champion. They were the right teams; Barcelona had won the last club World Cup and Real Madrid had won the last European Champions League. At the end of the year, they switched, with Real Madrid holding the world title and Barcelona holding the European championship.

It happened that the two clubs were to meet at the very start of the 2017-18 season in the Supercopa de España, as Barca now held the Copa del Rey and Real was to defend its La Liga championship.

Real Madrid united the traveling titles by winning both legs of Supercopa. And they have stayed that way.

So, we look now to the Club World Cup for the chance to unstick the titles, because the world traveling title will be contested in that tournament, but the European title will not. The only way for the world title to enter the Club World Cup is for Liverpool to take it there, as the Reds just won the 2018-19 Champions League and are the European entrant. Each continent gets one.

There is some chance of Liverpool holding the titles when it plays its World Cup opener in Qatar on Dec. 18. The Premiership and Serie A both are well represented in the European competitions, which both are now in the late qualifying rounds.

AS Roma, the team now holding the traveling titles, is entered in the group phase of the secondary tournament, the Europa League, along with Lazio of Serie A. That phase starts on Sept. 19. Another Italian club, Torino, is in qualifying for the same tournament and looks like a good bet to make the final round of group qualifying after a 5-0 first-leg win against the Belorussian squad Shakhtyor Soligorsk.

England has three clubs in the Europa League. Arsenal and Manchester United are entered to the group stage, and Wolverhampton Wanderers won the first leg of their present qualifier 4-0 against the Armenian squad Pyunik. We don't know how these Italian and English clubs will be grouped yet, but a path from AS Roma to Liverpool runs through this tournament, and the group stage will be about done when the club World Cup takes place.

The potential for interplay between England and Italy is even greater in the Champions League, in which each league enters four clubs directly to the group phase, which begins on Sept. 18. The English clubs are Liverpool, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea. The Italian clubs are Juventus, Napoli, Inter Milan and Atalanta.

It would be rather surprising if the championships weren't in the hands of one of these clubs and some point in the next few months, and probably several. But we never know. We could end up sending these titles to six countries and it would be fascinating, but the only way to unstick them is to send them with Liverpool to the club World Cup.

In view of the difficulty involved in separating some continent's championship from the world championship, a more-or-less pragmatic decision came from headquarters this spring granting the International Champions Cup (ICC) standing for contesting the world traveling title.

The decision came with some reluctance because the ICC is a series of friendlies in which American promotors bring top European clubs to the states and other locales for preseason exhibition matches. Exhibition matches don't count because they shouldn't.

But that bullet will be bit here because the ICC brings in legitimate top-tier clubs who face off against each other multiple times, the crowds are terrific, and enough of a tendency has been established for teams entering this exhibition at the start of the year to still be standing for the final rounds of the UEFA Champions League. The last three years say that much, anyway.

In 2016, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain won ICC championships and Real Madrid played in the tournament. At the end of that season, in the 2017 European Champions League, Juventus beat Real Madrid in the finals and PSG made it to the round of 16.

When the 2017 ICC rolled around, Barcelona and Inter Milan won championships, while Real Madrid, Roma and Bayern Munich played in the tournament. At the of that year, in the 2018 Champions League, Real Madrid won it all, but Roma and Bayern both reached the semifinals.

Tottenham Hotspur, which hadn't been a huge player in Europe, won the ICC in 2018. Turned out to not be a freak occurrence, because Hotspur made it to the 2019 Champions League final before losing to Liverpool. Of the eight Champions League quarterfinalists, six -- Hotspur, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Juventus and Barcelona -- were in the ICC that preseason. Another seven clubs from that ICC -- Borussia Dortmund, Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, PSG, Lyon, Bayern and Roma -- reached the Champions League round of 16.

It would be better for our purposes if the promotors would mix in some South American, Asian and African clubs, but what they have here certainly counts for "international" competition. So, it was decided to put the world title on the line in the ICC, but not the European.

It happened that at the end of 2018-19, the team holding the two traveling championships was AS Roma, and Roma was going to enter the ICC in 2019. But anything involving AS Roma is complicated these days.

At the end of a difficult season, Roma was sixth in Serie A, which qualifies for nothing better than a preliminary round entry in the Europa League. On June 12, AS Roma passed along its regrets that it could not compete in the ICC because it now had to deal with Europa preliminary rounds as early as July 23. The ICC was scheduled for July 16-Aug. 10.

The fifth-place team in Serie A, which qualifies directly to the group stage of the Europa League, was AC Milan. UEFA tried to ban AC Milan for two years last summer over spending beyond the prescribed limits from 2015-17. The club fought off the ban temporarily last year by appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a European quasi-judicial body that ultimately answers to the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland.

But AC Milan apparently tired of fighting and agreed to a one-year ban if UEFA would quit hounding them. So, on June 19, the club announced that it would sit out the Europa League. And that means AC Roma moves up one spot, to the one occupied by AC Milan, and now goes directly to the group stage.

So, the world traveling could have gone up for good fun in the ICC, but for poor timing. If AC Milan and UEFA could have reached an agreement two weeks earlier, it would have.

Manchester City dominates English soccer traveler in 2017-18

Manchester City set the all-time title streak record for the English traveling soccer championship in 2017-18, moving to the top of the all-time standings through three years.

Manchester City went on a record tear through England's top division of soccer in 2017-18, a 16-game streak of championship that not only won the English traveling title for the season, but also put it on top of the all-time standings.

The traveler made quite a few stops through England in its first eight games of the year, during which it belonged to six different clubs. That changed when Manchester City took the crown from Burnley with a 3-0 win at home on Oct. 21. City held the title for 14 games, 13 of them victories.

Liverpool finally took down Manchester City with a 4-3 home win on Jan. 14. But Liverpool couldn't hold on for even another game. Manchester City added a one-game championship at the end of March.

All-time, Manchester City now has 19 games of championship in this competition, which has lasted three years. Manchester City and Liverpool are the only clubs that have won at least one traveling championship in each of the three years. But Liverpool has defended its three championships one time between them, while Manchester City has defended its four titles 18 times.

Second on the all-time list now is West Ham with 16 games of championship, all of them in 2015-16, the first season of the traveling competition. West Ham's nine-game title streak late that year had been the record before Manchester City raced past it in 2017-18.

Tottenham Hotspur is third with 14 games of title, none of them in 2017-18. Chelsea is fourth at 13, followed by Leicester City with 11.

Liverpool, Arsenal, demoted in first England inner pyramid

Manchester City romped through the English Big Six in the first year of the inner pyramid. Less fortunate were Premiership stalwarts Arsenal and Liverpool, which were demoted to the Middle Six for 2018-19.

The standings in the pyramid within the pyramid that we're running in England tell you right away how tough that English Big Six is. Liverpool and Arsenal were relegated after the 2017-18 season.

We can expect, though, to see much of this as we run through these pyramids. The idea is to break the top league in the most competitive countries into three divisions, with six at the top, six in the middle and some number like six at the bottom. In an 18-team league, it is six. In a 20-team league like the Premiership, it's eight.

For this first run in 2017-18, the distribution of clubs is easy. We simply looked at the standings for 2016-17, put the top six clubs in the Big Six, the next six in the Middle Six, and the remaining eight in the Little Six(ish).

The clear winner in the Big Six for 2017-18 was Manchester City, which won eight of its 10 games, and, most impressively, put the ball into the net 27 times. It was a different story against the Big Six for Liverpool, which won only two games, and Arsenal, which won one.

The Middle Six was a fairly even competition in which 12 of 30 games ended in draws. Only Southampton managed to win half of its games, which was good enough to finish on top of the group. Joining Southampton in promotion to the 2018-19 Big Six is West Ham United, but Leicester City finished less than one win behind.

Bournemouth and West Bromwich Albion were to be demoted out of the Middle Six, to be replaced in 2018-19 by Burnley and Crystal Palace, the top two clubs in the Little Six(ish).

West Ham prevails in first EPL corn chase

A two-month run with nine straight wins took West Ham United to the first year's honors in the traveling prize for the English Premier League.

Leicester City came through the 2015-16 English Premier League season as the surprise champions, crushing the rest of the league with only three losses in 38 games and winning by 10 points over second-place Arsenal.

However, the winner of our traveling championship for the season is West Ham United, which won 16 Ear of Corn games and three championships. West Ham began its best run with a 1-0 home victory against Tottenham Hotspur on March 2 and held it for nine games before falling, 4-1, to Swansea City at home on May 7 at West Ham.

The only other club to win it more than once was Watford, which then managed a total of one title defense.

Of the remaining clubs, Leicester City had the best showing, a six-game winning streak from Nov. 7 (a 2-1 home win against Watford) until Dec. 19 (a 3-2 home loss to Everton).

Other champions who defended the title at least once included Manchester City, Liverpool, Watford, Tottenham Hotspur, and Swansea City.  One other club, Newcastle United, won a championship without defending it. The Magpies were relegated at the end of the season.

Chelsea began this exercise as the caretaker champion, but only held it for only one game before losing it, 3-1, at Manchester City on Aug. 16.