Ranking our Squad vs the Rest of the League

FrankWhite said:
There has been a lot of discussion surrounding our underperformance this season, with the blame potentially lying somewhere between the players and the manager. This made me ponder about the correlation between our expectations and our actual performance, which is a good indicator of how well the manager is doing. Naturally, there are other factors at play, such as the style of play.

Assessing the quality of our squad compared to the other 19 teams, I believe Arsenal, Manchester City, and Liverpool certainly have better squads than us. However, beyond that, it becomes more difficult to determine. In my opinion, a group of six teams including Aston Villa, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Newcastle United, West Ham, and us, is quite evenly matched. I would argue that we possess better depth, but our starting eleven may not be as strong as most of the teams in this group.

What are your thoughts on where you believe we rank and the reasons behind your opinion.
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When you talk about squad, it also depends on how they are being deployed.

Take McTom, Sancho, Mount, Eriksen, and even Maguire as example, they can easily fit into half of the league clubs, so long as you can play to their strength. But if you deliberately play to their weakness, they are deem useless. So why is Villa, Spurs, Newcastle better than us? Because they have a coach that can utilise their entire squad and make everyone contribute, ours only know his Best 11 and keep playing them until breaks.
 
Man City and Arsenal have a better squad man for man by miles in my opinion. Liverpool arguably, but there's not as much in it as it may seem over the whole squad, Klopp seems to be able can get a tune out of most players and a really hard working, united team performance most of time.

The likes of Newcastle, Chelsea, Spurs and maybe even Villa...basically the teams above us, I feel have 2 or 3 stand out players (maybe 4 or 5 in Liverpool's case that I think are a lot better than what we have. This is a huge contributing factor to good performances in my opinion, amplified by the fact that one of our supposed star players in Rashford has not even shown a glimpse of his top level, and the team performances as a whole have just been dreadful. Even Bruno is only really good now and again and he's our best player by a mile.

I don't think we have anyone as good as Maddison, Guimaraes, Gordon, Son, Watkins, McGinn, Palmer for example.

They aren't all top class, but they are better than the players we have in their positions and having just a few of these making up the spine of your team makes a huge difference.

Apart from Bruno and Mainoo (who's only 18), there's not a single player I think would be a massive loss. Despite this I wouldn't be buzzing to get players from most of the other squads, but they all have a couple I would take in a heartbeat.
 
It's very difficult to judge a player independently of their team and likewise the team from the manager influenced form.

I don't think we're that far behind Arsenal and especially Liverpool in terms of baseline quality. We're just underperforming whilst they overperform causing a huge gap. Put Gravenberch or Partey in our team and there's not much in it.
 
city, Arsenal and Liverpool have the three best sqauds in the league quality-wise.

After that there is a group of teams who have similar levels, so then it comes down a lot to form, injuries, ref decisions and tactics.
 
We have key players that are injury prone, no real midfield to speak of, and a real lack of quality in the forward positions.

I think you could make a fair argument that Spurs, Villa and Newcastle are at least on par with our squad, if not better. I can find a handful of players from each of those squads that would improve our starting XI easily. If you look beyond Mainoo, Garnacho, Martinez and Shaw (when fit), what are the real bright spots in our squad? What's more, the squad is trending downwards, because so many of the older players need to be replaced.

So, I'd say the squad ranks somewhere between 4th and 7th, but closer to the bottom of that range.
 
So even ETH doesn't think the squad is close to top two in the league. He thinks we are at least 2 years away from being able to challenge. He's definitely right in my opinion. He's also by default saying we are two years away from Arsenal, Man City and Liverpool. The fact that we've spent £400m on him to get to this position is another conversation. In reality, our squad is a 4-7th squad which is exactly where we are. The two things we can be most critical of are: how we've spend and the style of play.
 
Somewhere between 4th and 7th.

City, Arsenal and Liverpool have the 3 best squads.

Then we're in a group with Spurs, Chelsea and Aston Villa. I'd suggest we shade it over Spurs, Chelsea and Villa but we do have some aging players in key positions and as we bought them late in their careers we know have to address replacing Varane, Casemiro and Eriksen.

Whilst also replacing players that have peaked or will never be who we need them to be like Shaw, AWB, Maguire, Lindelof, Sancho and Rashford.
 
3rd or 4th. Some areas Liverpool are better, some I'd take our players. Easy to laugh at it based on how each season has gone, but do you really think any top team would say I want Luis Diaz or Darwin Nunez ahead of Rashford (who scored 30 goals last season and got more than 20 goals in 2 of the previous 3 seasons). You seriously think Bruno wouldn't walk into Liverpool's team in a second?

Liverpool have better players than us in defence for sure, which is our weakest part of the pitch - Alisson, TAA, VVD and Robertson would all get into a combined 11. Konate's been rubbish and their lack of another reliable cb or squad depth in general in defence is a big reason why they couldn't sustain their title push to the end. Casemiro's had a horrible season, but he also had a phenomenal season the year prior, and not a single Liverpool midfielder would have been chosen ahead of him at that stage. Maybe you could say you'd take MacAllister over Mainoo, but Mainoo's hardly been one of our main weaknesses this season, if anything he's been one of our biggest positives. Salah obviously is better than any of our wingers but he's likely going in the summer anyway. Nunez and Hojlund are probably much for much in terms of their level. Darwin has better attacking movement but Hojlund's a better finisher. I'll take Garnacho over any of their other wingers, especially given his age.

The only Spurs players I'd take are Vicario, Udogie and Son. Don't think I'd take any Villa players either (maybe Douglas Luiz). Arsenal and City's squads are still miles better than us, but they're also miles better than every other squad.
 
Interestingly we didn’t get one player in the Premier team of the season and that speaks volumes. We can only judge the squad as they perform now, not on reputation from yesteryear, so where we finish in the league, will be how good the squad is, so certainly less than fifth.
 
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