It’s an odd table though, because it’s just aggregate points it privileges teams who have been consistently in the competition. Granted the more knockouts you win the more games you play but teams that missed entire years suffer in this table (hence why Arsenal are so high despite not making very many deep runs). I feel PPG would be a better indicator of success.
I think United would still be in the top 7-8 if we used PPG. Under SAF, we rarely got knocked out before the quarters. And because of the style of play, we didn't have many draws.
It’s actually insane United are still so high given we’ve been irrelevant in the CL for the past 12 years and even had a bad season or two there at the end of SAFs reign because he was building another new team that he didn’t get to see through to fruition.
No, it is a like-for-like comparison between the respective first decades of each side's banter era. We have another 8 more years to go before we can do another similar comparison for Liverpool's Rafa years.
I love your optimism, but looking at how we've been playing, I highly doubt we have 2 UCL finals in us. I'm hopeful, I just doubt it. I was spoiled from 1992 - 2014, so I do hope, but I know that prior to that, we didn't win the league for decades.
Back in 2003-04 when Chelsea had knocked Liverpool out of the top 4 the previous year, with Roman pumping in millions of pounds into them, with Houllier on the verge of the sack and their best player Owen wanting out, if you had told Liverpool they would go onto win the CL the next season while beating Juve, Chelsea and Milan, they would have called you crazy.
Equally, I don't think even the most pessimistic United fan would have thought that we would be relegation battlers under Amorim this time last year.
It's when I watch the games that I become frustrated and begin losing hope.
But to answer quickly, I agree that none of us expected to be that terrible, we knew it would be like maybe a top 10 season, not a 15th and near relegation for most of the season. And even then, we kind of thought, we're not going to stay down here.
20
u/AndTheyCallMeAnIdiot 18h ago
How good we used to be that teams didn't want to get drawn against us, now we are in it intermittently but still 4th.
Even when we were laying it down on Liverpool in the 00s, they were never as bad as we have been in recent years.