Arsenal suffer on another bleak night for Europe’s most bafflingly ineffective league

Arsenal’s 3-2 defeat to Olympiakos and Chelsea’s loss against Porto makes it five defeats out of six so far for Premier League teams this season

Ah, yes. The Premier League. Come in. Take a seat. Let’s have a look at these figures then. First up: £1bn spent on transfers in the calendar year. And against that, as of matchday two in the Champions League, a record of played six, lost five against the rest of Europe.

Not that Arsenal and Chelsea, both of whom were restrained in the transfer window, can be singled out on the Premier League’s huge-collective-spend-versus-Uefa-coefficient-down-the-plughole scale. On a night when the champions and the team with most points in the calendar year were both well beaten, it was instead hard not to reflect on the sheer oddity of a league where the art of team building appears to have been lost in a blizzard of acquisitiveness, unexpected stasis and frenetically muscular island nation football. And where somehow for all the millions spent, the Premier League continues to offer up to Europe’s elite club competition such obvious, startling weaknesses.

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