Is this the greatest ever Premier League season?
The race between Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool masks issues at the bottom of the table
SPORTS BROADCASTERS deal in hyperbole. Contests between middling teams are sold as battles with great meaning; lopsided affairs are re-enactments of David v Goliath. No one endures the spiel more than followers of English football’s Premier League. Since its inception in 1992, the competition has become the most popular in the world, thanks in part to marketing that relentlessly reminds viewers of quite how important the matches are. Even by those standards, though, this season’s bombast has been ramped up. A deluge of goals and a title race involving Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool have prompted pundits to call this the greatest Premier League season ever. Are they right?
The claim is not without substance. For the first time since 2013-14, three teams are in the running for the title with just a handful of games to play. After the latest round of matches, Arsenal sit one point ahead of Manchester City, the defending champions (who also have a game in hand), and three ahead of Liverpool. The gap between first and third has not exceeded four points this season.
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