There’s seven teams that have taken part in every Premiership season since it’s inception in 1992: Arsenal, Aston Villa, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Man Utd and Tottenham. You probably knew that and you may well also know that in all time points Aston Villa lie 5th. Even if you didn’t, you can certainly guess which 4 teams lie ahead of us, right?

Since it’s the only constant in every Premiership season I decided to check out how many points we’ve taken off the other six teams over the years and the results were quite interesting:-

As you can see, we reached our lowest ebb in 2004/05 taking just 6 points and didn’t do much better the following season, DOL’s last year at the helm, claiming a total of 7 points from the other six clubs.

MON hasn’t quite returned us the levels of the 90’s yet, but it’s clearly heading in the right direction and with 6 additional points still up for grabs against Chelsea and Everton it’s possible that we could achieve 20 points for the 2009/10 season.

So, what’s the significance?  Well, I think that these days it would be fair to throw Man City into this group and talk about a “big 8” clubs who will be scrapping each other for position in the top half of the table.  Assuming a similar record against the teams below us, what will make the difference in the final analysis is how well we perform against the other teams around us.

In 1992/93 we took 24 points from 36 available and that slowly fell to a pathetic 6 points in 2004/05.  For me, that graph is one more indicator of how we entered into the Premiership years as a very real contemporary to the likes of Man Utd and Arsenal, but failed to grasp the opportunities on offer and fell further behind.

It’s also one more graphical representation of how the trend has been reversed since Randy Lerner and Martin O’Neill took control at Villa.  If we can just grab a point or two from Chelsea and Everton then we’ll be back up at the levels of the mid-nineties and with a couple of trips to Wembley in the bag, accepting that the Premiership is arguably a more challenging league now than back then, it’s really starting to look like one of our best seasons in years.