Is it true that we had a tougher schedule though? According to the APLT, we had two 1-par games (the tougher ones), City had three. Arsenal and Spurs had four each, only Chelsea had two, as much as us.
In the last two seasons City have dropped 30 points (not including 19/20). When you break that down, 11 of those points have come against teams in the "traditional big 6".
Non Big 6 = 2.66 points per game
Big 6 = 2.45 points per game.
And so big picture the APLT does a great job of capturing this (FYI 8 of the 11 points dropped were away from home).
The point I was trying to make was that I'm not sure if there's been a similar case where a team has played 6 top 6 teams (I appreciate I'm bending the rules here a little bit by including Leicester) in the space of 8 games (plus important CL knock outs). That's a truly brutal run.
There are plenty here who are way smarter than myself, but the gut says the chances of beating top opposition in a series of multiple games must go down. I'm sure its possible to back that up with stats.
IF they had a repeat of last year's schedule it would read:
Spurs (a)
West Ham (h)
Schalke (a)
Leicester (a)
Arsenal (h)
United (a)
Shalke (h)
Burnley (h)
Chelsea (a)
Liverpool (h)
For a split second, say we believed that City might get a difficult draw, as it stands "Shalke" could get replaced by: Real Madrid, Atletico/Juventus, Napoli, Inter/Dortmund, Zenit/Lyon, Ajax.
Just flagging its a really tough run. To think as well they've been dropping those points in the PL without getting a challenge mid-week in the CL.