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The suspension of the Premier League season and the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament will not stop us from bringing you the crossover event you didn’t know you needed! Arsenal players! Brackets! Voting!
As far as I know (shoutout to The Godfather, Ted Harwood for the history check), The Short Fuse has never done a bracket competition of any kind, so why not now? I’m guessing a lot of us have extra time on our hands to get excessively worked out about something completely meaningless, which let’s face it, is a lot of what we do online anyway. So here it is, your 2020 Favorite Arsenal Premier League Player bracket.
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You can click on the image for a larger version; I know the text is a little small. Here it is as a Google Sheet.
Over the next few weeks, you, reader, will be able to vote on each matchup to determine who is our favorite Arsenal player of the Premier League era. Tomorrow, we’ll vote the first round from the Emirates Region, Wednesday, the Highbury Region, Thursday, the Hale End Region, and Friday, the London Colney Region. I intend to close the voting for each first-round bracket quadrant after 24 hours, but I’m reserving the right to keep it open longer if response numbers are low.
The seeds are based on my rough estimation of fan-favoriteness coming into things. I’ve mixed in a bit of longevity-weighting for the players from the earlier PL teams near the top of the all-time appearance list who might not be as well-known to newer fans. Also, you might notice something about the 16-seeds; I think they could have been seeded higher but for a particular shared quality.
For now, you’ve got 24 hours to question, quibble, and complain about my seeding until voting starts tomorrow. Barring some gross oversight and exclusion of a Premier League era Arsenal great, I’m not going to change anything in the setup. But one of the fun parts of any bracket is debating who is over-seeded, under-seeded, and snubbed. So have at it and have fun. I’d love to see some predictions in the comments.