It’s quite hard to see a way Arsenal don’t win the Premier League this season, and that’s a bit of a problem.

Not the problem you’re probably thinking of. This is nothing against Arsenal, per se. It’s a problem for the Premier League to have any team appear so absolutely certain to end up winning the league in May when we’ve barely touched upon November.

And that applies just as much whether the team in question is a Great Bunch of Lads beloved by the populace or a bunch of despicable penalty-dodging thugs led by a mischief-demon Lego figure made flesh.

So, yeah, like we said. It’s nothing against Arsenal at all. Hopefully we’ve cleared that up. But we do still need to try and come up with at least some semi-plausible routes out of the particular problem of Arsenal already very much looking, for assorted reasons, like they really are the only team that can actually win the league this year.

Here’s the best we could come up with.

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Man City get to keep all their points, and maybe get a few more for their trouble
This is the most obvious problem, of course. There’s only one Premier League team other than Arsenal that has both the historic course-and-distance pedigree as well as anything approaching compelling current form to suggest they can mount a season-long challenge to the Gunners’ supremacy.

And they almost certainly can’t actually do that just because of some tiny little industrial-scale cheating on an unprecedented scale over the course of a decade. It really is fine margins at this level.

Presumably we’ll soon find out precisely how many points Manchester City are about to get taken off them, because there’s an international break on soon and, by sheer serendipity, the brave hacks and scribes beavering away at this story always seem to make their biggest and most significant breakthroughs during those international breaks when there’s nothing much else to talk about. Heroes, the lot of ’em.

As for the answer to ‘How many points will they be deducted?’ we fear the answer is going to be not unadjacent to ‘all of the points’. And that kills the title race dead before it’s even begun.

Events of the last 10 days or so, though, suggest that even City keeping all of the points they do win might not be enough to stop Arsenal running away with the league. Better safe than sorry, so as well as not docking them any points for all that mad cheating – honestly, what’s 900 million quid’s worth of shenanigans between friends? – we should probably give them a few extra ones on top. For their trouble.

Just take them off Everton, that usually seems to work.

Arsenal players fall victim to nine separate misfortunes
Smithers, there’s no way Arsenal can lose this title, unless, of course, their nine all-stars fall victim to nine separate misfortunes and are unable to play for the rest of the season. But that will never happen. Three misfortunes? That’s possible. Seven misfortunes? There’s an outside chance.

But nine misfortunes? I’d like to see that.

We’re pretending this reference works because, while for football it should actually be 11 misfortunes Arsenal have already suffered Saliba and Saka misfortunes so it only needs nine more to take out their entire first team.

Mikel Arteta’s latest prank to keep his players on his toes backfires
We all know Arteta fancies himself as a modern-day Jeremy Beadle, constantly planning all manner of pranks and capers and borderline psychotic stunts to keep his poor players on their toes.

But what if one of them goes drastically wrong and several key players are ruled out for an extended period of time after slipping on the fake dog dirts he’s placed all over the training pitches for reasons too perplexing to get into? If nothing else, this very real and terrifying possibility very slightly increases the chances that Arsenal could indeed fall victim to nine separate misfortunes. One of them being self-inflicted by ol’ Wacky Mikel means it would only take eight external misfortunes, which is much likelier than nine. That’s just maths.

Tough new laws mandate jail time for the leaving of technical areas
Tough on managers leaving their technical areas, tough on the causes of managers leaving their technical areas. Sensible policies for a happier Britain.

Look, if the prime minister’s got time to be faffing about with noisy people on bus in the face of rising global temperatures (literal) and rising global temperatures (figurative) then he’s got time to weigh in on this vital issue. After he’s helped City avoid any points-deduction unpleasantness, of course.

With Arteta in jail, Arsenal’s chances of winning the Premier League this season could fall to as little as 85 or 90 per cent.

The Law of Averages turns out to be real
It’s the law of averages, isn’t it? All evens out across a season, doesn’t it? No it isn’t and no it doesn’t. But imagine for a second that it is and it does, and Arsenal suddenly concede a whole bunch of penalties and get some red cards in real competitions that matter instead of children being sent straight to bed in the Energy Drink Shield.

It might be enough to reduce their eventual winning margin to a mere 15 or 20 points. The Conspiracy is real.

Brighton actually are Leicester 2016 incarnate
It says a lot about everything else here that this one is probably the most likely: that there might be a team knocking about this season capable of matching the 5000/1 boilover that Leicester pulled off a decade ago.

Brighton are a better-run and more established Premier League club than Leicester were back then. And they have already beaten both Arsenal and City this season. Their manager is the heir of Klopp as well, never yet encountering a defeat about which he can’t be spectacularly salty and often just hilariously wrong-headed in his steadfast belief that Brighton losing football matches is against the natural order of things.

But that’s a good thing. Show us a good loser and we’ll show you a loser etc. and so forth. And Fabian Hurzeler has no more interest in being a loser than he does in accepting nature’s plans for his hair. He’ll fight against the inevitable there, and he’ll fight a similar inevitability with every bit as much gusto when it comes to trying to make this season’s Premier League title race a thing that exists at all.