100% what I was going to say, this is the biggest factor skewing everything off.

Have said this before but Arsenal had Guiemares, Konsa, Eze on the bench for their first few games. That's 3 recent trophy winning club's captains reduced from playing 90 mins every week to coming on for 15 mins to see out a league.

How can that do anything but make the league less competitive?

That level of squad-padding just didn't used to happen til very recently