By Will Sturgeon, 31 August 2001 13:00
NEWS The Premiership season is already well underway. Leicester City have yet to score a goal, ITV has already scored several spectacular own goals with viewing figures plunging, while in-form Bolton Wanderers are laughing, with maximum points so far.
Football pundits may tell you "they hand the trophies out in May", and back it up with "it's a marathon not a sprint" for good measure, but it is a pleasure for many to see Manchester United languishing in fifth place.
Sadly it's not all good news for Manchester United's legion of detractors. The Old Trafford giant is still at the top of the web performance tables.
On the last Friday of each month throughout the season, silicon.com, in association with Keynote, will bring you exclusive coverage of how each team's site is performing and Man United are currently top of the heap with an average time taken for their site to load of 1.67 seconds. Bottom of league, in every sense, are Leicester City with a sluggish average of 11.24 seconds.
Other notable successes see Sunderland registering a slick 1.9 seconds and Liverpool's site being up and running within 2.45 seconds.
Going further down the table, perennial Premiership strugglers Southampton score highly with 4.12 seconds to take seventh place - putting bigger clubs such as Arsenal (7.78 seconds), Chelsea (7.7 seconds) and dirty Leeds (5.84 seconds) to shame.
In terms of one-off poor performances, Middlesborough managed the most pitiful performance of the season so far, keeping fans waiting a massive 56.94 seconds to access the club's site.
Fans of Bolton, Blackburn, Derby, Everton, Fulham and West Ham (and there must be some) will have noticed their sides are not represented in the survey. This is something which should be remedied as the season progresses. In the meantime, the league table currently looks like this:
1. Man United
2. Sunderland
3. Liverpool
4. Charlton
5. Ipswich
6. Newcastle
7. Southampton
8. Leeds
9. Chelsea
10. Arsenal
11. Middlesborough
12. Aston Villa
13. Tottenham
14. Leicester
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