- Arsenal’s end of the current downturn is there for them to grasp
- Ødegaard’s return certainly will help, but we seem to have too many players…
By Tony Attwood with the help of a passing high horse.
Read the blogs, read the news websites, listen to the football on stations like Radio 5 or Talk Sport in the UK, hear the endless opinions on Sky Sports, and you might think that football is jogging along as it always does. Clubs are vying with each other to buy new players, managers are being sacked, young players are suddenly hitting the headlines, Arsenal are making cockups (“William Gallas slams Arsenal for ‘unacceptable’ issue in scathing attack”) … and oh yes, refs are rather like the floodlights, and the stewards, and the people on the gates, and camera teams, and the commentators, and the hidden security teams, all doing their job…, which is why no one mentions them.
But behind all that there is something else happening. Or rather several “somethings elses”. And what is noticeable is that the media, be it blogs, newspapers and their websites, radio, TV…. are not even contemplating these other people. Nor are they noticing that something different is emerging.
Indeed the impression they give is that everything is as it always was only a bit bigger, a bit faster, and as a result a bit more interesting and definitely better. Certainly worth paying attention to at any rate.
And yet look at the news stories of the day and for the most part they are the same old same old, the players are not doing their jobs, the wrong players have been bought, new players are going to be bought, and the manager lacks the inventiveness to get the current team to do something else. Most articles have little that is new – all they have above them intriguing headlines to draw us in.
As a result most opinions being expressed either by professionals paid to spout what they are directed to spout, or amateurs who spout just for fun, are to the effect that Arsenal are getting things wrong.
Now mostly this opinion comes from people who really have no idea about running a football club – they are either complete outsiders, or they are insiders who have finished and moved on, or failed and are now paid for their opinion.
As a result the agenda is pretty much self-perpetuating. There are of course a few bits and pieces: the Premier League charging Manchester City with 115 offences, and Manchester City taking the League to court over its arrangements with clubs (that’s the case where it was heard and both sides claimed that they had won, since which nothing has changed).
And really when one pauses for a moment it is slightly odd that the discussions about matches and league tables and approaches and managerial changes and Edu leaving etc etc are all continuing without any attempt to take into account this context. It is as if commentators are saying, “well that’s a bit of a side show…. football will always be football no matter what.” And readers believe it.
But if the case brought by Manchester C and the case against that club were not enough to make one think something big time is about to change, there is the fact that PGMO, the ultra-secretive secret society is still running the show, and still has its employees being criticised wholesale by fans and is rarely mentioned by the media.
Now we knew something was up after the Mail ran the headline “Premier League referees ‘stopped from taking lucrative side jobs in Gulf states’… after Michael Oliver banked £3,000 for officiating in Saudi Arabia ahead of VAR horror show last season “
But what we don’t know is how the PGMO is now managing its finances after it very publicly ran out of money back in August. It’s as if that little episode never happened, because PGMO is just buzzing along as before.
Meanwhile three other major factors are rarely mentioned – why PGMO is so secretive, why the media don’t do an enquiry into it like they do into everything else, and how come the results of games overseen by different referees can be so different?
Whenever there is even a fraction of a hint that a player might leave a club the media are all over it, generally without any evidence. But where we have the crisis-ridden PGMO, running out of money, seemingly not running out of money, forbidding its staff from working overseas, and then perhaps not, still not budging a millimetre on its ultra-secrecy stance, still allowing the same referee to oversee matches involving the same teams over and over again, still not responding to mega protests from fans… and well, that’s odd too.
And all the while the journalists say… nothing. So here is a list of the most read articles at the moment of my writing this, on the NewsNow site covering Arsenal
- One of Arteta’s biggest Arsenal signings admits he’s unhappy as star makes huge pledge over transfer links
- Sky Sports journalist: Arsenal eyeing move for once-£145m big name without Edu’s help – report
- Arsenal want to sign striker who’s ‘one of the best in the world’
- Arteta will be “fuming” with him: Arsenal must now drop 4/10 dud who lost the ball 16x – opinion
- 6ft 5in hitman seriously considered joining Arsenal, changed his mind because of 25y/o- report
Actually, I missed one out and it reads ‘Football is ruined like this’ – Italian press criticises refereeing during Arsenal defeat to Inter Milan
And I ask you to consider for a moment – if you were writing a summary of what is in the English media at any particular moment, could you ever find yourself writing the headline “Football is ruined like this – English press criticises refereeing during match.”
I doubt it – and that really shows the gap between the English media and the Italian media. The English media kowtows to PGMO in a way that is unthinkable in any other democratic country.
Thus the questions from that are
a) why is this happening and why are journalists and newspapers allowing it to happen?
b) does it matter to us fans that our news is being censored by the media owners?
c) what can we do about it?
