By Tony Attwood
An awful lot of people spent an awful lot of 2020 doomscrolling. Then as the pandemic eased off lots of people stopped doomscrolling or at least reduced their addiction to manageable proportions. But doomscrolling never goes away.
Now if you don’t know the term, doomscrolling is the spending of large amounts of time reading negative news on social media and the internet. And Arsenal are the leading recipients. For everywhere we are being told that Arsenal absolutely and desperately need new players and they are not getting them. And before you know it, they will all have been sold, probably to Tottenham.
However, why Arsenal need all these new players is not examined – and indeed, if you were to ask any of the people writing this nonsense (or at least 97% nonsense) they might well tell you that it is obvious. Arsenal haven’t won the league, and clearly having come second three times running, Arsenal are failures.
Besides, all the top clubs are buying. And this is where you might feel like getting a retaliation in. For last summer, the more the team spent, the further it slipped down the league the following season.
And that realisation makes us aware that behind all this “must buy” stuff is an ignorance of what generally happens. For the more you buy the more you slip. And if you want to make sure, change your manager, too. That normally takes the club down the league as well.
But the media continues with the notion that it is possible to buy the players the club absolutely needs in the transfer window, and indeed, if only the manager and his team would listen to or read the work of amateur commentators, they would know what to do. But they don’t.
The tell-tale sign of what is wrong of course, is the fact that the media don’t re-run the list of the players they suggested each club needs, and then see what happened to the clubs that followed the media’s advice. Nor do they ever answer the question: if your commentators are so good at knowing what a club wants, why don’t they work for a club?
The serious point, of course, is that it is impossible to win in the transfer window. Some clubs may appear to have solved all their problems, signed a host of brilliant players and have brilliant seasons in prospect, but this is never the case. Signings fail to work out, players get injured or lose form, managers are rubbish and are quickly sacked, only too be replaced by managers who are rubbish and are quickly sacked.
But the clubs that don’t sack managers even when things are not going well are right. You might think of Arsenal with two 8th place finishes.
Ignoring social media tales altogether is usually a good place to start if you want to know what is going on. Each summer over 100 players are said to be coming to Arsenal. Between 97% and 98% of those players don’t come. Maybe because the media made it all up, maybe because the players didn’t want to come because of the way the media talks about Arsenal’s problems, maybe because the selling club didn’t actually want to sell.
And remember, anyone can start a rumour, with journalists often plucking rumours from their own imagination, and then getting the rest of the crowd to spread the story. Instead of doomscrolling to get your transfer in the news, and make it stick to reputable media sources. It is an art which many work on.
One point to arise from this is that no news isn’t bad news
Just because your club has not signed anyone yet does not mean they have not been frantically working on things. Most clubs hate transfer stories leaking out – they are closely guarded secrets – and while there will be legitimate targets reported in the media, deals are also being worked on in private.
Of course, some stories might come to pass. Martin Zubimendi has been seen in London. Honest. I read it in the paper. Or maybe Real Mad are buying him but they chose to do the deal in London just to confuse Uefa.
Arteta is / is not getting desperate No. Yes. He knows what he is doing, otherwise he wouldn’t have led the club from the utter disaster that was the previous manager to three second-place finishes.
Apparently Arteta has really got a taste for players with a Z in their name so after Zubimendi, Arsenal will sign goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga. Cue the song, Kepa is a Keeper.
After that, we know don’t we. It is Sesko or Gyo or Rdrygo – well, someone with an o in the name. And Martinelli will not go and it will turn out those rumours were started by a journalist whose editor was shouting at him for not providing a negative Arsenal tale that day.
Another thing to watch out for is Arsenal buying a player who has not been mentioned in the media, and finishing the deal late in the window. That will be called a “panic buy”. It won’t be, it will just be that the tale didn’t leak to the media.
