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By Tony Attwood
There is something particular about Arsenal that some football supporters really don’t like at the moment. While most clubs have adopted a process which basically can be described as a “rush to the top” (a process which can easily go wrong), Arsenal have taken the route to the top slowly.
It is a process which other clubs and their supporters have eschewed. And it is a process that the media, by and large, laughs at when they spot it in progress.
But at the same time, this is a process that, while being laughed at by the media, actually works. And what’s more, for other clubs, their “get in quick” methods for rising up the league have been shown to be totally unsatisfactory in terms meeing the aim of the process. Indeed, they can quite often cause the club to fall backwards rather than rise up.
Such “get there quick” methods generally focus on such options as “Do what you did last season” – and for that approach, we can see Liverpool as a perfect example.
But the most obvious reason why the anti-Arsenal rhetoric has grown in recent months is that the media has promoted it. Someone publishes a piece about Arsenal fouling every other team, and other publications take it up.
One publication suggests Arsenal have spent a lot on transfers (they were actually the fourth highest spending club in the transfer this season, with Liverpool, Cheslea and Manchester City spending far more) and everyone else runs the story. No one notices that Arsenal were only 15th in the chart of the number of new players the club brought in for 2025/26. No one comments on the fact that Brighton, Sunderland and Chelsea were the top three for the number of new players they brought in because it hasn’t done them much good.
Getting rid of lots of players isn’t much of a story either – Arsenal were 15th in the lists of clubs selling players. Chelsea got rid of around twice as many players as Arsenal did.
But Arsenal did spend 280 million euros in the last couple of transfer windows, this being (to be clear) the amount spent on new players minus the amount they got for the players they sold)/
In fact, it is quite hard to find really negative stories about Arsenal, even if we move on to look at cards waved by referees…
Arsenal, in fact have the fourth highest level of possession of any club in the league: 56.8%, and the third highest number of shots per game in the league. So they are an attractive team, and a team with 16 fewer yellows than the deified Manchester City. Arsenal were also a team that received seven fewer reds than Chelsea. A club with the highest average market value of players in Europe at €51.21m.
And yet a club more vilified by the media than any other, despite being top scorers, having the best defence, and being top of the league.
Of course, one reason for this is easy to grasp – having come second in the league three years running, the media en masse predicted Arsenal would now slip down this season, rather than seriously challenge to end the league at the top. And if there is one thing that journalists hate, it is being proven wrong. But having not found anything serious to knock Arsenal with, the media has actively encouraged fans of other teams to condemn Arsenal for cheating, without producing a scrap of evidence to back that up.
Indeed they’ve even tried the old “supercomputer” prediction lark, forgetting that some of us actually know what supercomputers are, where they can be found, and what they are used for. And believe me, it isn’t for predicting football results.
But so low is the journalists’ estimate of their readers’ intelligence that just because they have no idea what a super-computer is, and what it does, and indeed where it can be found, they think we not only don’t know we wouldn’t look it up if that were the case.
In fact, one thing shines out in all of this, and that is the utter contempt that football journalists have for their readers, thinking that we will accept any twaddle that they write without question. But just because they are that stupid, it doesn’t give them the right to believe that we have sunk to their level.
