- The first top of the league club to have fans demanding the manager’s sacking
- The light at the end of the Arsenal tunnel is just the express train heading right at Tottenham
By Tony Attwood
There is a subscription article in the Telegraph today which has the headline “Culture war between Arsenal players and fans is so damaging.” The essence of the argument is expressed in the sentence, “Arteta’s patient approach fails to meet anxious supporters’ demand for adventurous football in shock defeat by Bournemouth.”
There is no evidence offered in the article to show that there actually is a “culture war” taking place, nor that it is between “Arsenal players and fans,” nor that it is “damaging” the club. You might think that all three issues raised actually exist, and that all three are damaging the club, but if you do, the chances are you will be basing your view on your emotions, selected events that back up your thoughts, and something said in a newspaper. Because there isn’t any clear evidence, it is speculation.
Yet despite the lack of evidence and supporting data, this view, being replicated in newspapers and by radio and TV commentators, is taking hold. And indeed this is not new – it is something we have seen many times before.
Now I don’t want to go over these issues yet again – but I would like to put forward a question.
Why are these journalists and their editors and indeed the newspaper publishers putting forward these points when they are not raising the issue of why Manchester City were able to spend such a huge amount of money that the League was able to charge them with over 100 offences and find them guilty, and then do nothing about punishing the club?
OK, these are two different issues, one is about who Arsenal buy and how Arsenal plays, the other is about the source of money and the amount of money spent by Manchester City. One topic is debated in the media, and the other is ignored by the same media.
And what is so curious is that in the first case – the way Arsenal play – there are infinite numbers of opinions, and only a modest number of hard facts. Is player X better than player Y? You can probably find people with different viewpoints. Is the fact that certain referees see something like two-thirds of their games as home wins, while others see under a quarter of their games as home wins, something we should ponder and ask questions about? Obviously not for the papers, no more than the fact that some referees can see the same club half a dozen times or more in a season, when it would be so easy to arrange things so that no referee would ever oversee matches involving the same club more than twice during a campaign.
In short, we are debating issues about Arsenal which are hard to discuss and which have a lack of facts, while we are absolutely not discussing refereeing issues where the facts and figures showing huge variations in the way they handle games are there for all to see.
And what’s more, the media are jumping into the arguments about Arteta and his style, while they won’t touch the issue of referees.
As a result, it is quite possible that we will lose Arteta in the near future, and following the approaches of clubs like Tottenham and Nottingham Forest, then go through a series of managers who are actually far worse than the one we have just kicked out.
The media won’t mind because that makes Arsenal’s managerial issues the news. And although they can’t or won’t write about refereeing problems, they most certainly will jump into the story of Arsenal’s change of managers with utter relish.
That the media behave in this way is of course, up to them – it is a free country in terms of what the media do. Although it is curious that all of the media avoid certain topics, like Manchester City’s finances, while diving into attacks on managers of other clubs. But of course, that is up to them to decide what they are going to write about
And it is not because of a lack of facts. We know ManC were found guilty of around 110 breaches of financial regulations. If we are talking about Arteta’s decisions, it is much harder to prove one decision right and another wrong – but the media still endlessly debates such things while leaving actual rule-breaking aside.
Ever wondered why it is taking so long for the League to issue a punishment against ManC? Is it because no one but me is interested? Or is it because the story is far too complicated for us poor, near-illiterate fans to understand all this complex money business? Or could it be that someone somewhere has said that it is in the media’s interest NOT to publish the story? Or did ManC say they would sue any newspaper that reported anything? I have no idea: I can only speculate, because no one is saying a word.
But I do find it strange that the media focuses so strongly on some topics and leaves other topics, which seem to me to be huge, off the agenda. And I do spend my time wondering “why?”
That doesn’t help anyone, of course, and that doesn’t get us any closer to an answer, but somehow it just seems to me to be very important. Why are we not talking about the fact that it has taken years (and is still taking more and more time) to reach a conclusion about what should happen to ManC as a result of their financial dealings in the past, when some can conclude that Arteta is a useless manager based on one game?
