- The most detailed research into what is wrong with PL refereeing, yet found. Part 1
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By Tony Attwood.
Normally, on the days before an Arsenal match, we’d be focusing exclusively on the forthcoming game, but there was recently an article in the Guardian which was headlined, “Do people actually hate Arsenal? Yes, they do. The real question is: why?” It was written by Barney Ronay, three of whose previous seven articles for the paper are about Arsenal. This piece opened very promisingly with the lines, “Why do people hate Arsenal so much?” adding a few lines later, “The obvious starting point is: do people actually hate Arsenal? The answer to which is yes, they do.”
Meanwhile, in a totally different arena, we hear that the final Scottish League match of the season was not concluded after a pitch invasion near the end following Celtic’s goal, which took them into the lead.
So here we have “A recent social-media study concluded Arsenal’s fans are the most disliked in the Premier League,” and the final match of the Scottish season being abandoned because the away team’s players did not feel safe lining up to restart the game because of the number of opposition supporters on the pitch.
And then we have a “recent study” (which is an unfortunately vague heading, as I like to check these things), of which we have no idea concerning how and when it was undertaken, how many people were asked, how they were selected and so on.
And that’s a shame in relation to that piece because it continues by saying, “Even Mikel Arteta drives people into a state of rage, from his unremarkable control-based tactics, to his invariably bland public statements, to his frenetic touchline appearances in black zippy coat and sober grey slacks, like a travelling hitman on a fishing trip.”
But whose fault is this? Normally, in British society, the rule of law is based on the notion that individuals have the duty to control themselves. And yet now that seems, at least in relation to football, to have broken down. However, we might also ask if what jacket the manager wears really matters. And come to that, does an opinion based on his dress code actually tell us anything about football?
So when we read that “Mikel Arteta’s touchline behaviour annoys opposition fans” we still don’t know how he annoys them, how many he annoys, and how much worse this is than the sort of annoyance that any other manager whose club is top of the league generates.
Now we know Arteta is threatened regularly with violence, as when, for example, the ESPN panel host suggested: “other Champions League coaches might want to literally punch Arteta in the face, while his panellists nodded along, as though this is an entirely reasonable conclusion.” And that point is worth noting, for it seems to be excusing violence.
Now of course violence in football matches is not new – indeed if you are keeping up with our series on “100 consecutive years of Arsenal in the top divisio,” you may know we have just been through the era when, because of the violence of Liverpool supporters in a European Cup match, all English clubs were withdrawn from European matches causing Arsenal to miss the chance of playing another season in Europe, having just won the league.
And now we read, “Arsenal is an objectively good elite-football entity. If we must have hyper-rich clubs, this is the model of how to do it. Generate your own revenue. Don’t bend the financial rules. Don’t run debts funded by shady interests.” And although they criticise the Rwanda project, the piece concludes, “this is perhaps as close as we’re going to get to a functional mega-club.
There is also good criticism of Chelsea, with its “deeply stupid talent clearing-house methods,” and notes approvingly that Arsenal “is at least a pure football project,” in which a young manager was given five years to build a club which could play five Englishmen in a Champions League semi-final.
And then the big point is reached: “Arsenal are not cheating by playing like this. They have simply adapted better than others to the current permissiveness on certain kinds of contact at set pieces, in the same way Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal team reacted to the 1925 change of the offside law…. For now, this is just good coaching, finding a way to top the league with a deeply basic centre-forward and a very good defence.”
And I say at that point, thank goodness someone has noticed
But why do people feel enraged by Arteta? Is it because he leaps about on the TV feed, close to the pitch? If that’s it, it is a bit of an overreaction by his critics since he is mainly yelling at his own players. He’s not berating officials; this is just a very intense man desperately trying to find an edge in his own team. Who is also, lest we forget, competing against people who stand accused of breaking the rules in order to win the league, are found guilty, and then never get any punishment at all.
Maybe the biggest problem is the contrast between Arteta’s excitement and energy and Pep Guardiola generally looking quite relaxed. But that seems rather unfair – to punish one guy for not looking as cool as another.
There are many reasons given for the media turning on Arsenal, including the suggestion that London based newspapers like to tell their northern readers that they are not London-centric, and they can hate a London club as much as people in Manchester and Liverpool might do And besides the media is very clearly not hating Tottenham, nor having a bit of a laugh about the financial mess they have got themselves in, spending all that money on a stadium, and then flirting with relegation.
But there is one other point here that seems to me to be quite important. Media coverage of football is only slightly based on facts – most of it is opinion. And so journalists find it easy to pick up on the opinion of some supporters that Arsenal deserve to be derided. Because there seems to be a need to dislike at least one team, so Arsenal it is.
There is no excuse for journalists to be biased against Arsenal, who have the best, or almost the best (depending on when you read this), defence, attack and points total in the league. But taking that line sure does make writing football articles easy. You just make it up and write it, day after day.
So yes, Arsenal are probably the most hated club in the league at the moment. And if you want to change that situation, stop buying a newspaper, and if you do see one, don’t buy any product or service that is advertised within it. That should solve the problem.
Arsenal have always been the most hated club in England – from the ‘Bank of England Club’ accusations in the 1930s (between the crash of 1929 and the Second World War), ‘Lucky Arsenal’ under Bertie Mee, through to George Graham’s ‘Boring Arsenal’ for winning 6 trophies in 8 seasons, to the varying degrees of putting down Arsène Wenger (record red cards and rough house tactics, I did not see it, Pirès’ dive, switching to trying to score the perfect goal and being lightweight, lacking leaders, no Plan B, injury prone players etc), right up to the ‘b’ word and the celebration police today!
It’s the eestory of the Ars-e-nal!