- Why don’t clubs give managers more time? (Sometimes one season is too long!)
- Fines and suspensions don’t stop unwanted behaviour. Why not try something else?
By Tony Attwood
I opened my first article today with the thought that in May 2025 the headline appeared in www.goal.com saying ‘Sorry but SACK ARTETA!’ – Arsenal fans call for manager’s head & rivals take aim at ‘full Stoke’ tactics as another trophyless season beckons after Champions League semi-final heartbreak at hands of PSG.”
Now either those “Arsenal fans” were either a figment of the website’s imagination or maybe they have since changed their minds, or maybe they have just faded into the darkness. But either way, it seems impossible to find them and seek an explanation from them as to why they felt that way. Yes in May 2025 we came second again, but look at what happened in May 2026 because we did NOT sack Arteta. We won the league by seven points, and lost the Champs League final by one goal.
And I think this allegation of some Arsenal fans demanding the manager be sacked after he has just won the Premier League for the club for the first time in 20+ years because of his tactics, demands some exanimation.
Now it is important to note from the off that the article in Goal I am quoting doesn’t tell us how many fans wanted Arteta out. I didn’t meet any but maybe they did. Did these “fans” attend games? Are they season tick holders? Were there lots of them or just half a dozen? Such information is not trivial – it helps us understand the depth of the feeling and the possible truth within the allegation.
The people I know are the people who packed the streets for the parade of the trophy, and none of them were saying “we don’t accept this trophy because it was won with such a bad style of football.” Every Arsenal fan I know adores Arteta and what he has done, because like me, they’ve watched how he turned the failing Emery side around to create the league winning team that was the second highest scoring side in the league, and has the best defence in the league – both at the same time.
Indeed where I have discussed the style of play with others or read many websites newspaper reports and I can’t recall such negativity as expressed by Goal.com. So it would be really helpful to know how many people Goal consulted and whether they were Arsenal season ticket holders or TV watchers, or… well, who were they???
It is of course true that the way clubs played last season when a corner was taken evolved into a style of play that has not been seen before. And the PGMO refs have changed the rules in order to change the way they respond to it this season and on the basis of the one game so far this campaign, Arsenal have changed their tactics. That sort of thing happens to innovative styles of play, and it deserves examination, but all we got was accusation and implied sneering.
Now I do think the complaints against Arsenal are very, very important, not least because complaints made against Arsenal by one publication are often picked up and repeated across multiple other outlets.. Especially with the suggestion that Arsenal have been breaking the rules a) in a way that other clubs have not while b) the referees ignore this rule breaking and c) Arsenal fans are so fed up with this they are demanding that the manager who has transformed the club from the days of Emery should be dismissed.
Of course what we don’t know is how many Arsenal fans are calling for Arteta to be sacked. Is that 1% of those attending matches (ie around 600), or are we measuring pinions of those who actually support another club but add, “I’ve always liked Arsenal but I can’t stand this style of play.”
Or could it be that no research has done, other perhaps than listening to the talk of a couple of mates who are not Arsenal supporters but who have said, “Arsenal are cheating”. From my casual observation that is how it normally goes.
Sources are important because if the people giving the opinion that Arteta should be sacked are Arsenal season ticket holders of long standing that is one thing. If they are supporters of other clubs that is something quite different. And if the headline was changed by the copy editor just to get more readers (which is a very, very common occurrence in publishing) then that is different again.
And that leads me to the main point. Many football supporters take newspaper reports of a match as representative of what happened, whereas headlines such as that about sacking Arteta, are set up in order to whip up opinion, not to give a factual report.
Indeed that is where newspaper and online reports of matches are now. They are not written to report what happened, as used to be the case, but rather to project a particular opinion (as in this case “sack Arteta”). As far as I know there is no evidence based on a serious survey that multiple Arsenal fans want Arteta sacked, and thus the headline “Arsenal fans call for manager’s head” is downright misleading. If that is ok I can legitimately write “Goal readers demand publication is shut down,” because two of us just said it. It’s not very good reporting.
Which raises the question, why was this piece published? The answer probably is to attract readers, sow dissent and create disenchantment – and I write that because I can’t see any other reason for publishing it.
Now it is interesting that in recent years with the multiple championships gained by ManC there has been only a modest amount of criticism of the ManCs financial approach to football and also only little criticism of the slowness of the processes of the League in dealing with the issue of their finances. And although this issue does arise from time to time (as it did this past week) most of the time football reports about ManC make no reference to the issue.
Yet here we had one Arsenal game out of which Arsenal fans (we are not told how many – was it three, or 30, or 30,000?) “call for the manager’s head.”
In a lifetime of watching football at all levels from the Spartan League to the Premier League I have never known supporters demand the sacking of a manager because of the style of play he enforces. Sack him because the club is low in the league – yes. But sack him because of the way the club takes corners? Never.
So what we have here is a thoroughly misleading: a demand for the manager to be sacked because of the tactics he uses. And this in an environment in which we are still waiting for action on the club that has broken over 100 league rules and yet not been punished.
Which when you come to think of it really is weird. Just what is it that goal.com is trying to promote – or come to that trying to hide? Now that might make an interesting article.
