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by Tony Attwood
There is a growing anger in the Arsenal fan base. It is not shared among those who gather data and ideas for Untold Arsenal, nor indeed do I share any anger. But it most certainly is out there. A typical example comes from Canon Stats with its headline Frustration in the fanbase is bubbling just under the surface.
The feeling is that the Arsenal management are lazy, not paying attention, not responding to a crisis, not seeing a crisis that is obvious to everyone, resting on their laurels, afraid to take risks, being content with coming second, and so on. And they feel it is a good thing for them to spread this anger and frustration so more and more people pick up on it. Then it will spread to the players and…
And actually, I don’t know. What comes across is simply “this is not good enough”. How can we be beaten by Tottenham at all, let alone in a pre-season friendly? Tottenham,. who ended up nearer relegation than anything else last season, of all teams.
The keyword in all this is “frustration”. It has nothing to do with all the players Arsenal are buying. It is that we should beat the Tots and nothing else matters.
But this set of pre-season games is, in fact, not about preparing for the season and noting the strength of the team. It is about selling more TV rights and thus making more money. Yes, pre-season games were about winning back in 1987 when Arsenal were climbing back up the league, having finished 12th, 5th and 3rd the previous three seasons. But then the way pre-season worked (without any thought of profit, but lots of thought about getting players to play together) was quite different.
In that pre-season, Arsenal started with a 1-4 away win at St Albans, then a 0-1 away win over Orient, then back to goal scoring with a 0-4 victory over Stade Nyonnais, and a 1-2 away win over Strasbourg. followed by a defeat to PSV, then a win over Norwich.
All very satisfactory, but not really the equivalent of the game against Tottenham played in Foreign Parts, with the prime aim of making a lot of money, as well as a chance to get the players used to playing with each other.
Now I have seen the argument put that the players don’t realise how much beating Tottenham means to the fans. But actually I’d say that anyone who is turning on Arteta because of that result doesn’t have a clue how contemporary pre-seasons work. They are money-making projects which are essential because Arsenal, unlike in previous times, are now a loss-making club.
So when we read about frustration and anger building up among the fans, this to me seems to relate to fans who are fixated on a rivalry with Tottenham, rather than having an awareness that there is more to the season than two league fixtures and a friendly against Tottenham.
But the notion that the club doesn’t realise how much this means to fans, really is “old world” thinking. This is not what it is all about any more. This is not about winning the league, winning the cup, it is about being able to meet next season’s financial requirements so that next summer we can do some more player trading and not be as hamstrung by FFP rules as some clubs are this season.
There is also the eternal argument that somehow football is moving on and Arsenal are falling back into some sort of mythical dark ages era. And this despite coming second for three years running.
Let’s try this a different way. Here is the table for the two clubs at the end of last season…
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Arsenal | 38 | 20 | 14 | 4 | 69 | 34 | 35 | 74 |
| 17 | Tottenham Hotspur | 38 | 11 | 5 | 22 | 64 | 65 | -1 | 38 |
Is anyone seriously saying that one match in a pre-season friendly overthrows that total difference between the clubs? And that at a time when Arsenal have just spent a quarter of a billion pounds on new players!
OK if some viewers of that match think that the money was wasted, or that the club should have spent more, that’s their view. But the reality is that such people don’t work for a football club. And the reason they don’t work for a football club is that they don’t actually know what they are talking about.
In the match against Tottenham, Arsenal were focused on getting players fit and seeing how the new players could work with the existing squad. They were focused on how to turn a team that came second last season into winners in the coming season.
Tottenham were focused on a) beating Arsenal, because that is so important and b) how to climb out of their worst league season since 1977 when they were last relegated.
It is also a fact that the media, aided as ever by their coat-tail hanging accolites in certain blogs, both always ready to knock Arsenal, managed to report Arsenal coming as runners’-up as a failture, not even noticing that the last time Arsenal became runners up three times running they went on in the fourth season to win the league.
And this we must note, is the media that colludes with Manchester City in terms of taking the fact that they have been charged with over 100 offences, out of the news completely. The latest published by their friends in the Manchester Evening News is that any announcement concerning the offences has now been put back to October. And this is for an investigation into rule-breaking that covers the period from 2009 to 2018. Rule-breaking that started 16 years ago. Still not resolved!!!
Meanwhile, the media has managed to persuade everyone that Arsenal’s second place last season was a failure, a disappointment, a disaster…. not taking account of the way the Arsenal forward line and midfield was devastated by injuries to players.
The reality is that whatever Arsenal do, the media will knock it. The pre-season games are experiments, not competitive affairs. Sadly the media haven’t woken up to that yet.
