The issue about sacking Arteta, changing the team, and sorting Arsenal once and for all

 

 

• The issue about sacking Arteta, changing the team, and sorting Arsenal once and for all
• The biggest scandal in football today is still unresolved

By Tony Attwood

It is a rather unfortunate reality of English football is that the media deems it necessary for the game to have controversies.  The reason this is so is that the media live on arguments.   No logic is needed, no reasoned thought, just controversies.   In the days when anyone can get the facts of football (the score, the scorers, the league table, possession ratios, the punishment cards, and anything else that takes your fancy), all in a split second, so football needs something else to keep up interest.

Journalists and their editors have been aware of this for years – hence they stimulate and prod anything that looks vaguely controversial.   Arsenal are top of the league?  Sack the manager.  Tottenham have sacked their last three or four managers, and have sunk lower  and lower.   The solution?   Sack the manager.  That sort of thing.  

As a result football matches are not games played out over 90 minutes with a little break half way through, but rather they are about a pre-game analysis that has become a range of suggestions, demands and undercurrents, all almost totally unproven, and generally forgotten once the match is over and a new round of controversies is invented.

The people who invent these controversies are journalists – and the people who let them linger, take root and fester, are those in the clubs.  For the general rule in football is that any publicity is better than being ignored.  No publicity means no crowd means no gate receipts.   

Now the reality of course is that most of the time there is no news although clubs do their best to give updates on injuries and training sessions.   And so for most of the year there is a raging invention of transfers which of course never happen.   Indeed as we have proven over numerous years between 97% and 98% of the transfer stories run in the media each summer never happen.   And most likely were never likely to happen.

Yet these days if you look at the blogs and newspapers you will find transfer rumors running all the year round, but to be fair the media do try and come up with a few other trinkets to keep the readership busy.

One on the most obvious of these is the failure of Arsenal to sign a player, the inability of the manager to see the obvious which every supporter can see whether he/she goes to the games or not. So the reason Arsenal don’t win all their games is that their transfer system is broken, the selection system is useless, the manager has no idea and really the answer is obvious.

Now this leads to an interesting point.   The solution, according to the media and the moaning supporters, is obvious.   But the only people who fail to see it are the people who are paid to see it.

So how can this be?  Actually it is because most people prefer their beliefs to the evidence in front of them.  For much of my working life I wrote the text of advertisements (a job known as being a “copywriter”)

My work was then judged by the sales the advertisements I created got.  If sales went down the advertising agency I was with would lose the contract, and it would be my fault.  If sales went up, that was because it was a wonderful product, and basically any old copy would have worked.

Football seems to be the reverse of this for managers.  If the club is not top of the league its the manager’s fault for buying the wrong players.  If the club is top of the league it is because the players are doing well.

Of course such logic is a bunch of turnips but each day in the newspapers, blogs and comments this is what we see  

So why is it like this?   Actually there is an explanation..   In fact there is a whole branch of psychology that deals with this: it is called Crowd behavior and delusions – or quite often Crowd Delusions.  It is a branch of psychology that asks and answers the question, “Why Do People Believe Things That Aren’t True?

In fact most of us do believe in things that are not true, and then when whatever we believed in turns out not to be true, so we blame someone else, and have another untrue belief – usually a variation in the last belief.   It is a world-view system that never gets defeated.   A fan believes Arsenal would win the league if only we got rid of Arteta.    The club does that and the next manager takes Arsenal down to 8th next season.  We blame the board for making the wrong decision.

Its a good game to play because we don’t ever make the decision, therefore we can never be wrong.  As a result we live in a world of high anxiety (we’re worried about Arsenal) and low trust (the manager is useless).

That is all fairly obvious but what follows is far less obvious and much more dangerous.   That form of thinking results in stress and fear, and that makes us search for alternative answers.  But unfortunate these answers become more and more unreliable, and less and less likely to help solve the problem.

We then become anxious and that makes us more vulnerable to picking up on a wrong solution to the problem.   Anger, worry, anxiety, and quite possibly alcohol consumption stop us seeing the world clearly, we lose touch with what is possible  and we stop seeing what is real eventually reaching the “Anyone is better than Arteta” phase, which is clearly nonsense.   Just think of who Arteta replaced.

Strong emotions, make feelings seem like facts.  Try and avoid them if you can – it makes for a better life.