There are signs that Arsenal are winning the battle against the eternally negative media

 

By Tony Attwood

• How the media are setting Arsenal up for a disaster?
• ManC v Arsenal: The referee and his percentage of home wins, and the sadness of losing a player

There is a screaming headline in the Telegraph today that reads “Finishing second is a failure – Arsenal would be the most criticised runners-up in history”

Of course, it is nonsense – coming second would a fabulous triumph for many teams in the Premier League – Tottenham, Crystal Palace, Chelsea, etc. etc.    But the media use the story that Arsenal can fail because they know how much power they have.  

It’s a phenomenon that psychologists have known and written about for decades, as with articles such as “Does what you know affect what you see?” and of course, the answer is yes.  If players and fans “know” Arsenal are “bottlers” that will affect their reaction and affect the game.

The point is that the problem with the question, “Does what you know affect what you see?” is the word “know”.   For much of the time, we “know” things are, when it comes down to it, just opinions.  Over time, those opinions become perceived as facts when enough people hold those views, and thus become the standard way of seeing the world.

Of course, not many people will be reading the Journal of Experimental Psychology but I turned to this subject today because in a recent edition, Michael A. Cohen at MIT reported a scientific study showing that what we are told before an event affect they way we respond to an event.  Translate that into football, and if all the media are telling opposition players, opposition fans, and referees that Arsenal are a boring side who win by bending the rules of football, and in fact cheating, that is how Arsenal will be seen by everyone, and even some refs will be affected.

Throw in the notion that Arsenal’s football style is tedious, boring, dirty, , unadventurous, and full of cheating, and then ultimately the Arsenal players will start to see themselves this way.   And indeed, even a tiny change in attitude can affect their play.  Of course, u if PGMO ever announced anything, they would say, “That’s not the case,” but there is no sign that they are even considering this sort of effect.  If they were, surely the first thing they would do would be to ensure each ref only sees each club a maximum of twice in a season.

Now of course it is the job of the manager and everyone else within Arsenal to counter such negative impacts, but after each training session the players will see mass media attacks on the Arsenal team, the way they cheat, how dirty they are, how their fans are fed up with them, and above all how massively superior ManC is when compared with Arsenal.  

Of course, we might say, “Arsenal players should have more self-belief,” but very, very few of us have ever experienced this type of attack or felt how much it can undermine one.  But the fact is that a lot of psychological research shows that the “knowledge” that we pick up along the way can affect how we see ourselves, situations, and others.   

Now of course, managers and their training staff know all this, but what they can’t fully overcome is the effect of the mass media, which are constantly on certain players’ backs.  

Our brains take in both factual information and biased suggestions in equal measure and it affects our behaviour, and this is the game the media are playing all the time.  If just one player is affected, the effect can be small.   But if the whole team are reading that when Arsenal have success, it is only because they cheat, it can affect the players quite deeply.

Of course, clubs today are aware of this, and top clubs started employing psychologists in the 1980s. Although it was not widely publicised, it became mandatory for academies to have at least one psychologist working with the team from that time onwards.  Indeed, AC Milan became known for being one of the early adopters of the profession within football, although it is reported in some places that as early as 1958, the Brazil national team had psychologists in their training camp to help the players cope with stress and the unprecedented media attention the team got.

Of course, the negative perception of psychology and psychologists in much of British society has resulted in some players and fans taking a negative view of the use of psychologists, but the wholesale attacks on particular players and teams in the media have made the use of psychologists much more widespread and more acceptable within football than was previously the case.

In the build-up to recent games, the evolution of the notion of Arsenal as a team that is at the very least “bending” the rules has been adopted by the media at large.  This is not only changing refereeing attitudes towards Arsenal but it is probably ensuring that some top talents are thinking twice before coming to Arsenal, which is a great tragedy.

But as the headline here suggests, it is possible to see Arsenal pushing back against this campaign and seeing a real bonding in the team as it unifies not only against the opposition players but also against the media bias too.