Why are the media so much against Arsenal?

 

By Tony Attwood

“There is a subsection of online Arsenal fans that is extremely sensitive and obsessed by imagined plots against the club; there’s a reason that fan TV reached a mainstream audience at Arsenal rather than any other club. Their frenzied anxiety has entertainment value to those who enjoy the comedy of embarrassment.”   

That was published recently in the Guardian.  Absolutely no evidence was produced to back up this extraordinary claim.   Not a comment for a guy down the pub, or a sociological survey of Arsenal fans undertaken by a PhD student.  Not a report of a questionnaire, nor the comments of some people watching an Arsenal match on TV in a bar in Northants.   Nothing.   It is said, and we are asked to take it as gospel.

Actually, I don’t.  I think it is an invented piece of tripe made up by a journalist, possibly at the behest of his sports editor, in order to do a bit more knocking of Arsenal.   You can imagine the question: “Dave, have we done a knocking piece on Arsenal supporters this week?” and on getting the answer “No” he replies, “then get on with it, man.  I told you I want at least two anti-Arsenal-fans pieces a week.”

But maybe you think there might be something in this anti-Arsenal stuff – perhaps feeling that there is something in the nature of the club itself that should be criticised. After all, Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn both have season tickets.   So a story can be built around that, maybe…

Certainly, the Guardian recently proclaimed that the London borough of Islington is the spiritual heartland of New Labour.  Except most Arsenal supporters don’t live in Islington.   My Arsenal supporting home, where I was brought up, was just off White Hart Lane – the Wood Green Town FC end of White Hart Lane.   And we weren’t the only Arsenal family there.   “Dinner parties and faux intellectualism” says the newspaper.  My dad served petrol in a filling station, says I.   

What the Guardian focuses on, however, is something else: “how much Arsenal’s style of play is disliked,” apparently because their games feel disjointed.

Feelings are quite hard to analyse in this regard, and I prefer to go for facts.   Like most wins, fewest defeats, best defence, second best attack, best goal difference… little details like that, aside from the most points.  You don’t get to see this in the media but Arsenal did actually win the league by seven points, with a better goal difference, and with no outstanding claims against them from the League.

Now journalists like to quote statistics, but they get very shirty if we mere supporters start questioning “facts” and finding them untrue.   So sarcastically, the Guardian is now saying, “Arsenal fans seem to have spent much of the last week digging out statistics to prove their games are not actually unusually disjointed,” and of course, we have, because all the facts show that Arsenal are not disjoined.   The Guardian just saying “but that is how it feels” is mindless gibberish and total tripe.  I can say that Tottenham feels like a team that has never played together before.   That doesn’t make the point true.

So what else?   Arsenal are criticised for being “pragmatic”, which I guess you have to be to score more goals than anyone else, and get more points than anyone else.

But the question returns – why do so many newspapers run anti-Asenal stories?

The fact is that football facts stopped being relevant to reporting a long time ago.   It is now just opinion, and we’ve read the same opinion so many times that it is all now boring.   Writer A says Arsenal are boring, and quite a few readers find a way to agree with that.  Blogs pick up on the story too, so it escalates, and it becomes the dominant narrative.  But no, it is the journalists, all endlessly repeating themselves and their mates in the press bar, who are boring.

Narratives don’t have to be true to get ever bigger audiences.   One might consider religion in this regard – since many religions claim to be the one true faith, they logically cannot all be true.   Yet their number of followers seems to grow.  Football reporting is based on the same concept: if enough people start to believe it.

Now, of course, one religion might be the one true faith, but that’s not my point here.  The key issue is that whichever (if any religion is the one true faith, there are plenty of people believing other religions.    So it is with football – I don’t support Arsenal because they are the greatest team, but rather because I was brought up in a family in north London where my parents and grandparents all supported Arsenal.

So why, as the Guardian asked a little while back, “Why do so many people want Arsenal to fail in the Premier League title race?” the answer is beause a few people wanted that and others started to write abut and it pick up on it, and it felt like an easy to run story at the time and running a similar story against other clus runs into probleems.

For example, the Manchester City story is embroiled in the legal case, and if the League doesn’t take action against the club, then there is a chance that the club will take action against newspapers that have been promoting the fact that the club has done something wrong.   So best to lay off them, say the editors…

Manchester United can only be criticised if they slip down to mid-table – they have more armchair supporters than every other club in the league put together, and knocking them without them virtually falling in the second division will lose the media readers or watchers.

Aston Villa are considered too small to worry about – knocking Villa seems like knocking a little team because they haven’t won the league since they are too insignificant.

But in the end, it is a habit.  The media has a bit of space and needs to run something, so Arsenal are boring is the story they run.   There is no evidence; there is nothing to say this is true.   The club has won the league, scored the goals, got a superb defence… it is all nonsense just to fill up space written by people who only know how to write Anti-Arsenal pieces.   Believe them at your peril.