Why I Don't Feel Anything for Arsenal Anymore

The serialised article that follows is an attempt to explain why one individual has lost his love of Arsenal. In fact he is not the only one, and it a view I hear a lot nowadays.

However the author puts his reasons in to a context and overview of late capitalism, the age of neo-conservatism. Here the author is considering modern football at a super club where fans have become fodder for corporate aims and maximum profit. Where football has become a soulless experience. It may not feel like this to a Leicester fan at present, but at some stage they too will be ground down by the corporate grinding wheel of modern football. Part 1 of the article follow below.

 Anyone who complains is told that football is a business, a brand, an image. Increasingly it seems the majority of fans accept that argument; and just as no one chants and sings at their favourite supermarket, neither do they at the new super palaces of football. The most often heard sound at Arsenal now is silence. The great noisy rabble with its discontents have been reduced to a tiny minority. The author considers how this came about in his Arsenal supporting lifetime. This can’t be done without putting it in the broader context of how capitalism has developed. The Editor

 Celine Dion writes:

The last time I felt compelled to write about Arsenal was a good few years ago when I decided to give up going to home games. I wrote a short piece explaining why, and it was well received. A lot of people contacted me with similar stories, or to express agreement.

 Since then a lot has happened to me in my personal life, and it’s fair to say that I’m not even sure I am an Arsenal supporter any more. Certainly not one in the traditional sense of the word in any case. My uncles, who support Chelsea, or people at work, who support Spurs, will poke fun at me in the event of a poor Arsenal result, in the traditional way that football supporters do, and they can’t understand why I don't really react. Or just agree with them. These are people who have known me for a long time. 10 years ago they would have got a completely different response. But recently at times I have found myself wanting Arsenal to lose a match. That should be unthinkable. But from speaking to people, although they obviously keep it quiet, I don't think I’m the only one.

 I have often thought about why this has happened, given that I was a vehement and passionate Arsenal supporter for a good 25 years. I don't think it is all to do with my personal life. My main contact with Arsenal fans nowadays is on twitter, and from communicating with other supporters, many in the same age bracket as myself I believe mine is a malaise shared by many. It probably needs a word to describe it. I am going to try and get to the bottom of it all here.

 Obviously I wasn't alive in 1886 (although sometimes it feels like it) but if we look at how football clubs evolved, they evolved as just that. A club.

 club¹

noun an association dedicated to a particular interest or activity."I belong to a photographic club"

We would need to sit and read rather a lot of books to understand precisely how collections of munitions workers, railway workers, and solders joining up to play football on the parks of London and elsewhere became what many of us experienced when we first went to live football, which for me was the mid 1980s. What immediately struck you at a game in those days was the togetherness of the crowd, the ‘us and them’ mentality, the raw noise and aggression of the football terrace. It was like a drug. Many of the things that we regard as terrifically important today, wages, transfers budgets, net spend, did not even feature. The word ‘club’ could still be applied. Arsenal conducted themselves in a low key but fairly high brow manner, like a golf club, and we ‘belonged’ to the club by coming to watch, for a minimal fee. The board of directors were a couple of old men in an oak panelled room somewhere in the East Stand at Highbury. If things weren't going that well, the manager got sacked.

 If we won a cup, or the league, or beat Tottenham, everybody had a big party. Before a cup final the local streets were festooned with flags and banners, most of Islington in fact. It would be a lie to say that all our fans and players came from North London. They didn’t. But many came through London schools football and they weren’t on particularly big money. If you stood near to the pitch you would observe people like Merson and Wright, Adams, that were just like us, just very good at football. Neither were the crowd entirely from Islington. But most of us were from London and the home counties. When Liverpool came to town, their fans were nearly all from Liverpool, and a fair few of their players were from the North. It was basic, tribal stuff, and that was what created the raw passion that made the game what it was. 

 In the thirty or so years that have passed since then, I think most of us can generally agree that football has become a completely different animal. This is almost entirely down to one thing - the injection of very large sums of money into footballs infrastructure. There are many people you will meet who will tell you that this is for the better. They would rather watch a Santi Cazorla than a Paul Davis. Never mind that it might cost about eight times more a proportion of their monthly wage to watch the former. They don't miss “the thuggery of the ‘old days’”, they will point out the dilapidated stadiums that we used to rattle around, and, fair enough in fact, the various stadium tragedies that occurred. Football is a safer, cleaner, better ‘product’ nowadays. That is mostly a good thing, but there is a problem.

The Problem of Product

You will often hear football described as a ‘product’ in fact. A thing for consumption. Like toothpaste. Or caravans. A thing that had to be sold. A commercial commodity.

 product

noun: product; plural noun: products

an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale."dairy products"

Like most transitions that occur in modern moneyed society, this change to football being a ‘product’ rather than a ‘pass time’ has been silent, overseen by the same faceless, unelected high priests of capitalism that don't see anything wrong with a commuters rail ticket costing six thousand pounds a year. Many readers won’t see anything wrong with that either. Its ‘supply and demand’, we are told, and that is considered irrefutable. Capitalism is a machine, munching its way through the world, devouring everything in its path, and becoming bigger and bigger, distorted by its greed. The agents of capitalism, the CEO’s, the tax dodging accountants, the marketing people, the bonus grabbing bankers, the analysts, each one is able to justify their role to themselves and their families. Many of you will work in businesses that are defined by capitalist principles. There may be times where you are uncomfortable with certain practises or objectives. But that is the nature of the game. And it takes a very brave, even foolhardy person, to step off the merry go round.

It’s also important to note, that, as long as you are reading this in the British Isles, then you may be benefitting from Capitalism. (Those on more than £6ph, and a house to live in, which probably excludes most of Arsenal’s service staff. Editor) By virtue of the fact that you have access to a computer, or a smart phone, that puts you in the top few percent of the worlds wealthy. Whilst some parts of the world crumble into war, which in my view will eventually be shown by history to be down to lack of resource, we sit in our houses chatting about Sergio Aguero. So whats the point of revolting against Capitalism when it is putting food in your mouth?

 I think the reason Capitalism concerns, and in some cases, repulses so many of us, is because the last ten years or so have shown that it has taken on a form of its own, and cannot be controlled by governments. As governments are elected in most parts of the world (at least for the time being), this means that without a revolution of some kind, PEOPLE cannot control it. Which is very unnerving when it was created by ‘people’. The worst monstrosities of capitalism can be seen in the roots of the 2008 banking crisis, i.e. the sale of sub prime mortgages. They can be seen in the refusal of governments to sign climate change treaties as they cannot be seen to adversely affect the immediate requirements of commerce.

 They can be seen in Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and the annexing of many of the monetary proceeds to American companies. You can see it in the widespread calculated tax evasion in large companies, a direct result of which is the reliance of many people in Great Britain on charity food banks. You can see it in the setting of energy prices that are too expensive for the elderly to heat their homes. Capitalism is what has made it too expensive for people from London, to live in London, and for people in Cornwall, to buy a house in Cornwall. I am sure you can think of many other examples. The alarming thing is, however, that if you think about the people who work in the organisations that are involved in this sorry list of mutations and excesses, then they will simply have been ‘doing their jobs’. And if we cannot control capitalism now, where it it taking us in the future? Who can we talk to about it? How can we stop it? Where is it taking the things we love and rely on?

 And why is any of this important, when we are talking about a football club? Well, I am trying to get the bottom of why I don't feel anything for Arsenal any more. And why I suspect so many other people share my antipathy.

 End of Part 1

 Part 2 here