There used to be a club over here An unacceptable ethos

By Celine Dion
May 22 2016

Here is the third and final chapter of Why I Don’t Feel Anything for Arsenal Anymore There are links to Parts one and two at the very bottom

I cannot ‘support’ a club that has this set of objectives. Because they are working against the interests of the original set of fans, who sustained the club and handed down their support through generations. This business objective is the precise reason why my child, who is eight, has never been to the Emirates, and many other parents who used to stand on the North Bank with me in the 1980s and early 1990s, wont be able to take their children to the Emirates either. And I think the indication is very clear that in 20 or 30 years, there will be no fundamental difference between Arsenal and say, Manchester City, other than the colour of the seats and the shirts. We are half way there already, the original identity of these clubs is so diluted that you will essentially end up with something that looks like the MLS, where the clubs were essentially made up in a business meeting.

Then there is the rhetoric of a fairly large portion of our own fans. We all know that the Arsenal fan base is riven down the middle. Its started to become boring in actual fact. There are those that identity strongly with the club in the traditional ‘support your team’ sense. For whatever reason they are able to disregard the concerns I have outlined above, and many of them become quite excited when confronted with people like me. They tend to identify strongly with Wenger, they tolerate the board, or at least don't see them as relevant. Some even appear to see Arsenals owners as plucky underdogs, rallying their limited resources against the ‘sugar daddy’ forces of evil. Not the multi billionaires that they actually are.

They also tend to talk up the performances and reputations of our players. This last point is mightily significant because Arsenal themselves have systematically played on Arsenal’ illusory brilliance via its corporate communications, via social media, via its mail shots. Players are declared ‘legends’ and ‘world class’ when they have barely kicked a ball. Wenger’s style of football, pleasing on the eye as most of us are able to accept, is hailed as some kind of uber-brand.

Arsenal, through the churning propaganda machine arsenal.com, operate in permanent bubble of self congratulation. An entire cottage industry (A very large cottage. Ed) of obtuse statistical achievements are bandied around the internet as evidence that Wenger, despite a meagre couple of FA Cups in about 10 years, occupies some position of impregnable superiority in English football. ‘Arsenal have won the most matches THIS YEAR’, people will tell you, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the football season starts in August and ends in May. They will talk to you about Ozil’s passing stats as if they somehow absolve the club of its latest embarrassing defeat to a ragged Chelsea side. They express a kind of moral outrage at the idea of a clubs owner investing money in players from outside resources. They will also labour the point about Wenger’s undoubted role in sustaining Arsenal through the difficult period after the stadium move. Whether you admire this, I suppose, depends on whether you think the evolution to our current position is a wonderful thing in itself.

A lot of us were paying very large sums of money to witness the actual football during this transition, whilst a procession of very respected club favourites got clearly upset with Wenger and left the club. But overall I understand why this culture has sprung up. It’s a coping mechanism as they try to deal with the complexities of ‘supporting’ something which isn’t what it seems. In my experience these people are often quite young, or quite moneyed, or both.

So what of Wenger himself. I think the clue was when Wenger first joined the club, and we were told that he was an ‘economist’. To my mind he has done nothing but behave precisely as an economist would, in the 50 or 60 so years since he came to us (sorry, I know its not that long ago, it just seems like it sometimes). Firstly I think I need to say that if most of us met Arsene Wenger we would probably like him. He’s clearly personable, intelligent, and he can be amusing. But then again, the same could probably be said of many very capable managers in large companies. I personally have become very tired of the image that is projected of him by elements within the club, of a kind of modern day saint. I’m genuinely not sure where it came from.

My view of him is that he is a very capable manager within a larger organisation which sadly operates purely as a profit making mechanism. Wenger has, time and time again, thrown away opportunities to press home an advantage in the league table, when he could have spent money on players, the latest being the transfer window just passed. HOWEVER, when our position in the top four is threatened, suddenly a great many players are signed. Diaby, Walcott and Adebayor in on week. Arshavin in 2009.

The flurry of players signed after the 8-2 loss at United. Likewise many of our signings, even of very good players, seem to be commercially driven, opportunistic signings. Podolski for example, was signed as a name to put on the club propaganda, because internally it was known that Van Persie was going to leave. We never decided what to actually do with him, and off he went again.

Even Ozil and Sanchez, great players though they are, were not pressing needs for the club, given the amount of attacking players on the books already. Defenders, and defensive midfielders have been a requirement for years. But that doesn’t put ars*s on £80 seats does it. Wenger has never, never broken ranks with his employers. Given my perception of his employers, and the amount of money he is paid, and I become very sceptical about him. Add his infuriating stubbornness, a certain streak of arrogance, the droning repetition of his interviews, his absurd penchant for keeping injury prone players on the books for five or six years longer than any other football club would do, and his myopic inability to get defenders to defend and people taking corners to get the ball as far as the near post, and I start to lose interest in him altogether. He’s part of the problem. In fact he’s a very powerful and public manifestation of the problem. A very capable front man, but a front man nonetheless.

So what it boils down to is this, sadly. I don’t like large multinational businesses. I don’t trust large multinational businesses. If I REALLY don’t like one, I don’t buy its products. And when an institution that I was previously very fond of, is appropriated by one, and starts to conduct itself in almost exactly the same way as all the other ones that I don’t like, then the notion of ‘supporting’ that business in its exploits, in this case sporting ones, becomes philosophically absurd. And that’s how I come to sit there, in my living room, sniggering gently when Arsenal let in a last minute goal against Liverpool for example, instead of being GUTTED. Because when these failures occur, a little bit of me is GLAD, because although I feel sad for the supporters who have travelled to the game, those whose love of the game remains unspoiled enough and who have the funds to enjoy the spectacle for what it is, I don’t feel sorry for the smug, money grabbing, self-congratulating, exploitative operation within the club. I’m not remotely impressed by the club coming second, you can twist and spin it whichever way you like. But ultimately what does it matter, if the club is existing as a business not as a sporting concern. Even if it won the league, or the Champions league, in a way this would just give them the excuse to extract further vast sums of money from the fans. A sobering fact is, that under Company Law, it would be obliged to. It HAS to extract the largest possible profit from the situation it finds itself in. ALL businesses do. So it may seem absurd but it is very probably the case that a league win would be BAD for the average fan at the Emirates, in the long term. Because we are not involved in a sport any more.

So what does any of this matter? I’m just a rather sad and cynical individual nowadays. I don’t even go to games now. Im fairly unlikely to begin again in fact. Well, the reason I think this is important is because football is undergoing an awakening. This season we have seen the black flags of revolution flying in front of the Kop at Anfield, in response to the setting of £70 seat prices. Arsenal fans themselves have launched protests against the board, or Wenger, or both, at the Norwich game. We could talk about that all day, it wasn’t particularly successful. My view of all that is that the club very cleverly uses Wenger as an emotional ‘bribe’, as he combines the hard faced business objectives of the board with the footballing aesthetic that many fans still identify with. For as long as Wenger is at the club any protest message will remain confused, and the club will be able to dismiss voices of dissent as a few nutters. WE know its more than a few, but big Corporations like Arsenal project their own realities. And as more an more of the old school fans simply give up and go elsewhere (and this is happening A LOT as anyone with half a finger on the pulse of Arsenal will know), then the club can replace them with happy clappy tourists AND get rid of the dissenters. Its WIN WIN as far as they are concerned.

We aren’t the only ones who aren’t happy anyway, this is actually bigger than Wenger or Arsenal although our club is one of the ones where it is most accentuated because Arsenal appear to operate most brazenly as a Corporate business. Last year Bayern Munich fans protested in our own stadium at away prices. (The sobering element in all this of course, is that the people within the clubs who set these prices, who exploit these opportunities, are only doing their jobs.) To me, the most culturally significant movement in all this was the creation of FC United of Manchester. The people that did this were visionaries, in my view. Because they identified, at a very early stage, that they were not prepared to support a corporate body, and decided to try and preserve the social and cultural elements of the club in another form. There should be statues of these people outside every football ground. As I said earlier, when all is said and done, the rhythms and dynamics of a football match are the same whether you are at Manchester United or Macclesfield Town. I myself have watched a few lower league teams since my love affair with Arsenal ended. Its been OK, good in fact, but it wasn’t Arsenal. You can only really support one club, most football fans know this. The reason this matters is because the social fabric of top level English Football is being ripped to pieces. By pricing, by ridiculous travel times, by the dilution of atmosphere, by aggressive stewarding and the stifling of debate, by replica shirts costing £100, by the slow dismantling and reassembly of British football and its great clubs into a facile plastic Corporate media driven pantomime. And despite what the suits may think, the social fabric, in many peoples view, is what made the clubs great places to go in the first place. And these leeches, who have appropriated these clubs, do not care about this. And there is still time to make them care about it. To those who protect this process, and dismiss it as ‘progress’, be careful what you are defending. Look into it more closely. Read Marx and Engels. Read up on what they called ‘False Consciousness’.

To those who still go to games, who dismiss the arguments of those who have been priced out, one day, you will be priced out too. Don’t celebrate or excuse the vast sums of money that rule football, those vast sums of money are the precise reason people have to eat out of food banks. They are not ‘inevitable’, they are part of a great sickness. Don’t be a turkey that votes for Christmas. There are people richer than you and if the Corporations that rule English football get their way you wont be able to sit in your seat either one day because Arsenal v Tottenham will be being played in China. Capitalism doesn’t care about the individual, and has no respect for institutions. There is more than enough evidence to show that people within these organisations who DO care about the individual, are replaced with people who DONT. And in the meantime, perhaps all the above is why I don’t really ‘support my club’. Because I don’t think its a ‘club’ anymore.

Part One Why I Don’t Feel Anything for Arsenal Anymore

Here

Part Two Why I Don’t Feel Anything for Arsenal Anymore

here

There used to be a club over here An unacceptable ethos

Posted by: Arsenal Times (IP Logged)

Date: 22/05/2016 19:42

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2016:06:09:07:09:47 by Padre Pio.