No drama. Not really. These days, the top tier of English football is something that mostly takes place in the imagination rather than in anything as limiting as a physical realm; less a division of 20 community-reared sports clubs, more a ceaseless neon fireworks display of gossip, permutation, financial credit, schadenfreude, dogma and furious tribal perspective.
Yet it feels like the Premier League’s been this way for long enough now that it’s getting easier to detect the trace notes of doubt in the bluster, the er in the hyperbole. Arsenal’s capitulation to Watford last Saturday evening was easy and familiar fuel for Modern Footie’s banter-industrial complex: weak-willed Gooners folding again to a side with less palpable talent but more strength in the stomach and the saddle – more guts and “cojones”, as Watford’s bench-captain and catalyst for change Troy Deeney put it in an interview with BT Sport post-match.
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But this is a narrative – or a story, a trope, whatever you wanna call it – that is so tired now it’s impossible to see how it can be wrung for any fresh drama. If you were surprised by how Arsenal, from a goal up and a position of apparent comfort, managed to snatch humiliation from the jaws of victory last weekend, the Premier League’s hypnotic power has likely never worked on you. What has been painted in the aftermath as a shock turnaround is, deep down, precisely what everyone could see was going to happen.
No drama. Not really. Not with Arsenal.
There are several lies at the heart of the story that the Premier League tells itself, over and over again – on TalkSport and Sky TV, in newspapers and on phones, in Friday pubs and Monday office kitchens – about post-2005, post-Patrick Vieira Arsenal. The first is that there is a way of losing games that has become uniquely, idiosyncratically Arsenal, a way of losing games that belongs to them in the same way that a moon belongs to its orbit or a soul belongs to a person. The truth, though, is the total opposite: Arsene Wenger, the man whose identity consumes the club, has been in charge for so long now that Arsenal have been able to perfect almost every variety of defeat there is, from the sad-sack outmuscling at Vicarage Road on Saturday (seen previously at Bolton in 2011; Wembley in 2011; St Mary’s in 2015; Selhurst Park in 2017; etc, etc), to the horrifying big game castration at Anfield in August (Old Trafford 2011; Stamford Bridge 2014; Anfield 2014; etc, etc). Arsenal have mastered the futile second leg victory against a European giant just as well as they have the second leg evisceration by a European giant. Arsenal losses can be attributed to complacency or nerves, fear or anger, youthful naivety or familiar failings, but each time it will be portrayed as Arsenal losing a game in the only manner they know how. If it’s confusing, it’s also inevitable – a curse of the longevity for which, these days, Wenger is almost solely feted. But let’s not pretend the team fails the same way each time.
Because the problem isn’t that Arsenal have only one way of losing, it’s that they’re only capable now of one type of meaningful win, which is the win that averts change, prolongs stasis. Meltdown, calamity, crisis: these are all things that seem to be happening constantly to Arsenal, at least on some ambient level, to the point where they are sensations that, for the first time this season, have become weirdly tolerable to me. There is very little that is exciting about supporting Arsenal anymore. Even the anxiety – which, beneath all the joy, the hope, the anticipation, the lizard brain excitement, the sorrow, the self-righteousness and the pain, is the base emotion underpinning the whole experience of being a fan – has largely vanished, seen off by a club that through its unquenchable thirst for a kind of cosseted, elite stagnation has somehow managed to render the Premier League boring. Supporting Arsenal now feels a little like being trapped in “Tom’s Diner”, or supporting the one AI-controlled team in a knock-out FIFA tournament. Life just sort of goes on around you.
If you were to ask me where that excitement and anxiety has disappeared to, I’d tell you it’s gone the same way as the faith that anything can ever be different under Wenger, because ultimately football isn’t about stability, it’s about hope and flux, even if those things end up hurting you. It’s not just the manager, either; it’s a stasis that grips the whole club, from the boardroom and Stan Kroenke – who’s declared his wish for his family to remain asleep at the wheel of Arsenal for “generations” – down to the fans, who’ve been cutting huge swathes in the turnouts at the Emirates this season. Players come and go with a shrug; there is a growing appreciation now that whatever the personnel, the manager has lost the ability to prepare them in any way that could decisively alter the trajectory. Through all the diverse failures and changing squad lists, Wenger has been the sole constant, but it’s difficult to see what he does any more other than preside over a failed infrastructure entirely of his own creation, with its deadwood-gathering socialist wage structures, abandoned StatsDNA data sets, jilted commitment to financial fair play regulations and slapstick recruitment team.
It’s hard not to guess at when this slow collapse began for a man who was once a genuine pioneer; it’s widely known that Wenger had a huge role not just in engineering the move to the new stadium but also in how the Emirates ended up, aesthetically, ergonomically. Is it wise for a man to undertake a grand-scale interior design and property development project at the same time as he’s trying to qualify a football team for the Champions League on a hugely diminished budget? It’s not for me to say, but it seems possible that at some point Wenger began to fret and think too deeply about the macro side of club management while losing sight of the details that really matter come kick off: things like the day-to-day handling of the players, tactical and motivational preparation. The overriding impression is that Wenger is so desperate to oversee so many different aspects of the club that he ends up in control of none of them; resulting in a kind of inertia by hyperactivity.
“When we look back at what we did wrong I don’t think you can question our character,” Jack Wilshere said in response to Deeney’s comments before Thursday’s tie against Red Star Belgrade in the Europa League, Arsenal’s presence in which is the only thing that really sets this season apart from any other in the last decade. “We will move on,” he continued, “we have a game tomorrow and another big one Sunday [away at Everton] and the players can bounce back, we’ve seen them do it.”
He’s wrong and he’s right: we have seen them bounce back, countless times, but “moving on” is a different thing entirely. After a summer of promises – that the club would be restructured, that business would be done early, that we weren’t going to be held to ransom by wantaway stars, that things were going to change – by the time the season began, Arsenal 2017/18 looked suspiciously like the previous iterations of Arsenal that have spent the last decade providing more questions than answers. Questions like: Will any player that Arsenal actually want to keep sign a new contract in the next three years? Will Arsene Wenger stay beyond his current deal? Will Mesut Ozil and Granit Xhaka – two of world football’s most notoriously flaky and undynamic luxury playmakers – continue to be thrust together to compete in world football’s most notoriously strenuous and dynamic league, like champion épée fencers asked to do battle in a drone war? What happened to our aims, our identity? What is Arsenal, in 2017, other than a club that faffs its way to making up the numbers while providing Saturday night entertainment for social media laughing boys?
The Wenger In-Wenger Out dance is something that still gets a lot of play on the internet, but at this stage it’s a false dichotomy. There can be no sane person who truly believes that Wenger is equipped to win either the league or the Champions League this season or next. Now, the fanbase is largely split along different lines: between those who’d rather he left immediately and those who are grateful enough for all that he’s done – and that is a lot, let it not be forgotten – that they’re willing to grant him the time he needs to fail on his own terms before his contract expires in summer 2019.
I appreciate that to the vast majority – and especially to fans of clubs with terrible owners and uncertain futures, like Blackburn, Charlton, Coventry and Blackpool – what I’m saying will sound absurdly entitled after three FA Cup wins in four seasons, hundreds of millions lavished on players, a 60,000-seater stadium and a place in the highest echelon of European football for the best part of two decades. But it’s all relative, and the manager’s longevity and power make Arsenal a weird, possibly unique case among football clubs. If I’m reading the mood right, it’s not something more that most Arsenal fans want, it’s just something different.
It shouldn’t have been like this – other than my immediate family, the manager is the longest consistent presence in my life, someone who’s been managing the club for two-thirds of my time on earth, a rare anchor in reality in a world that is so fast and so weird. But as other sides toil and rush to scour the outer limits of their potential, I realise I miss the sensation of not knowing how things will pan out; I miss football’s power to deliver new days and destinies.
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