Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal side are on the verge of becoming deeply unpopular Premier League champions, but this probably says more about us than it does about them. A recent social-media study concluded Arsenal’s fans are the most disliked in the Premier League, and even Arteta himself drives people into a state of rage—from his control-based tactics to his bland public statements and frenetic touchline appearances.
Last week, an ESPN panel went viral after the host suggested other Champions League coaches might want to punch Arteta in the face, with panellists nodding along as though this were a reasonable conclusion. Among rival fans, the idea is fixed that Arsenal are the bad guys, with neutrals supposedly wanting Manchester City to win the title instead.
Yet Arsenal are an objectively good elite-football entity. They generate their own revenue, don’t bend financial rules, and avoid debts funded by shady interests. Within the limits of a grubby and compromised world, this is as close as we get to a functional mega-club. Arsenal also offer a counterpoint to the Chelsea soccertainment model, with its destruction of sporting culture and talent clearing-house methods.
This is a pure football project: produce your own players, field five Englishmen in a Champions League semi-final, give a young manager five years to build a team. And yet Arsenal are more likely to be held up as a model of all that is bad. The simplest explanation is that this is a reasonable response to the way they play, which can be boring and fussy, based around team defence and set-piece margins.
There is a legitimate sense that football is becoming overmapped, broken down into data-driven phases, like the Vorticist view of nature—organic shapes transformed into units of human control. Arsenal embody this trend, and the rage they inspire may reflect our own discomfort with the sport’s evolution.
