Why I can’t laugh at Arsenal fans (pt. II)

Will Almond
Nov 6 · 4 min read

The following was a real headline at the end of last week.

“‘Get it done!’ — Arsenal fans send message to Raul Sanllehi after ‘meeting’ Jose Mourinho”.

Obviously, this is incredibly bleak. The situation at your club has now got so desperate that you are begging a manager who spectacularly failed at teams who used to be your second (and probably third??) biggest rivals in the last decade and spent a year living Partridge-style in a hotel to come and help out. A man whose most recent qualification is that he has, on occasion, made Graeme Souness look a bit of a tit (obviously, this is ultimately, “a good thing”).

But bleak for Arsenal fans is nothing new. In fact, some enterprising Arsenal fans have turned this never ending tap of misery into an income stream — the now behemothic AFTV. For the uninitiated, it’s a Youtube channel where Arsenal fans of various shapes and sizes shout the same thing every week, regardless of result or performance, or of who is in the dugout or the boardroom. Come the apocalypse, they will still be there, on a grey concourse outside the Emirates Stadium going on about “typical Arsenal”.

I’m sure at least some of their views come from Arsenal fans who watch in some hopelessly misguided attempt to find catharsis (or even wisdom??). But the vast majority of Arsenal fan TVs audience now surely must be fans of other teams, freed from the shackles of love and hate for their own clubs that ordinarily constrict every footballing moment, and able to laugh at Arsenal — safe and secure in the knowledge that whatever happens, that comfort will be there.

It’s the same reason we have created every aspect of human culture — we dance, we drink, we paint and we watch to escape. Lost in Titanic or Pompeii, we briefly forget the drudgery of our everyday lives — even in disaster there is escape. Arsenal football club is now that disaster. AFTV puts it on the big screen.

And we laugh because, as with any good slapstick, it is both entirely predictable and simultaneously always unexpected. You know Arsenal will find a way to fuck it up, and yet they continue to find new and innovative ways to do so. It used to be funny that Arsenal couldn’t get in the top four and finished below Spurs. Then it was funny they spent several years playing in front of half empty stadia as an internal civil war raged over whether to oust their most successful and beloved manager. Then when they did oust him, it was funny that all of a sudden everyone loved him again. Then his replacement was even worse, and you get the idea… Arsenal have shown a commitment to progression in slapstick matched only by Charlie Chaplin moving beyond his hugely successful early work such as “The Kid” to create his challenging, political masterpiece, “Modern Times”.

But I can’t laugh. Because just as there is comedy, there is also tragedy. Watching Arsenal, once famed for their beautiful, incisive, pioneering football, unable to manoeuvre the ball out of their own box against Watford, is to witness real pain. And although it is funny to laugh at Arsenal fans, who are undoubtedly at least partly to blame for their own downfall, I see enough of myself in them that the laughter catches in my throat, my lips twist into a grotesque half-smile and I slump low into my chair.

Because…

We’ve all launched a concerted years long campaign, featuring flying banners and crumpled (sold on) season tickets, to force our greatest ever manager out of the club, only for him to be replaced by a member of the Spanish underworld. Well, not exactly that. But we have all dumped an ex who really, actually loved us loads because we were bored and an idiot, and then got together with someone objectively worse when they moved on and we couldn’t just have “crying alone” as a personality any more. “Crying with someone” is much better.

We’ve all begged and pleaded for decades with the Russian oligarch who owns our club to spend some of the money burning a hole in a swiss vault on a centre back only to celebrate the purchase of a £71m winger who had one good season. Well, no not exactly that, but you did spend the money your parents gave you for the rent on three kebabs (chicken doner and chips/easy on the garlic/heavy on the chili/no lettuce) because you bet your mate you could finish them all. You lost and had to move out.

One day there will be a knock at your door and you will open it and it will be Jose Mourinho, damp and dishevelled and really quite properly old now and he will have been kicked out of his boutique hotel and he will want to stay on your sofa bed “just for a few nights, you know, while he gets himself sorted out”. And you will pull it out and make it up for him and he will never leave. Because we are all Arsenal fans. Greedy, hypocritical, tragic figures who wander through the world in a Beckettian fog of ignorance and misery.*

We are all Arsenal fans

*Disclaimer: I’m a Leeds fan (and we’ve got Bielsa) but figuratively we are all Arsenal fans.

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I write words on the internet about football and other stuff.

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