PREMIER LEAGUE DEPRESSION MACHINE

I don’t know whether we’re reaching a tipping point in Premier League football punditry, but it does feel like the circus surrounding it is starting to become more important than the football… and worse, the pro pundit class is so out of control, they seem to be quite content to soil the product that feeds their podcast deals, all in the name of underselling the work going on at Arsenal.

The Premier League lost 10% of its audience last season after PGMOL ruined the spectacle by butchering Arsenal early on in the season. That is a huge number. So this season, I’d have thought everyone would be dialled in to making sure that was a moment in time, like the COVID view dip before it , that they’d work hard to rectify this season.

The football teams have done their best, the relegation fight isn’t done yet, Wolves smacking up Liverpool after 90 minutes yesterday. Every single club in the league has spent the money they have been given pretty well, the league table is a melee right now, teams are in contention one minute, out the next. Everyone can beat everyone. It feels like things are working. The best coaches, the best technical brains, and the best players are now in the Premier League and the machine is so dominant, Spurs, in a relegation battle, finished top 4 in the Champions League super league phase.

So how have we landed in a situation where it would seem every single pundit, getting fat off the league that feeds it, seems to be going out of its way to depress everyone about the football they’re watching? We have pundits going out of their way to call the league boring, they are criticising the style, and they’ve all taken a lemming approach to the narrative that Arsenal aren’t worthy of the league.

I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. When it was Mourinho parading around the country making people endure his disgusting low-possession sufferball, he was a revered genius. When we watched Alex Ferguson destroy the 2004 Invincible run with outrageous violence, that was righteous retribution over a team that didn’t like it up them. Too many foreign softies that didn’t get the core of English football unsophistication. When we had literal babies trying to dazzle the league, no one stepped out of Stoke orch hell to demand the game improve to protect snapped legs. I’m old enough to remember when Neville and Carragher were dancing on the sidelines after Arsenal were bullied by Brentford by set pieces, grappling, and throw-ins.

Now Arsenal have all the dark arts, all the bullies, all the technique to turbo-charge tactics that were once weaponised against us… we have a crisis of the commons?

These pundits are quite literally working towards rule changes to prevent Arsenal doing what we’re doing at the moment. They are salting the ground of our potential Premier League win. Somehow, they are trying to depress the audience of viewers with some of the most disingenuous bullshit I’ve ever read. It’s like they’re looking for people to switch off so they can take the numbers to the bosses and demand action. I’ve never seen something so self-defeating. Sky Sports hasn’t felt so dominated by out of control talent since Keys and Gray had their heads loped off. Arsenal fans have to endure outrageously partisan commentary designed to damage fan mood. Don’t get me started on why Arsenal let it go. Man City don’t get these problems because they are extremely aggressive about these sorts of things, and will attack at the source. We’ve seen Forest bully Sky back. Mourinho never had a cross word because he would humiliate these people. Arsenal just… let it slide to the point where this narrative full-court press affects performance on the pitch and the vocalism of our fans.

Arsenal has literally gone from win-at-all-costs being the most elite characteristic a manager and team could imbibe… to reading Stan Collymore waffle on with a ChatGPT fever dream of a tweet about Premier League fan expectations not being met with suitable entertainment levels? Did I really read Peter Schmeichel complain about Arsenal not being worthy because they don’t play within the spirit of the game? A man who took advantage of the backpass rule to such egregious levels in Euro 1992, they had to change the rules?

The worst part about all of this is the two-faced hypocrisy of all of it. The same people that would have Patrice Evra telling the world it was ‘men against boys’, the folk spewing ‘same old Arsenal, can’t hack it against tough teams’, are now crying into their microphones trying to steal market share from amateur podcasters with TikTok clips they don’t even believe in.

Foundational principles is something that has been lost in the age of social media trends and clicks. I don’t mean to sound like an old man shouting at clouds here, but the best pundits, politicians, and writers have clear beliefs that don’t shift without reason. Roy Keane is probably a good example of someone who likes what he likes regardless of who is doing it. He’s probably not going to have a pop at Arsenal for being aggressive. But the guys who loved nastiness when it’s their teams only to shift view now it’s Arsenal? How is that good punditry. You stand for nothing. If you stand for nothing, you aren’t authentic. You’re a fraud. You aren’t an analyst, you’re a partisan.

Arsenal have revolutionised lower league set-piece approaches. 39% of our goals have come by way of them this season. There are quite literally 4 teams with a higher percentage of set piece goals to their name (Palace, Newcastle, Leeds, Chelsea). But my broader point here, who cares how the goals go in? Stop us if you can, or match us, like Chelsea did. For all of the spleen venting, it’s notable that everyone is now doing the same as us; they just don’t have the delivery experts.

Arsenal are also playing in a league that is monstrously hard. Virgil said this is the hardest Premier League season he’s ever played in. All of the nineties talking heads imagine the game is the same as it was in their day. Jermaine Jenas claiming he played against real men back in the day when he was dreadfully average at football. No, Jermaine, the guys out on the pitch now are real men. They run further, sprint more, and have to have a far broader suite of skills to manage the extreme pace of the league and massive tactical demands. Football from the nineties was a different beast. Teams were less fit, English teams weren’t as tactically astute, and the pace of the game was pedestrian.

Arteta had this to say about the game:

“There are phases and there are moments when a team has an opportunity to do certain things, and the game is evolving and the game is becoming more and more difficult. Before, when you used to do a game plan and you just invert a full-back and bring an extra player in midfield, or a false-nine, opponents are finished, big overload, 4v3 inside, 2v1 inside, time on the ball, so dominant, 70-80% of possession, the other opponent, two counter-attacks, set-pieces, the game is done. Now, teams are adapting. Teams know after every sequence of play, whether it’s a throw-in or a style of play, an open-play situation, or direct play, exactly what they have to do, and everything is almost man-to-man. So, it’s going to be a different game unless we change the rules, because the evolution of the game is that.”

People think football is a simple game; it is not. At the very highest level, it is a complicated game that merges deep thinkers, data, analysis, and a lot of choreography… with extremely fit human beings.

Arsenal aren’t the only team in the equation. We’re playing against clubs that have all the same tools, tech, and fitness approaches in the Premier League… but now, the league has incredible players at every club. The margins are getting narrower, finding solutions isn’t as simple as ‘just pass faster’, and we have to accept that if the best players and the best coaches are all saying the same thing about the difficulties of the Premier League, maybe they are onto something the masses are not?

It is also very funny to me that the ex-player pundit class chirp off in such an ignorant manner, because a lot of them don’t read about the game. Their ‘insights’ are largely gleaned from a team of analysts that do that work for them. These analysts quite often come from the Twitter tactico nerds online. So they are not really immersed in the game in a way you’d think they’d be. That’s why you get so much lowest common denominator commentary. It’s not designed to educate you; it’s designed to make you angry, to fight in the comments, all so a social media intern can pull together a media deck that’ll impress the big dogs at Dude Wipes for that media deal.

But, Arsenal fans have a role to play in this. We’re terminally online, we can’t resist feeling like victims, and nothing gives us more energy than digging up 2015 tweets of these guys making arguments on the other side of the fence. Wise up. This is what they want. Their disingenuous comments to be the story of the day. They want the agenda to seep into the stadium, which it often does; they want to feel like they have more power than they do.

Arsenal fans need to shape up, stop mainlining the rhetoric, stop sharing the content in the group chats, stop the rot - our rage cannot continue to be the most valuable in newsrooms around the country. We need to be better than that.

Sign up Le Grove instead, in a secret part of the internet you’ll never catch Gary Neville. And while you’re here, take a listen to the excellent views of Miguel Delaney (Chief Football Writer for the Independent), who chatted to Jacob Hawley on the latest Dugout episode.