With the appointment of a new manager, Arsenal once again look to the future. First, they should look back and ask themselves how in the hell they got here. An episode of The Simpsons comes to mind. Homer has taken Marge’s rainy-day fund and ‘invested’ it in pumpkins. The basis of his decision? A chart showing massively increased sales over the course of October. He extrapolates that as the numbers were great pre-Halloween, imagine what riches lie in wait in November! December! Alas, it does not work that way – business, as life, is cyclical. The pumpkins rot…
From a distance of fifteen or so years, Arsenal’s decision to gamble their little all on a new stadium looks like utter foolishness. Perhaps hindsight is 20-20 but a cannier board – a more realistic board – would have realised that the good times could not last forever. Almost every strand of the decision-making process was wrong; that increased match-day revenues would make the team more competitive, that Wenger’s magic touch would never wane, that demand for tickets would always outstrip supply, that the move would make Arsenal a super club. All were wrong – some desperately so.
Arsenal take pride in being a financially self-sustaining club. Fans use it as a riposte to plaything clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City, supported by their sugar(oil) daddies. But the reality is Arsenal’s model is as infected with compromised cash as any of their rivals. The stadium is sponsored by UAE’s state airline, the shirtsleeve tattooed with ‘Visit Rwanda’, the coffers filled by questionable commercial partners like VBet.
The stadium itself is a kind of Premier League version of Grand Designs: all glass and steel, convinced of its own virtue, very comfortable in an Ikea-deluxe kind of way, but ultimately very boring, derivative and fading predictably fast. Highbury was perhaps England’s most attractive stadium – an Art Deco front, marble halls, proportion and most of all history, deep, deep history. From the club’s controversial move north from Woolwich to the first glory days of the 30’s teams under Chapman, to the great double in ’71, George Graham’s steely winning sides of the late 80’s and early 90’s and finally through to the stream of great, freeing football and trophies in Wenger’s first iteration as a knowledgeable, intellectual disruptor of English football. Which other stadium has had a film made about it, indeed two? 1939’s The Arsenal Stadium Mystery and Fever Pitch in the 90’s (though the latter is very inferior to Nick Hornby’s book). Henry Cooper fought Muhammad Ali there in ’66. What has the Emirates hosted? Coldplay.
This is not nostalgia – this is a question of pedigree, of character. The new stadium has a terrible dearth of both. An Arsenal fan once told me that games there feel like watching football in a shopping centre. It is difficult to disagree; indeed, the match-day experience is much like a trip to Brent Cross – lots of people spending lots of money, dealing with sullen young agency staff who don’t want to be there, eating bad, overpriced food (the prawn sandwich stuff is overdone by the way, the culinary offering is blandly American in character, utterly lacking any élan) then going home tired, disappointed and a little empty. It is a sterile, plastic cup kind of experience.
One of Wenger’s big preoccupations was that as the fans who come to the game on Saturdays have worked hard all week, they should be rewarded by seeing something special. He meant intricate passing and good goals. He missed the point. Yes, fans do want excitement, though throughout Arsenal’s history this has been much more about brief moments in a game, rather than throughout the whole ninety minutes; traditionally the fans want a team who can defend and there is plenty of excitement in watching your team repel another’s attack. But more than anything they want a home – a link between the past and the present, a place with meaning, a place that mixes memory, familiarity and hope.
The stadium project and Arsenal’s concerted move to become a bigger commercial operation no doubt appealed to the Kroenke family. A smaller stadium, with fewer opportunities to flog smartphones or tires or sandals or really anything would no doubt have been a less appetising investment. Another couple of successful seasons at Highbury might, however, have seen the club taken over by the likes of Qatar Sports Investments who purchased Paris Saint-Germain in 2011. There is ultimately little difference between a member of Qatar’s royal family and an American tycoon – billionaires rarely make their fortunes through savoury mechanisms. Fans would have been faced with a starker moral quandary but would have kept a winning team and a beautiful home.
Arsenal fans are often mocked for their disillusionment and rage. Certainly some of it is myopic. The side has finished in the top six every year for over two decades and fans of Nottingham Forest, Leeds, Sheffield Wednesday etc would happily trade places. But spare a thought for fans who were promised that their team would be able to compete with the best in Europe, would be better in the new stadium and instead pay the highest ticket prices in the world to watch a stale, worsening team in a single-use plastic stadium, a team that does not and seemingly cannot win. They were lied to, or at least misled, lost their home and instead of watching Keown, Henry, Petit they have to tolerate extremely expensive, extremely disappointing mediocrity made flesh in Xhaka, Özil and David Luiz. Good luck Mikel Arteta – you’ll need it!
