Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Joyless and bloodless, Stan Kroenke's Arsenal has lost sight of its basic purpose

The club that played football to make the heart sing and made emotions spill over with its late-Wenger stubbornness now struggles to make people feel anything at all

Jonathan Liew
Chief Sports Writer
Wednesday 20 February 2019 15:17 GMT
Comments
Arsene Wenger questions giving Mesut Ozil a new Arsenal contract

The problem, you see, isn’t losing to BATE Borisov. It’s not Alex Lacazette’s elbow or Mesut Ozil’s contract. It’s not Aaron Ramsey or Sven Mislintat. It’s not the failure to spend in January, it’s not the void in central defence, it’s not the curiously unshakeable belief that an attacking move doesn’t really exist unless it’s gone through Sead Kolasinac first. It’s not Unai Emery’s midfield diamond, it’s not Emery’s 3-5-2, it’s not even really Emery himself.

The problem, as Arsenal enter the final stretch of a season in which the best-case scenario is fourth place and a Europa League, and the worst-case scenario is sixth place and another shot at the Europa League, is that at some point, Arsenal simply stopped making you feel.

There’s a medical condition called anhedonia, which has traditionally been defined as an inability to feel pleasure in normally pleasurable activities. In fact, it’s more correctly understood as a sort of emotional blunting, a dulling of both the motivational impulse and the appreciation of reward. It’s an idea that seems particularly applicable to Arsenal at the moment: a club whose furrowed brow, weary ennui and internal bickering seem to a large extent independent of results on the pitch, or even the sort of football they’re playing. Anhedonia is closely linked to post-traumatic stress disorder, which makes sense given the dramatic events of the summer, and the subsequent struggle by Arsenal fans to frame their new and peculiar terms of engagement.

Have you watched Arsenal Fan TV lately? During the late-Wenger years, it became a sort of foul-mouthed outlet for the skittish spirit of protest sweeping through the Emirates at the time. Now, slickly rebranded as “AFTV Media” after a stern warning from the club, very little of that thrilling insurgency has survived into the new era. Claude stares listlessly into space, like a man who’s seen all of our futures. Troopz wears the haunted, crumpled look of a firebrand preacher who’s taken a job in telesales. Robbie grins desperately into the camera, trying and failing to congeal his thoughts on a Torreira-Xhaka midfield two into a tangible emotion. The result is less viral soapbox, and more a bunch of middle-aged blokes arguing about who has the worse lower back pain.

And this triteness appears to be the prevailing weather at the moment, not just on the internet but in the Arsenal universe at large, and at the Emirates most of all, which even in its more electrified moments feels less like a football stadium and more like a sort of wailing seance: talk to us, talk to us, please don’t let us die alone. The club’s eerie media silence in the wake of a defeat also feeds into this, a sense that very little of the love and care bestowed upon Arsenal is reflected back outwards, that on some important level it remains cool, elusive, unavailable.

It’s easy to blame all this on post-Wenger exhaustion, an inevitable comedown from the intensely emotional and at times bitterly rancorous debate over the club’s future. And there is a certain value in the idea that after the operatic tumult of the last few years, Arsenal just needed to lie low for a bit, to keep the show on the road, quietly build something while gathering strength for its next big assault. The appointment of the technocratic Emery - a paragon of extreme competence, classy and courteous and respectful and sober to a fault - seemed to confirm this.

But perhaps in the middle of this, something got mislaid. The first and last job of a football club is to make you feel something, which is not necessarily the same thing as making you care about it. From the corridors of Colney to the beach bars of Busan, there are millions of people the world over who care deeply about Arsenal, who invest fortunes and lifetimes, who see in Arsenal not just a means of leisure but a version of identity, an opportunity to be part of something larger. But what, exactly?

Arsenal have been reduced to this... hands on hips, a shrug of a football club

Never underestimate the power of a purpose. From Klopp’s Liverpool to Warnock’s Cardiff, from Pep’s City to Pulis’s Middlesbrough, the modern club - and, come to think of it, the pre-modern club - runs on an idea. Something that distinguishes it from a ringbinder at Companies House. Under the efficient and yet entirely bloodless stewardship of Stan Kroenke, Arsenal strikes you as a club no longer certain of its basic idea. Sure, it wants to win. But how? And why? What broader aim is served by Arsenal winning? And why should everyone else move heaven and earth to prevent it happening?

The great shame is that there is still so much to adore at this club. Wonderful attacking players like Aubameyang and Torreira and Ozil, if he ever sees the light of day again. Exciting younger talents like Matteo Guendouzi and Ainsley Maitland-Niles and Alex Iwobi. A thriving academy. A brilliant women’s team. Even the much-maligned Emirates can put on a stirring show, like when Spurs were stuffed 4-2 in December, the last real glimpse of Arsenal’s tribal, feral side, the last time they felt genuinely suffused with purpose. Somewhere out there in the ether is Arsenal’s joy. You just hope, for their own sake, that they manage to locate it before long.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in