By Celine Dion
May 22 2016

This is part 2 of Celine's article on why he no longer feels anything for Arsenal. A link to part 1 is provided below

Part 2 It’s a corporate world

We live in a world where we are bombarded with corporate ‘messages’. Everything has to be sponsored. An episode of your favourite soap opera has to be ‘bought to you in association’ with a type of washing powder. Politicians rely on soundbites not actual policies (its probably impossible to have any proper policies when you are controlled by the banks in any case). People in skyscrapers spend literally all day every day developing psychological agendas to either control our behaviour in some small aspect, or to sell us something. Perhaps the first element of my disintegration of my interest in Arsenal was when I observed the same behaviour emanating from the club itself. We all know the scenario around the building of the Emirates, the seat prices, Wenger’s steadfast insistence that there was plenty of money whilst simultaneously bringing in players like Marouane Chamakh. The steady escalation of seat prices, 50p being added to the cost of a pint of beer every single season. The constant advertising of attendances as 60,000 when anyone with a pair of eyes could see it was about 45,000 sometimes.

Arsenals communications with the paying fan became more and more like that of the well known gas company that proclaims to ‘look after my world’ whilst fixing the prices of the gas as high as it can get away with even when wholesale prices have been shown to drop through the floor. I can put up with it from the gas company. (Or at least I just ignore them). But thats because I don't SUPPORT the gas company. I have no emotional engagement with them whatsoever. Or actually, I do. I don't like them at all. I would go so far as to say I don't like the people who work for them either. Not the humble engineers. But certainly the chief accountants, and the CEO, and the Marketing Director. I don't like them at all, even though I have never met them. So, to start with, its a big problem for me when Arsenal, who I proclaim to ‘support’, starts to communicate with me in same saccharine and spin-happy manner as many other large organisations whose main objective is to extract as much money from me as possible, whilst telling me that they love me.

And when the product is threatened, Corporations have shown themselves the world over to get rather disagreeable. So we have all seen the Arsenal stewards mysteriously appear at the Etihad Stadium, and heard stories of anti-Wenger banners being forcibly removed by either these stewards, or the police. Fans bringing banners into football matches is a pretty basic element of fan culture. In Italy they take things a couple of steps further, then for whatever reason they feel short changed by things, and turn up mob handed at the training ground, or refuse to go to matches altogether. But in England, we can’t have banners because it threatens the saccharine sweet super happy Ozil Sanchez Wenger-fest that the club projects as its prime business asset. This kind of stifling of fan opinion is the behaviour of a corporation not a football club. A football club, whose objectives were purely sporting, would either argue back, or enter a period of introspection.

 Now lets investigate the ‘product’ itself (there’s that word again). As I mentioned earlier, many people will tell you that the modern Premier league footballing ‘product’ is vastly superior to it’s previous manifestations. The footballers themselves are fleet-footed white booted continental superstars with wonderful combovers and a fleet of Bentleys. Arsenals stadium is an all seater temple of football with huge pulsating video screens and wonderful sight lines. For those we refer to as ‘armchair supporters‘ the spectacle is propelled onto our TV screens by a super sexy Sky lady with flashing white teeth. The analysis of the game is a different animal too. From hundreds of little internet Herbert’s with their tactical ‘blogs’, each trying to outdo each other in displaying their studious understanding of the games finer points, to Gary Neville and his magnificent touch screen, it’s very clear that football is a complex topic to be studied and revered. And thats before we get onto the financials. Ah, the financials, at a club like Arsenal, where do we start? A couple of years ago, there was a period where the fans used to pay more or less the same, if not actually more attention, to financial statements and AGM discussions, than they did the actual bloody football results.

People defended Wenger not in terms of whether he could put a team on the pitch that didn't collapse like a house of cards at home to Man Utd, but whether he had maintained a healthy ‘net spend’. There was also a period, thankfully it may have passed now, where certain clubs in England had had so much foreign cash invested in them (I could say ‘laundered’) that there was very little point actually PLAYING them. And again, despite the very dubious nature of both the sources of the finance, and the effect on the competition itself, the media was very reluctant to criticise anything. Because in our society, a large sum of money is essentially seen as a good thing, without necessarily considering where it has come from and what it is being used for. No, if something costs a lot of money, then it must be very good, and you should want to pay a lot of money yourself, to partake in it. Thats an essential of capitalism and one definitely seized upon by the various people in charge of Arsenal since the stadium move.

A Lot Of Money For Nothing

But that’s perhaps football’s essential problem. You can dress it up with as many bells and whistles as you want, but a crap match is still a crap match. I think one of the main nails in my Arsenal watching coffin was a Saturday lunchtime game at home to Chelsea - one of RVPs last games I think - a category A £60 0-0 draw where literally NOTHING happened, and we all traipsed home again. The notion that EVERY match will be absolutely super-fantastic and you should certainly want to pay £80 to go and watch it, is one that can be sorely tested by the nature of the game itself, and unless they make the goals bigger (although of course I believe various Marketing people have suggested this) then that isn't going to change. Of course, rubbish games are nothing new, I have watched far too many of them in my time.

Twenty years ago of course, you may have been so immersed in baiting the other fans, or singing witty songs, that the game itself, if poor, was a passing irrelevance. And it hadn't cost you much in any case. But football does not have that refuge now. Enough has been said about the atmosphere at England’s football grounds without me needing to explain things. In the same way that Hoxton has been ‘gentrified’ for the purposes of Capitalism, so has the Emirates Stadium. Look at any front row of any of the larger football grounds in the UK and you will see a large number of  people who are clearly tourists, filming the game on expensive cameras. Stand up in the Upper tier of the Emirates and there’s a good chance a well-spoken lady (or man. Editor) with a flask of tea will tell you to sit down. This is a problem, in my view. Of course, political correctness can very often be used to stifle debate against the establishment, and I will doubtless be accused of lacking it here. But the fact is, that the very reason ticket prices have been able to increase exponentially in English football, is because of the opening up of English grounds as a tourist attraction.

Now, I think it is rather flattering when visitors come to our football grounds, especially if they have travelled long distances and will see the day as a kind of benchmark experience in their life. But if you FILL your football ground with people who know very little about the culture of the club and won’t be there next week in any case, then you simply end up with a very large concrete bowl full of people with cameras. Likewise, as I have already mentioned, although your modern continental footballer is a honed Adonis, a lot of them wouldn’t actually have known where Arsenal and Chelsea were until their agent took them there in a helicopter.

Now, I am not daft enough to believe that every large English Club has priced out its core fans, or that no foreign player identifies with their club, YET. But the seeds are sown. In the same way that the marketing people talk about ‘taking games abroad’.  And as we have seen in many other facets of capitalism, it doesn't operate within boundaries, and it isn't interested in people, unless there is a threat of exhausting its market. And football’s market is global, so many of us have the overbearing impression that the club would fill the stadium with Eskimos if they had enough money to get in.

End of Part 2

Part 1 here

Final Part here