Arsenal and The Super League

A Lament

I have supported The Arsenal my whole life, as have most of those in my family that care about football going back to my great-grandad and probably beyond. I don’t live in North London and neither have any of my family as far as I’m aware, but we are from South East London and I can only assume that this Arsenal supporting tradition stems from the time that we were based in Woolwich.

Regardless of how it transpired, there was only ever going to be one team for me and unlike many of my peers when we first started becoming aware of football, my devotion to one team has never wavered.

In all fairness, being an Arsenal fan since the late eighties has been a fairly easy ride. We’ve had good seasons and not-so-good seasons, spells of winning nothing and losing our best players to rivals, but we’ve almost always been amongst the very best teams in the country. In saying this I am confident that even if we were to become the worst team in the country I’d still support Arsenal, it’s all I’ve ever known and the idea of supporting any other club is inconceivable to me.

My dad took me to my first match at Highbury on the 8th of May, 1993. My mum and dad had divorced in 1991, a situation that as a six year old I had really struggled with, and this was one of the scheduled weekends I would spend with him. They were something I always looked forward to but this one Saturday would be particularly memorable.

We played Crystal Palace and I remember the day so clearly. From all the fans in their colours as we walked out of Arsenal tube station right down to the polystyrene cup my dad had his tea in with the old Arsenal badge embossed on it. But my most significant memory of that day was my first sight of the bright green sunlit pitch as I walked up the steps and out onto the West Stand. I marvelled at the stadium, feeling the atmosphere already despite the fact we were in early and most hadn’t taken their place in the stands yet.

It was something I got to experience again more recently when I took my own son to his first game at the Emirates. He was wearing the very same “bruised banana” away shirt that I wore to my first game, thankfully my dad had kept hold of it for the last twenty odd years. I made a point of watching my son’s face as he walked up the Clock End steps and saw the pitch. Even being the emotionally constipated person that I am, I had a tear in my eye witnessing that moment. It was like a window in time, looking at my eight year old self and experiencing the wonder of seeing the inside of a proper football stadium for the very first time all over again.

After my first match at Highbury I was completely hooked on Arsenal Football Club. I would only go to home games sporadically over the next ten years as we couldn’t afford to go very often. Then in about 2002 my sister got a boyfriend who happened to be a season ticket holder at Highbury. This provided more opportunities for me to go and I even got to experience my first away game, unforgettably beating United two nil at Old Trafford in the FA Cup semi-Final. Fortunately for me, my sister and her boyfriend stayed together long enough for me to visit Highbury and experience the majesty that was The Invincibles team many times.

Having completed my engineering apprenticeship and starting to earn my own money, I wasted no time in getting me and my younger brother, who is ten years my junior, on the season-ticket waiting list. We were on it for six years before we finally received an offer. My brother was still at school and my mum couldn’t afford to pay for him to go every other week, but he loved Arsenal like I did and he was the only person I wanted to go with. So I borrowed money, racked up loans and got credit cards and between us we managed to get my brother up to Arsenal with me every other week, until he was old enough to pay his own way. We’ve had great times together following our club at home and away over the last eleven years. Going to Wembley and seeing us win FA Cups, great and not-so-great Champions League nights and my favourite of all, the North London Derbies. But more important than any of those games is the relationship I now have with my brother and how going to The Arsenal together has strengthened the bond between us. This last year, spending time with him is probably what I’ve missed more than anything. I really couldn’t wait for next season, to go to the pub with him before the game, to jump up and hug each other after a goal and to talk about it all the way home. I know capitalism has convinced us that sentiment is only good as far as you can exploit it for profit, after which it must be cast aside. But it is this kind of shared sentiment that underpins the very idea of a professional game. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you love and support a club because of the experiences you have with it. Whether you’re watching the FA Cup final on TV with your Arsenal mad family in Nigeria or mercilessly ribbing your Spurs supporting mate in a New York bar after turning them over in the NLD. Football is not "just business" for most, even at the very highest levels of the game. No matter how much the uninitiated or wilfully ignorant try to convince you otherwise.

It’s this fact that has made the recent announcement of our intended participation in a “European Super League” so unpalatable. It has tested my love of The Arsenal like no poor run of form, or relinquishment of a star-player could ever do. A concept borne out of the apparently inexhaustible greed of those at the top of the world game, where the fundamental essence of why we love football is sold-out in a desperate attempt to sustain the economic bubble that the most “valuable” clubs currently exist in. It is a consequence of allowing the unimaginably wealthy to take control of a game in which their desire to invest is in direct proportion to their interest in the sport itself, where a club that means so much to the people that follow it is nothing more than another asset in a billionaire’s portfolio to be leveraged and traded, bought and sold, wrung for every penny and bragged about at high-society cocktail parties.

This trend of ownership by affluent individuals has seen the unsustainable inflation of everything from ticket prices to merchandise costs to television subscription fees, all put upon a fanbase of which the vast majority do not have stock portfolios, yachts and holiday mansions. They make the sacrifices where they can, often beyond their means, because they love the game and they love their club as I do. This loyalty has been exploited at every turn by those who would financially benefit and it was only a matter of time before the cynical foundations of this edifice were tested to breaking point by a serious financial crisis or something even rarer, like a global health emergency.

And so it was, just as elite football’s economic bubble was at critical mass, when almost every possible liberty had been taken with the fans and in particular the match-going ones. The pandemic hit. Suddenly people couldn’t afford to buy the half a dozen kits the clubs were releasing that year, they couldn’t afford to spend a 100 quid a month on Sky TV and they were no longer able to spend £8 on a pint and a bag of crisps in the ground on top of the £180 they’d spent on two tickets in The Clock End. The well had run dry and those who already had more water than they would ever be able to drink but still appear to possess an insatiable thirst are now responsible for the future of the game.

And what was the response of these clubs? Of the owners who, by all accounts, had only enriched themselves further during a year of job-losses and financial uncertainty for everyone else? Was it to admit that the days of £200m plus transfers were over? That maybe a player’s weekly wage could no longer be more than what a key-worker would earn in 20 years? Or that they would no longer be able to use their football club as a personal piggy-bank or as leverage in some other investment opportunity? No. They decided that there must be water left in this well somewhere and they were going to extract it, even if it meant the well and everything around it collapsing into a sinkhole that might never be recovered.

The short-term thinking of dispensing with an already extremely tenuous merit-based system that gave at least some semblance of an opportunity to those clubs with less resources the opportunity to compete at the highest level, speaks to a level of cynicism that cannot be tolerated and must be opposed by everyone who loves the game. Without wishing to make this piece political, it is very much emblematic of the wider issues society faces in the wake of a devastating pandemic.

I see that some people think a condemnation of the Super League is somehow an endorsement of the actions of UEFA and the Premier League. Make no mistake, this situation is a direct result of their behaviour and their indifference to anything beyond their bottom line. Including their shamefully weak responses to racism and discrimination. It is a monster they created and they are as much to blame as anyone for the current situation. But reform is what is needed now, things don’t need to get worse before they get better. Those who wield power need to accept that now is the time where they must do what is good for the game even if that is to the detriment of their already heaving bank balances.

I’m so disappointed with Arsenal right now, but I also remind myself that this is not the decision of the club as much as a decision of the tiny group of people who own it. A group of people for whom the demise of a 120 year institution that has been a big part of so many people’s lives will be little more than an amusing talking point on the golf course. I may be catastrophising, but this appalling idea feels like an insurmountable affront to what this game and this club represents to me. And I don’t know if it will ever be the same again.