CEMENTING THE NEXT LEVEL IN 2024 (LONG READ)

Happy New Year to one and all! I hope you are nursing a bad hangover this morning. I wish I was. My bedtime was 0930 last night after picking up plane plague. I spent a load of money stocking the fridge prepared to battle, alas, the battle was lost. Now it’s dry January and I’ve... Read more »

Happy New Year to one and all! I hope you are nursing a bad hangover this morning. I wish I was. My bedtime was 0930 last night after picking up plane plague. I spent a load of money stocking the fridge prepared to battle, alas, the battle was lost. Now it’s dry January and I’ve got illicit goods staring at me every time I reach for the Athletic Greens pot.

Let’s talk about 2024 and some of the things I’d like to see happen this year.

The key premise is there are two areas of improvement I’d like to see. The first one is for the club to go hard at restoring the fraying relationship with fans by fixing the things they have broken in-stadium with tickets and going back to their 2022 mandate of making sure the stadium is red hot at every game.

The second one is about the Sporting Department going hard this summer to shift the squad rebuild project from IN PROGRESS to FINISHED PRODUCT.

If we can achieve those two things, we’ll be unstoppable for the next decade. If we don’t, it’ll be leaving things on the table unnecessarily.

WE’VE GOT OUR ATMOSPHERE BACK

You can hear the stadium noise through the TV, but people pretend you have to be there to experience it and understand the complicated nuance of it all. Well, I went to two games over the winter break and can confirm – the atmosphere ain’t it this season. To be more specific, I sat around different groups of people and mingled in the concourse both times and the lack of noise was a hot topic on every occassion.

Arsenal sends its surrogate fans out every week to explain away why each week the noise levels seem to get worse, but the consensus of not-very-online fans I hang out with is that the new systems put in place have been a flop, and the atmosphere rarely hits the heights of 21/22.

I understand why some of the new ideas were put in place. There was a lot of touting over the past two years and there’s always a desire to have as many people pass through a stadium as possible… but football is different to other spectator sports >IF IF IF< a fizzing game day atmosphere is what you are seeking out. Racing, boxing, and music festivals are annual events in the main and people don’t tend to do it 5+ times a year. A ballot system makes sense in those events. You are seeking fairness in distribution because everyone should be on an equal footing for something that happens once a year. If the only way to get to Taylor Swift concerts was if you’d been before, you’d cause reputational damage, and it’d cost you money in merch sales because you’d be speaking to a smaller market. More to the point – how good a Taylor Swift concert is is not dependent on who is in the crowd.

Balloting systems in football work on paper because you can put a slide up in a meeting and say ‘we have delivered tickets to 60,000 new people who will have memories to cherish as they spread the gospel of Arsenal around the world.’

… but what does the sporting department want? To spread the gospel of Arsenal? Or do they want a red-hot atmosphere every game to give the players some of that home-ground advantage?

‘For tomorrow {West Ham}, please go to the stadium and get it rocking. Get behind the team, inspire them again and the team is going to try to do everything that we can. It’s going to be the last game of the year in front of you so it’s a special moment so let’s make it beautiful’

That’s Mikel Arteta begging for noise. At both the Brighton and West Ham game, Martin Odegaard and various other players tried to rile-up a dead stadium to get more behind the players. Who is the most important man at Arsenal? Mikel Arteta. Who has rebuilt the relationship with the fans to achieve new highs with the atmosphere in the stadium? Mikel Arteta. This will absolutely be a discussion point in the corridors of Colney, if you don’t believe me, watch Martin Odegaard at a home game.

Arsenal had created something magic. They turned around a dead stadium full of toxicity into the best noise machine in the Premier League. Vinai was so pleased with it he bragged about all the amazing things he’d done to help make it happen at the club in a New York Times article titled HOW ARSENAL FOUND IT’S VOICE.

So what happened next? Arsenal took something that was working perfectly and tried to fix it with ideas that didn’t match with the objectives of the sporting department.

Ashburton Army might not be your cup of tea, but who cares? They were noise makers, they had ideas, and they delivered. They complained recently the club stopped talking to them, didn’t approve their tifos, and they’d had their ticket allocation cut. There was a particularly stinging moment during the West Ham game when their away fans sang ‘where’s the wanker on the drum!’ and AA had to respond with a sheepish song. They have been neutered.

The crowd on the internet that say ‘how can you give them credit for the atmosphere’ absolutely lose me. The atmosphere at The Emirates had been TERRIBLE for the entire existence of the stadium. Then Arsenal gives a section to young noisy fans, things get better, and people want to deny the vibrancy of ‘ultras’ had nothing to do with it? Even if you think there are 5 ingredients more important than that… you couldn’t scientifically conclude which one, because your conclusions are feelings-based. So why break any of them?

The club should have looked at the lab experiment they permitted to run, patted themselves on the back, then said ‘how do we scale this?’

There were grim PR issues with AA you could point to. Well, don’t punish everyone, just those that were caught. If AA is too much to handle, seek new groups that could partake in a more inclusive section. Most MLS clubs that have elite supporter sections of 3000 or more will have 6 to 10 groups within a section. Those groups are like social clubs. You can have a latino group or a group that gathers around music – it doesn’t really matter but more groups is better because bad behavior doesn’t represent the whole section. The club gives a cheaper allocation of tickets in exchange for relentless noise for 100 minutes on game day. It is a good deal and the output is global fame. It shows that Arsenal is an old club with a young edgy vibe about it. Sponsors want to be part of that. So do premium ticket buyers.

The answer to a first season of success so good the NYT wrote about it should NOT have been to reduce the ticket allocation and make the noise generator part of the stadium smaller.

As for the balloting system. It’s complicated and the randomised nature means loyal fans who understand the stadium don’t get to go as often. So the stadium always feels like a bunch of brand-new people coming together. Red hot nights are few and far between. Because the process is complicated, people don’t fill their seats. The Brighton game had empty seats scattered all around the stadium. Clamping down on touting by implementing painful rules has the counter impact of making it harder for normal fans to give tickets away. Touting tickets is a sign of success, 10 years ago, I couldn’t give my seats away. Touts are still making the new system work. For them, it’s an inconvenience that’s worth the time. You’ll never stamp them out – but you will make it hard for friends and family to spread tickets between them at late notice. People literally buying burner phones to make things work is not the sign of a process that is working well for the fans. New tech is supposed to simplify, not complicate.

Again, these moves all look good on paper – less touting, more control, better marketing funnel opportunities with people signing up for memberships, more new fans walking through the gates.

… but if the sporting department of the club isn’t happy. No one is happy and your great metrics will not be celebrated like they would at non-football organisations.

I also feel like all of the above has lead to a lot of angst amongst supporters in general. Making things harder for people is never a good thing to do. Arsenal made things harder, crushed the atmosphere, and basically said ‘we don’t really care about that part of the experience.’ The relationship between fans and club really improved over the last 4 years, but it looks like it’s creaking at the seams a bit. There’s still time to fix it, but you need the objectives of the corporate side to align with sporting desires. You also need to correct areas the fans see as painpoints. Sometimes, you have to take and L to earn a W. It’ll be interesting to see if Arsenal will own the error, especially if Arteta is banging the table like the fans.

THE FINISHING MOVES

Arsenal fans have been very patient with Mikel Arteta and Edu. They let the two of them have a very bad year of mistakes and poor results. They got behind young players and elevated their game with unrivaled support. We were rewarded with a system that took us to second last year.

The job Arteta has performed has been immense. Incredible. He is a once-in-a-generation managerial talent we brought in at the ground floor.

But this year, he has to be delivering the final touches to the squad. We can’t be going backwards to go forward this summer. The fans need to see the familiar problems of the last 4 years addressed so we can finally cook as a team.

There are a few areas I’d like us to seriously look at.

FULL BACKS: We have to move towards robust fullbacks at some point. Zinchenko, Tomiyasu, Kieran Tierney, and now Timber have availability problems. Timber was VERY robust, but I’m putting him in here because the start was a knee blow out for him. We can’t keep stuttering in the league because our fullbacks break. Arteta needs to invest in players who can manage more than 6 games in a row before exiting for 3 months. He also needs to address how he manages delicate players with his training methods. The best teams have the most robust players. City is the benchmark, they rotate well, and their players are always ready.

MIDFIELD REBOOT: Big Mo, Jorginho, and Thomas Partey will need to be changed up this summer. It’s going to be a massive ask to replace Thomas Partey, but again, the priority needs to be a warrior that never gets injured. We also have find back-up players that are of a high level, but also happy to play limited minutes because Declan is a warrior and never gets injured. Arsenal cannot be giving any of those three new deals. Particularly Partey, who derails us, but always finds the energy to make it for Ghana.

ATTACKING PIECES: We signed Reiss Nelson to a long-term deal last summer, I told everyone Arteta didn’t fancy him, and guess what, he doesn’t fancy him, and he never plays. Trossard has showed in spurts that he can deliver numbers, but he can’t put Martinelli on the bench right now. We need to get serious about the players that sit behind sub-22-year-old wingers. How Saka doesn’t have a back-up after 3 years of trying is beyond me. Even elite players need competition, but the reality is they need to rest.

Then there’s the striking issue. We don’t have a forward that can score regular goals. Eddie hasn’t hit the level this season despite loads of minutes and Gabriel Jesus is a hipster striker who does everything bar consistently put it in the net; he’s the ‘if you don’t get ____, you don’t get football’ player of the 2024 squad. This summer, we need to address that issue head-on. I want a bully, an aerial duel monster, and a guy that wants to play as a centre forward, not a roaming chaos merchant, and I need to see non-penalty goals and greed in front of goal. I strongly believe that’ll be Ivan Toney and I’m here for it. But we can’t exit the summer without that piece. It’s the crown jewel of this project. Once we can these attacking players in place, we are ready for the next 5 years.

People say ‘why didn’t we do it this summer?’ I hear you. But the whole project has always been about a slower build. We don’t have cash injection owners, we don’t have nation-state money, and doing everything at once certainly didn’t help Chelsea get to the promised land.

Arteta needs to finalize the project and he needs to bring us a big trophy in the next 3 years. If he does that, he’s cemented his legend. We will be able to finally say we got our Arsenal back. As fans, we need to give him this time. I can’t believe some of the embarrassing carry-on I’ve read from fans threatening to withdraw their faith or slobbering over Tottenham Hotspurs. We have the best young manager on the planet, dragging us into the elite level, and he’s done through sheer force of personality at a club no one thought had the guts to back a manager.

We’re on the right path. The core of our squad is scary. The system is the right one. Address the two things above and I think we could have a very exciting 2024 and beyond!

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