Different stories
The narrative engine hits overdrive, already
Let me tell you a story.
A club wins the Premier League. No, that’s not quite right: a club stomps the Premier League. The final gap to second is ten points. They score fourteen more goals than anyone else. At home, in a stadium famous for its impenetrable wall of noise, a mythical place where the crowd wins games through strength of feeling alone, they lose once all year.
In the summer following this historic campaign, they refresh and re-arm with ferocious intent. They spend €220m on two attackers from Germany, and are strongly expected to add the Premier League’s best striker for a further €150m. They drop €86m on new full-backs. They lose two key players, one in horrific circumstances; the other, a magician who was controversial anyway, is hurled abuse for daring to want away after a decade of dedication. Their talismanic attacker is crowned the country’s best player, and they surround him with just shy of half a billion Euro’s worth of new toys.
They step out onto their sacred field against last year’s closest competitors, a team led by a man who has never won there. But then who can blame him? So few do.
The champions field their best eleven players, save perhaps one. Their opponents are depleted; the star player is injured, the nine is injured, the centre-half is injured, the captain is on the bench. The champions trot out the country’s best attacker and flank him with that €220m pair. Out into the storied atmosphere they stroll, the most feared noise in English football a vicious wind at their backs.
In the first half these champions take two shots and generate 0.09 xG. By the end of the game, it’s 0.51 xG. Good for half a goal, if such things could count.
Through a bolt of improbable lightning, they win the game. The narrative engine decides the moral of this story is their opponents were cowards.
“Why didn’t you just try to win, Mikel?” Barney Ronay wrote, of Arsenal’s defeat at Anfield. “Why not score goals, why not lay on a banquet of free-flowing devastation, seizing the day, blowing smoke from your nostrils. Thrilling us all with your cold, hard will to power? Why not do that?”
Because he’s good at this, Ronay has touched the zeitgeist’s pressure point. And in the above he is playing to the crowd, writing a caricature of the Twitterdom that grabs narrative and runs with it; that yapping monolith that is ‘absurdly outcome-based in its narratives.’ Perhaps referencing Arteta’s approach as ‘Starmer-ball’ is a little - how do I put this lightly - fucking bizarre, but that’s his prerogative - and he is far from the only writer or commentator to frame Arsenal’s 1-0 loss as an ideological failure (which he still does, sarcasm aside).
Unai Emery was once widely mocked for desiring Arsenal to be ‘protagonists’. It was a silly thing to say, but not because his team were about as heroic as a limp fish. It was foolish because Arsenal are always protagonists, even when they’re bad - especially when they’re bad. Arsenal are the centre of every story. Win or lose, they did it wrong. There is only one way to do this correctly, and that is with a rip-roaring, buccaneering domination: ‘a banquet of free-flowing devastation.’ Just don’t do that and lose, because that would be naïve.
Here’s another story: the runaway champions of England retooled the best attack in the land with €220m, walked out into the most impenetrable stadium in the country, and needed a moment of one-in-a-million brilliance to defeat a depleted challenger who finished last season a million miles behind them.
Why didn’t you just try to win, Arne? Why not do that?
Show me ten teams who head to Anfield to deliver a banquet of devastation and I will show you ten teams who go home looking like they’ve been in a derailed train.
“Why didn’t Mikel Arteta simply go to Anfield and win 3-0” is not the gotcha it is being framed as. This was simply a game between two juggernauts who knew the weight of loss might outweigh the thrill of victory. They were both as bad as each other: cagey, probing, willing only to score when it were safe to do so. The best time is when the ball is not moving at all.
I thought Arsenal still looked every bit a side capable of heading to the most difficult fixtures the country can throw at them and winning. It’ll be ugly, a little painful, but suffering is inherent to glory in this game. The lauded, all-conquering Paris Saint-Germain side of last year settled for Gianluigi Donnarumma heroics when Arteta came to town. At the Parc des Princes, Arsenal generated a staggering 2.91 xG from 19 shots. The banquet of devastation was delivered to the best team in Europe, and the victory went to the side who dug in. The argument Arteta only knows one approach fails with a cursory glance at history.
Margins, details. If Ebere Eze pulls the trigger there, through on goal, the story changes. If Declan Rice remembered to wear football boots instead of his Wellingtons, the story changes. If the ball bounces just a little further…
Arsenal leave with many positives. Christhian Mosquera, in his de-facto Premier League debut, looked in every moment capable of deputising for the injured William Saliba. Martin Zubimendi continues to prove he will set tempo in the face of any noise. Noni Madueke’s ability to move the ball from his half into the opponents’ box is a definitive superpower. Riccardo Calafiori is one of the most bizarrely effective attacking mavericks in the league, capable of twisting games around his gravity even as he seems to forget how to play football. With Eze shifting inside of him, the future of Arsenals’ left looks like wonderful chaos. But those stories are buried, crushed beneath the weight of a moment.
A football team does not really decide whether they are protagonists. That responsibility lies with the beholder. Perhaps we should tell a different story.
Why didn’t you just try to win, Arne?
Edit: added a line acknowledging the intent of the Barney Ronay quote. This was not meant as an attack on another writer! Rather on the general feeling he captured. I stand by my opinion that calling Arteta’s approach ‘Starmer-ball’ is weird.
Nail. Head. Lovely stuff Tom.
Arne Slot himself said that if the game was played 10 times it would end in a draw on 8 occasions, once it would be won by Liverpool and the other by Arsenal. This wasn't about trying to win or not but of two teams that were evenly matched. Anything else is just noise.