Tedious media narratives
Morning all.
Arsenal will be training this morning at London Colney ahead of a trip to face Napoli in the Champions League tomorrow evening. Mikel Arteta will meet the press in Italy later on, so we’ll get some idea of his thoughts on this game, but it’s one I’d like to see a bit of rotation in with a tricky visit to Sunderland on Saturday. How much he’ll be inclined to do that, or simply stick with what’s working, we’ll have to wait and see, but maybe he’ll give us a bit of insight at his press conference this evening.
Meanwhile, after three games of the new season, the bullshit has started with an absolute bang. I know the media landscape is polluted these days with even the biggest organisations desperately belching out bottom of the barrel stuff for ‘engagement’, but I do think it’s important to just take a moment to call out this kind of nonsense. The relentless dumbing down of football discourse is, if you actually love the game, hard to take. This header image today is from Sky Sports News yesterday.
Leaving aside the fact it’s Tim Sherwood, I cannot put into words how much I despise this sort of stuff. It’s not ‘Can Arsenal go unbeaten?’, because the answer to that is ‘Yes we can’, but then so can Man City, Hull City, Brentford, Liverpool, Newcastle, Everton and Leeds, who all remain unbeaten in the Premier League so far this season.
It’s ‘Will Arsenal go unbeaten?’, as if this is something we – as a club – have put out into the world. The fact that every single team’s ambition at the start of every season is to not lose any games is irrelevant here of course. If you asked any manager if they wanted to go through the season without losing, they would answer in the affirmative. Nobody is going to say ‘Well, I’m happy for us to lose a few games along the way as long as we win enough to achieve our ambitions’.
What happens when Sky Sports do this kind of thing is that it gets picked up as something to hold over that particular club. It happened last year when we were in four competitions, the media started talking about a potential quadruple, and when that didn’t happen it was presented as a kind of failure. Even though when asked about it, Mikel Arteta consistently played it down, saying:
Has it ever been done? That’s how difficult it is. Let’s go game by game and let’s try to earn the right to continue to be there until the last stage of every single competition and then we will see what happens.
It’s not unique to us either. I recall Pep Guardiola being asked the quadruple question. I remember when Liverpool won the opening five games last season and, having won the title the season before, they were already being crowned champions again by sections of the media. Nobody at Liverpool said they were title winners elect, but the way it disseminates across the Internet means that doesn’t matter. It is, very obviously, a shortcoming in terms of how people parse information and stories, particularly on platforms when a snippet of something is presented without the full context, but at the same time should we expect better from a broadcaster who is, like it or not, the cornerstone of football coverage in this part of the world?
If we’re in January, for example, and Arsenal haven’t lost a game, then I think we could all understand how the idea of going unbeaten might well be a discussion worth having. But three games into the season? It’s lowest common denominator bullshit, and what happens is that with ever-shrinking attention spans, people forget (or choose to forget) this was a Sky Sports construct, and nothing to do with Arsenal or Arsenal fans. Inevitably though, it’ll play out differently, and Sky know this.
There’s a lot of good football content and some excellent content creators out there, but unfortunately there’s a large idiot contingent too – especially on YouTube – and stuff like this is manna from heaven for them. “Errrr, Arsenal said they’d go unbeaten”, they’ll bleat after the first defeat. “Arsenal fans where’s your unbeaten season now?!”, and it’s just a completely dishonest narrative.
Yes, I know we can choose not to click and not to watch etc, which is the best way to avoid this, but if you’re a football fan on the Internet these days, it’s hard to avoid these people seeping into your experience, even with your best efforts. When you live stream for hours a day, when you ‘hate watch’ the games of other teams, I think it’s too easy for some (not all) to lose sight of reality. If they even care about reality at all, because for them the job isn’t to be honest or insightful, it’s to grab viewers and subscribers and that usually comes via performative behaviour which gets clipped up to go ‘viral’, and once you get into that cycle there’s no way out of it.
Must. Scream. Louder :: Must. Kick. Chair. Over :: Must. Be. More. Partridge :: Must. Film. With. Brother. Inside. Stadium etc etc
I don’t think outlets like Sky Sports have a responsibility, per se, to avoid creating these ridiculous narratives so early in the season. They too have to gain subscribers and viewers. They too are battling for online clicks and eyeballs and engagement, but football give us so much to talk about, it feels a bit depressing that so much of what is produced is essentially clickbait or ragebait. You expect it from certain outlets, and maybe I’m the idiot for expecting any better from Sky, but they also produce really excellent analysis, and this really stands out from that as the kind of low-rent garbage nobody needs.
Here’s my hot take: Arsenal probably won’t go unbeaten. It’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely because it’s so incredibly difficult to do.
Juicy one, eh? Tomorrow, I ask the questions ‘Can Alexander Isak get 400 goals this season?’, and ‘Can Sp*rs even score one goal?’.
Arsecast Extra is below if you haven’t had a chance to listen yet. Have a good one folks.
Download – iTunes – Spotify – Acast – RSS
The post Tedious media narratives appeared first on Arseblog ... an Arsenal blog.
