Arsenal's Omniscients Miss the Point

If you're so smart, how do you explain your spectacularly poor timing?

That's the only meaningful question raised by the dismissive banner unveiled in the away end after Arsenal's 1-0 win against West Bromwich Albion. The team had just won its second match in four days, holding the opposition scoreless again. Yet a few of the leading lights in the grandstand thought that was the right occasion to publicize their desire to usher manager Arsène Wenger into retirement.

The episode was unedifying. We heard no new arguments about freedom of expression, got no insights into the internecine debates among Arsenal supporters, gained no appreciation of the complicated task of managing a professional sports organization.

What we did get was a glimpse of modern sports support, if not life, in all its simplistic self-indulgence.

Contrary in almost every respect

The impulses behind this type of expression run counter to the drivers of a successful, attractive footballing enterprise. Despite the clarity of the final results, professional football is a complex group undertaking, requiring business savvy, judgment of character and ability, tactical experience and smarts, psychological and motivational skills, uncommon physical ability, collective understanding, and other expertise.

That complexity frightens many. Those are ones clinging to the notion that "the simplest explanation is always the best," not recognizing that Occam's Razor has long been a logical fallacy. They latch on to every new piece of information about the club, not understanding how to assess the accuracy or meaning of that information. This same group appoints itself arbiter and tribune of The Truth about Arsenal Football Club, usually defined by an in-or-out vote on the manager.

The lack of nuance in this line of interpretation signals the fool's own stupidity. What's modern is the ability to gain an audience for that foolishness.

"Part of our emergency is that it's so awfully tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature," wrote David Foster Wallace in the essay "Deciderization 2007 - A Special Report." "The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's continually discovering new vistas of personal ignorance and delusion."

Or, more to our point, Gunnerblog observed in the aftermath of the 2-1 defeat to Manchester United: "The truth is that a result is rarely determined by one single thing. It's almost never entirely due to the brilliance of one player, or indeed the error of another. Football is a game composed of thousands of interconnected moments." ("Arsenal 1 - 2 Man United: Why the players have to take blame too")

Your known unknowns

Those myriad connections during a match certainly call into question straightforward, cause-and-effect analyses. Similarly, simple narratives fail to convey a football club's complicated preparations for competition, in particular its player acquisition activities, fitness regimes, and man management style.

Still, a contingent of Arsenal fans reduces these activities to simple stories, such as:

• In negotiating the transfer market, Wenger is a cheapskate and a ditherer
• Arsenal's injury problems stem from the players' delicate physiques, the manager's inability to rotate the squad, and/or the playing style
• The manager is a micromanager who can't get the best out of his staff or his players

We've debunked these myths before. Have a look at "Silly Season Survival Tips" on this site and "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Even Small Crowds" on my personal blog for better ways to think about the transfer market. In essence, if someone purports to have the complete, inside story on player acquisitions, dismiss that out of hand. It's such a murky environment that all accounts are suspect.

I'd encourage a healthy skepticism of injury analyses as well. A multitude of factors acts differently on each human body, so the idea that we could identify one cause or a few causes is far-fetched. For example, Wenger's recent implication that the World Cup schedule brought on the current spate of injuries doesn't account for the full summer vacations of the subsequently crocked Mikel Arteta, Aaron Ramsey, Nacho Monreal, and Kieran Gibbs.

Instead, we're better off trying to understand how the club is addressing the web of contributing factors. "Arsenal's Medicine Man, Shad Forsythe, Will Work Wonders over Time" provides a good foundation in the advances the new performance chief is trying to institute.

And rather than accepting an at-best dated analysis of Wenger's management style and its consequences, we should consider the possibility that structuring and nurturing human relationships are highly complex undertakings. Management approaches, including delegating tasks and setting performance expectations, and motivational work owe everything to systems and psychologies that outside observers won't fully grasp. (Some attempts to describe these multiple dimensions appear in "Management the Arsenal Way" and "Mesut Özil Plays for Arsenal, and You Do Not.")

Legitimate questions

These dynamics don't mean we should give up trying to understand what's happening with the club we love. They just call for appreciation of the complexities, wisdom to ask insightful questions, and skepticism of obvious answers.

For example, the question of who will succeed Wenger is now a shallow one. We should instead be asking how Arsenal's leadership is preparing itself to identify and hire the next manager, what principles will guide that process, and what structures will produce the choice. No writer or analyst, to my knowledge, has pursued those lines of inquiry with club officials.

That's a failure of the Fourth Estate. Indeed, the media is an active party to fans' rush to judgment because the simple story is easy to write and popular. Inaccuracy and banality don't seem to be concerns.

Acknowledging complexity and the limits of our own knowledge and ability should be of high importance, though, if we truly care about Arsenal more than our own opinions and brief moments in the spotlight.

Arsenal, Arsène Wenger, and the Cult of Personality

As the summer transfer deadline approached Monday, millions of keys were called into action to lambaste Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger.

"He's still cheap."

"He's a ditherer."

"He's too loyal to current players to acquire anyone who might replace them."

These are well-worn, superficial explanations of the club's transfer activities, criticisms that transform the perceived personal traits of one man into the guiding principles of a multimillion-pound sports business.

It's not just the amateurs making this association. Marketing professional Alex Fynn and Arsenal fanzine innovator Kevin Whitcher called their 2008 study of the club "Arsènal: The Making of a Modern Superclub," essentially equating the organization with its field manager. Even more striking was Arsenal CEO Ivan Gazidis's recent characterization of the club as run-of-the-mill, save for Wenger. He told Sports Illustrated's Jeff Bradley: "There's nothing that really distinguishes us from other clubs in England, other than this man."

To me, this line of thinking is simplistic, misleading, and damaging to the spirit of the game.

The full-blown obsession with managers

The overemphasis on the character and power of the football manager doesn't affect Arsenal alone. Although it's easy to identify Wenger with the club due to his extraordinary tenure, to say nothing of the spelling connection between his first name and the club's, observers are just as likely to limit their analyses of other clubs to the perceived traits of their managers.

The English media are particularly sycophantic toward Jose Mourinho of Chelsea, hanging on his every word, giving undue credence to all of them, and buying the image that Mourinho wants to present of himself. The fawning press then depicts Chelsea as a worldwise, ruthlessly practical organization; an equally legitimate characterization would be decadent and inhuman, but those descriptors don't comfortably connect to Mourinho's accepted public persona.

Then there's the case of new Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal. He presents himself as larger than life, which made him a good fit for a while at the similarly grandiose Barcelona and is in line with the hubris at Old Trafford. Van Gaal benefited from good fortune as Netherlands manager at this year's World Cup, where many touted his tactical genius based on the Dutch defeat of an aging Spain squad and a goalkeeper substitution that could've just as easily gone wrong. The fawning led to predictions that van Gaal would bring Manchester United the title, notwithstanding the squad's midfield and defensive deficiencies and the questionable performance of the club's executives.

Manchester United may, despite its slow start, contend, but it'll be more down to money and good fortune than to the brilliance of van Gaal.

Easy but inadequate analysis

This focus on the manager as the sole representation of a club makes work easy for those who craft the stories through which we understand matches and campaigns. All writers and broadcasters have to do is perform some amateur character analysis or copy those of others; they don't have to ask players any hard questions about their decisions or performances. That'd be too uncomfortable and complicated.

As a result, we get fed and regurgitate a line of analysis that is simplistic in three main respects:

1. It ignores structures, systems, finances, and club culture that make particular actions by individuals possible and comprehensible
2. It creates a story we quickly relate to and understand by focusing on one individual
3. It permits a knee-jerk critique based on a contrast of how that individual has acted and how I as an individual would have done differently in the same circumstances

 Deeper factors and dramatic outcomes

The character-based drama is indeed attractive, partly because it is so easy to grasp. Nobody wants to think too hard about a pastime. However, as a means of explanation, the personality-driven narrative falls short.

What's much more influential is the minimal degree of regulation defining football's culture and structures. In contrast to American professional sports, which have governmental oversight and self-imposed salary constraints, European football as a business is a free-for-all. This encourages the financial frenzy, which itself drives player acquisitions, which threatens to trump the game itself as the object of attention. (See Rory Smith's excellent piece for ESPN FC on this perversion.)

In this unregulated financial environment, the apparatuses driving clubs' commercial and player acquisition activities have a greater effect on results than the personality of one man. I have cautioned in "We Are All Bean Counters at Arsenal Now" about paying too much attention to the business side, but that doesn't mean the organization supporting the players and the manager isn't important; it's just not the reason to follow a sporting endeavor.

The competitions themselves are that reason. And at pitch level, thousands of individual decisions and actions, as well as twists of fate, occur that no one person controls. Any one of those small events can be decisive. That's because football matches are tight-scoring affairs contested by elite athletes of similar talent.

It's also why the matches are inherently dramatic. We don't need to psycho- or otherwise analyze one person sitting in the manager's chair to make that drama any more enjoyable.

On the Question of Media Bias

On Tuesday in Munich, Arsenal and reigning champions Bayern Munich drew 1-1 in the UEFA Champions League, giving the German club a 3-1 aggregate victory and a berth in the quarterfinals.

This is a classic first paragraph from a news agency or wire service report of Arsenal's most recent match. I can write it with authority even though I was not at the match and distribute it even though I do not work for a news outlet. In other words, I can perform many of the functions of a journalist, but I have not been one for a long time.

Others claiming a tighter hold on the mantle of journalist went far beyond the tone and structure of the "lede" I wrote and published immediate and withering criticism of Arsenal's performance, particularly that of playmaker Mesut Özil. I won't link to those stories for reasons I lay out later; they proved of fleeting value anyway, given evidence that Özil suffered an early injury in the match.

This coverage of the match provoked considerable discussion among Arsenal supporters, most of whom railed against bias in the media. Although this reaction is understandable, it has only a slightly less tenuous hold on logic and evidence than the original provocation did.

Tim Stillman's (@LittleDutchVA) thoughtful column on Arseblog debunked the notion of a media out to get Arsenal and its fans. I'd like to build on Tim's analysis and argue that the indignation over media bias stems from outdated concepts of journalists and journalism and fuels exactly the kind of behavior it decries.

Journalism the profession

The profession of journalism originated with individuals who wrote for printed works published daily, journaux in French. Publications of this nature had emerged in the early 18th century, famously The Spectator produced by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. A little more than a century later, individuals came to prominence as the named authors of articles in periodicals.

In the early 20th century, standards emerged to guide the activities of these individuals. Generally speaking, journalists were expected to be independent, to reveal the evidence that supported their stories, and to treat matters of public interest. Professionals in the field therefore followed practices of:

1. Remaining impartial
2. Disclosing sources or insisting on a minimum of two unnamed sources
3. Quoting those sources accurately
4. Writing in the third person with a detached tone
5. Choosing topics with a priority on the public interest

Journalists often took license with these standards, particularly the disclosure of sources, and they usually gave themselves the authority to determine what would be in the public interest.

Impartiality vs. absence of bias

The expectations of impartiality and voice and tone created writing that did not betray an interest in the outcome of an event. Whether that was a political campaign or an athletic contest, the journalist's account was supposed to unfold with little indication of the writer's own preferences.

This didn't mean journalists had no biases. That would have made them superhuman.

My experience as a sports journalist suggests that professionals in the field did and do carry biases. When I wrote for a daily newspaper in the US, we preferred certain outcomes, based on fairly mundane considerations, especially:

1. The personality or approachability of the participants
2. The potential for lively quotes
3. The prospect of a result leading to a trip to a desirable destination or event
4. The possibility for enhanced personal visibility
5. The opportunity to enjoy a better pre-game and game experience (read: spreads)

These are hardly noble or complex motives, and they constitute biases. The professional directive was just that these biases didn't influence the writing.

Early 21st-century sportswriting and the Arsenal

That mandate has lost its power in the media saturation of the early 21st century. Twitter's immediacy and brevity and commercial websites' hunger for content both encourage writers to publish opinion as news. The objective is no longer performing the craft of journalism; it's gaining attention. 

With this attention comes scrutiny. Anyone with access to a computer can now engage in an instantaneous debate with members of the media in a sort of perpetual Letters to the Editor. Meanwhile, media colleagues can react with public ribbing, which may have been limited to in-person banter before.

The speed, omnipresence, and vulnerability associated with modern media all strengthen the tendency to align one's writing with popular or easily understood storylines. Shaping a piece to fit the "Arsenal in Crisis" or the "Lazy Foreigner" plot requires little in the way of thought, analysis, or time. It's also not likely to provoke ridicule from one's peers. 

What's more, these plotlines summon indignation and attention from Arsenal supporters, which is of course the objective.

My recommendation? Instead of taking that bait, ignore it. Focus on the club and its performance, not on what published writers say about the Arsenal. 

And don't dignify those writers by calling them journalists. They clearly don't meet the professional standards that title implies. "Writers" or "media," sure, if you want to be generous, but in many cases they're just provocateurs and self-promoters.