Morning everyone.
I woke up today feeling not as bad as I did yesterday. Which, to be clear, is distinct from feeling better. I think I still have some way to go before I can say that, but baby-steps. Or, to put it in football terms, those little tiny steps a goalkeeper makes before he boots a goal kick into the opposition half. My goal kick right now would trickle just outside my own box, but we’ll get there, I’m sure.
I was fully expecting some kind of post-season crash, and while it was obviously impacted by four days having a great time in Budapest, it was gonna come anyway. I’ve said it before that this season has felt exhausting at times, and more than once I’ve floated with the idea of a complete switch off once it was all over. Just lie down in a room and wait for the batteries to recharge.
It realise it is slightly absurd that I, some bloke with a blog and a podcast, might find Arsenal’s season tiring, but there’s been a lot of work. Essentially a 7 day a week schedule throughout, and it does catch up with you. I recognise how lucky I am to be able to do what I do, and wouldn’t change it for the world, but this is the first time I’ve got to the end of a season and felt like I’d been through something physical. Before, there have been periods of emotional drain – either because we came so close to something, or because we were so far away – but nothing akin to this.
Which makes me worry a bit for our players. If we’ve felt it as fans, how much has it taken out of them, physically and mentally? Now, loads of them have to go to the World Cup, train and play for their countries, before they get some scant holidays and have to go again at the start of the new season. I don’t know what Arsenal can do to mitigate the impact this current schedule has, and we can talk all we want about how there’s too much football because nothing’s gonna change in that sense.
Some players at some clubs will have been going for basically two years non-stop because they took part in that ghastly FIFA abomination last summer, played a full season again, now go to the World Cup. That’s insane. It can’t be right. But as that baldy ghoul with Mr Burns body who runs FIFA continues to get away with everything he gets away with; as UEFA follow suit by expanding the Champions League so there are more games every season; and clubs, ours included, travel the world for pre-season ‘tournaments’ to boost the coffers; the players are the ones who will suffer.
It does make me wonder why, for all the discussion about how the game is played these days, that’s a factor that’s rarely mentioned. For all the chat about our style, the one which won us the Premier League after 22 years by the way, why isn’t there the great exemplar of the other way? The better way?! People can say Arsenal are boring and dull, and there’s some truth to that, but nobody says ‘Why can’t they play like X or Y?’. In Premier League terms that side doesn’t exist this season.
You could make the case for Man City in their pomp but that comes with many caveats, in and around the 115 mark, I’d say. This time around they went more functional because of their summer 2025 commitments, and when Erling Haaland doesn’t score they have problems, but we don’t hear how they’re a one-man team. Liverpool spent half a billion to finish 5th and then sacked the manager who won them the league the year before. Man Utd looked good going forward this season, but they played 40 games – throw in European commitments and see how they fare. Chelsea? Hahaha.
Hang on, there is a team everyone says we should play like. PSG. Except we’re not owned by a nation state whose own league gives them a helping hand re-scheduling fixtures when things get difficult in Europe; whose finances are bottomless for all kinds of reasons we all understand but nobody really seems willing to acknowledge is a huge advantage; whose players barely tot up as many minutes in a season as ours do in the first three months; and who are, essentially, the biggest corrupter of football in Europe if not the world. They saw what Roman Abramovich did (very bad), and took it levels beyond that. They drove the cost of transfers and wages through the roof with how they operated, and once stuff goes up, it never comes down.
But they play nice football with some lovely players, so let’s not talk about it.
Now, everyone’s been sufficiently sports-washed to cast Arsenal as the villains because we didn’t play open, expansive football after going 1-0 up in a Champions League final against a team with a significant physical advantage over us. It came down to the last kick of the game, Big Gabi’s unfortunate skied penalty, but PSG were worthy winners despite the fact their regular time goal only came about from a mistake by one of our players. Imagine if Arsenal played in a league so feeble we could play a shadow squad for most of the season, only to bring out the big boys in Europe. Even still we got to the final without losing a game, winning every fixuture in the league stage too, but because we’re a bit dull for the purists and Mikel Arteta annoys people for reasons they can’t adequately explain, we should be more like PSG.
Except we can’t be. We can definitely be better going forward, I think we have to improve in that sense, and hopefully that’s what this summer is all about it, but I just don’t understand why the differential in physical demands isn’t a greater consideration when talking about these things. I also don’t get how people who claim to love the game aren’t more opposed to how a club like PSG have manipulated … everything … to get where they are. But hey, maybe that’s just the world we live in. And maybe that’s a good example of why the world we live in is the way it is.
Anyway, I seem to have rattled off on a bit of a tangent this morning. As an Irishman with no skin in the World Cup game, I’d be delighted to see all the Arsenal players and their countries knocked out in the group stages so they can get some rest, but I realise your mileage may vary on that!
Right, I’ll leave it there for now, and there’s an Arsecast below with Laura Kirk-Francis and Andrew Allen doing our best to keep the good times going. Happy listening, more here tomorrow.
