A Little Arsenal Therapy
Winning, losing and our shared coping mechanisms
After our defeat in the Carabao Cup final I’ve been doing a bit of reflecting on the experience. Maybe there’s no final conclusion here, maybe just a few things to lighten the load and bring us all together a little. Anyway I’d thought I’d share my musings with you. I hope you enjoy :)
Football, like all sports, has a varying degree of predictability. Yes, Arsenal versus Harrogate Town is more predictable than say, Arsenal versus Man City, but there are no fixed certainties. Uncertainty is increased by the human dimension as well. Referee’s and VAR interpret the rules, managers make decisions based on assumptions or new tactics, players vary in their form. Even the time of year makes a difference. Lot’s of imponderables make football both predictable and unpredictable. Of course gambling companies exploit this uncertainty. Gambling is essentially an attempt to quantify the probability of an outcome. But there’s no hard and fast system for predicting the future. The universe always acts in an unpredictable manner. Once in a blue moon Harrogate Town will win. The only certainty in gambling is you’ll lose more than you win.
Anyway, as much as we might struggle to accept it, unpredictability is essential to the beauty and enjoyment of football. No one wants to watch a game where the outcome is certain except maybe desperate gamblers, but even they like the thrill and the anticipation - gamblers don’t need the money, the want the believe they have some control. In fact no one wants a truly predictable life either. Imagine always knowing what’s going to happen next. Life would be excruciatingly boring. Wasn’t that the whole point with the film Groundhog Day? Better to live in the chaos of uncertainty than the tedium of always knowing what was going to happen next.
Football fandom exists in the excruciating no-mans land between uncertainty and desire where fans desperately want a victory even though losing is the most common outcome for most fans, most of the time. This agony, this strange intoxicating struggle between hope and uncertainty is a huge part of the enthralling appeal of football. Football fans are continually hoping their team will give them that huge dopamine hit. There’s nothing quite like a stadium of people all going berserk at the same time. Even watching alone in your room your connected to the wider community. Each and every game is packed with micro moments that tip the outcome one way or another and it’s exactly these moments is what makes the game so addictive. But football teams are untrustworthy dopamine dealers. You just never know if they’ll turn up.
As annoying as it sounds, this means losing is as important as winning because dopamine means nothing if it’s on tap. Enjoying the game is subject to diminishing returns like anything else. Yes, of course we fans are desperate to minimise our experience of losing, but we all know that for most of the time losing is the default position. The trick to being a football fan isn’t to avoid losing, the trick is to learn how to deal with losing. Because as we all know there’s no escape.
Of course this philosophical conundrum is difficult its accept in the emotional turmoil of a recent loss, and worse, in the relentless flood of piss-taking and humiliating narratives we experience in what is laughing called commentary. It ain’t easy, but hey, nothing worth it comes easily.
Look at it this way. The job of the football club is to manager their affairs so that winning is more likely than losing. Arsenal fans love the job Mikel Arteta has done precisely because he’s raised our win-lose percentage ratio. In fact he has the highest win rate (58%) of all coaches in Arsenal history. But, because we haven’t won enough of this last crucial matches to take the silverware in some ways losing has become more painfully acute. Maybe not the Carabao Cup final but that’s because we’ve still got the dopamine rush of three other competitions to hope for.
Wenger once said “We are made up of those who love to win and those who hate to lose, but there is a dominance in all of us.” He was talking about defenders and creative players and their attitude to the game. Defenders, he claimed, hated losing more than they loved winning and creative players loved winning more than they hated losing. Mmmmm. Sounds good but I’m not sure. Losing is to sport what death is to life. It is the ultimate truth. No one escapes. No one only ever wins and no one lives forever. I think players and fans who hate losing have failed to acknowledge the truth of the situation. And I think acknowledging the truth in sport (or life) makes processing the inevitable easier.
Recently I’ve been listening to podcasts from outside the Arsenalverse. I thought it might be interesting to see what others are saying about their own teams and dealing with their own challenges. And do you know what struck me the most? How very, very similar we all are. We all say the same things, we all have the same experiences, processing our highs and lows in the same ways. There’s agony and blame and acceptance and amusement. Fans throw players under the bus, they accuse clubs of negligence and managers of ineptitude. They curse the gods and believe that strange forces like luck and karma will intervene on their behalf. Some have coping mechanisms to manage their inner turmoil and others get aggressive and look for scapegoats. Some think the internet is some kind of hive mind that should be taken seriously and others dismiss it as an amalgamation of sad sixteen year olds in their mother’s basement. Basically, when you cross the borders into other fan worlds you find that they, we, all of us, are saying the exact same things all the time.
I find this fascinating. And humbling. We are all going through the same experiences and processing wins and losses the same way. It’s purely random which club you end up supporting but at the end of the day all supporters are subject to the same spectrum of experiences. Yet our desire for dopamine and to avoid losing is built into the game itself. The sport of football encourages us to dehumanise and dismiss the “other” and to platform our own experience as the the only legitimate experience. Listening to podcasts from other clubs forced me to make the comparison between football clubs and nations.
The structure of clubs and the structure nations sets us up for conflict, yet we have far more in common than that which divides us. In fact the divisions are mostly decorative. And as we all know we’re encouraged to despise the “other” even though we are all essentially living the same lives, hoping for the same things, struggling with the same emotions, experiencing the same set of challenges. So it occurred to me that how we win and how we lose is more important than the actual winning and losing. In fact, because we are structurally forced to experience both victory and defeat, then how we accept and process these experiences becomes the most important aspect of being a fan or a citizen. And the only way to do that is with style and grace. Anything else is a double defeat.
I’ve mentioned my annoyance with match commentary and zombie narrative mongers plenty of times and this is the crux of why I think they are so damaging. They are not helping anyone to process experience, they are actively attempting to make every experience worse. They are telling you that the only legitimate response to the “other” and to defeat is anger and a kind of spiritual violence against each other. And I for one reject that entirely.
So I’m saying well done Pep, congratulations. He outplayed us on the day and he did it through guile and smarts. Yes Manchester City have legal cases to answer and rightly so. If they lose they should have the book thrown at them for (allegedly) trying to game the system to their own advantage and cheat the win-lose percentage ratio. But that didn’t win them the Carabao Cup final. They were just better on the day. We’ve been the better team all season, and are a better team on our day. But the final wasn’t our day and that’s ok with me.
We’re still in three competitions and I’m hoping Arsenal will deliver my much craved for dopamine hit. Chances are good. And our response to losing this season has so far been perfect. So I take not on the chin, manage my turmoil and get top to fight another day, with the style and grace of a good human.
And no one can tell me otherwise cause we’re all in the same boat and love will always beat hate. Have a great international break and let’s hope our dopamine hits start coming flooding in when the real football starts again ;)
Thanks, Jonathan. We still have much to play for, and have responded well to our few set-backs this season. You describe the fan experiences very well!
Which commentary did you watch/listen to?