So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (10 page)

I spoke to Attwood and his colleague, Andy Kelly, about the ownership of Arsenal – another issue that seems to separate us from the norm. Arsenal is currently the only truly big club or top team in England that has not succumbed to being owned outright by some playboy kleptocrat or dubious group of businessmen. Despite Stan Kroenke accruing around two thirds of the Arsenal, independent owners, most of whom are fans, still own thousands of shares (around five per cent of the club). Supporters have created the new Fanshare scheme to boost fan-ownership.

In summary – several thousand fans own Arsenal stock, and have legal powers to hold the board to account. For much of the last century, the club was largely owned by dynasties such as the Bracewell-Smiths and Hill-Woods (another Arsenal quirk). Yet the club has a history of encouraging plurality of ownership right back to its genesis.

“Between 1886 and 1893 the club was run as a mutual co-operative,” Kelly explains. “The club was owned by its members on a one-member-one-vote basis, it was run by a committee with a chairman who was voted for by the members. Anyone could be a member by paying a subscription.”

In 1893 it became a Limited Liability Company with three-quarters of the shares up for grabs to the public. More shares were later issued, particularly when the club ran into financial trouble. Henry Norris “made very serious efforts to sell shares to people in Woolwich,” according to Attwood. Norris told local fans that if they invested in the club, it would stay rooted in its locality. But the take-up was not sufficient, attendances were poor, and the club moved north of the river. Another share issue was conducted to raise money for the construction of Highbury, Attwood says, with a large amount bought by local north Londoners – presumably keen to disassociate themselves with that lot up the road. However, a lot of shares were lost through the decades, hence a large number of “orphan” shares, and the majority of the club became owned by the aforementioned well-to-do families, who finally sold out to David Dein, Danny Fiszman, and later Kroenke and Uzbeki Alisher Usmanov.

Supporter-ownership, in my opinion, is important and healthy for the club. For most fans, the relationship with the club extends well beyond watching a bunch of modern players and hoping they win over 90 minutes. It is a more permanent and, we hope, meaningful interaction. We are part of the club, like those bits of timber, each playing a part – often throughout most of our lifetimes – to contribute to its journey. This is why we drive to Sunderland, or Derby, or get on an extremely dodgy-looking ex-Soviet plane to attend a European Cup away game in Ukraine. And this is why, when asked, ‘What is Arsenal?’ on Twitter, we immediately think of the history, the heritage and even the ethics that we feel the club holds – or should hold.

Note the consistency in the responses: rather than people attaching their own supposed ethics to the club, fans generally gave the same responses. Arsenal means innovation, it means class, and it means doing things the right way. It is for this reason that the tragically-lost David Rocastle – officially my first favourite Arsenal player, even before Anders Limpar – is so embedded in Arsenal folklore, and celebrated for his famous imperative: “Remember who you are, what you are, and who you represent.”

Despite becoming cynical, miserable, lazy and inactive adults, we still need hope. We still seek identity and enjoy being part of something bigger. Arsenal, irrespective of the team’s up and downs, gives us all of this. More than just a team that represents a town, it is a club that we are all part of, with a unique identity, a strong heritage, yet also an unfettered enthusiasm for innovation and change.

This is why I am Arsenal, and I suspect it is why you’re Arsenal, too. This is Arsenal.

Forward.

***

Julian Harris is a journalist, Arsenal season ticket holder and co-founder of the fan blog Gingers for Limpar. He Tweets (too frequently) about Arsenal @gingers4limpar.

9 – LET’S GET DIGITAL - James McNicholas

As little as ten years ago, the match day experience at Arsenal was markedly different – and not just because you were walking the narrow streets around Highbury rather than patrolling the Emirates’ vast concourse. Yes, burgers were cheaper and the club shop was smaller, but whilst fans can now consume ground beef products and merchandise at ludicrous expense to their hearts content, there is something else they devour with equal fervour. Something that doesn’t cost anything at all: information.

Today, a fan at the Emirates doesn’t have to wait to see the teams emerge from the tunnel to know the starting line-up. He probably got the starting XI off Twitter whilst he was still in the pub. Not only that, but he was most likely able to read a microblog from Jack Wilshere detailing the extent of his ankle injury, as well as a projected recovery schedule. A new-fangled shiny stadium has coincided with a new-fangled shiny information age, in which we’re all up to date, up to the minute, and up to our eyes in football. And this seems truer of Arsenal supporters than most. In the wide world of the web, Arsenal fans appear to be the most verbose, spawning literally hundreds of blogs, forums and online magazines each season. Take a look at the very book you’re holding: so many of its chapters are contributed by those who began by self-publishing on blogs or other social media. The Editor? Arseblog, whose legs bestride the Arsenal blogosphere like a colossus.

For many of these writers, getting in to print was once a distant ambition, and their blogs a hopeful conduit to that goal. However, in the intervening years, digital media has begun to outstrip its physical counterpart. This is typified in the shift experienced by Arsenal’s most renowned fanzine: I suspect The Gooner’s online element receives many more hits than actual hard copies are sold. Football moves fast, and digital media allows writers to be responsive and reactive. A blog has the benefit of being editable right up to the whistle – and, crucially, it’s free.  

At the time of writing, the Wikio Blog Ranking (compiled using traffic statistics and inbound links) lists seven Arsenal-specific sites amid their top 20 Football Blogs.  Manchester United hold just one spot; the rest are made up of general interest football blogs, which of course are open to a far wider audience. Arsenal fans’ voracious appetite for information seems to know no bounds. In the summer of 2011, for example, the previously unknown name of Costa Rican forward Joel Campbell trended globally as fans turned over every digital leaf for clues about his future. A 19-year-old footballer from Costa Rica became his country’s most Googled citizen all on the back of some reported interest from Arsenal. What was once a curiosity has become a phenomenon.

Many have sought to understand just why Arsenal are so richly represented online – particularly those in the parasitic worlds of marketing and PR. I have dabbled in these areas myself, and have worked with some fantastic people, but any industry that uses the term ‘viral’ when talking about generating spread is bound to carry less than sanitary overtones and have, occasionally, less than sanitary practises.

One socio-economic theory is that Arsenal’s inherent catchment area of North-East London contains an unusually high proportion of digitally literate ‘new media’ types. It’s a suggestion that sits neatly alongside the modern perception of Arsenal as a middle-class club. It does not, however, reflect the true breadth or our fanbase, nor explain the wide variety of content produced by those who rarely set foot in this part of the world. Our man Arseblogger, for example, began his site whilst ensconced in the sunny sanctuary of Barcelona, and now lives in Dublin.

An alternative theory is that there is just something about our football club that provokes fans to put their thoughts down on paper, or some modern LCD-lit equivalent. I think we’d all like to believe that there is some element within Arsenal that fires a creative spark in its fans; that the crest is a muse, inspiring artistry in its followers as it does in its players. With some of the beautiful football we’ve been treated to in the past decade, that’s almost credible – until you remember that most of the fans in question were raised on a steady diet of George Graham’s football, when ‘artistic’ and ‘inspiring’ were less prominent epithets. I think the truth of it is far simpler: Arsenal had pioneers; brave explorers venturing in to the undiscovered country of the net. Arseweb was among the first, bringing fans news, results, and what today look like rather funky retro graphics. Though now inactive, it still stands as a totemic reminder of the Arsenal online creation myth.

And then came the blogs. The proliferation of information has meant that news, as a currency, has weakened. Original sources of stories are lost behind a carousel of re-tweets, as a literalised version of Chinese whispers plays out across the online playground. In this environment, where news is devalued, opinion is king. Into this void stepped Arseblogger, our foul-mouthed Christopher Columbus, accidentally unlocking a land of plenty. His sterling efforts and remarkable consistency made maintaining a weblog look easy. Inevitably, he inspired copycats. I can safely say that without Arseblog there would be no Gunnerblog. Without Gunnerblog there would be no ... well, perhaps that’s a bad example, but you catch my drift. Like Johan Djourou’s bizarre hairstyle, it’s a pyramid that keeps on growing.

Arseblog, and the few sites that sprung up around it, established a culture of Arsenal blogging. Soon the sites were covering every aspect of the football club. Sociology dictates that any culture broad enough will eventually encompass subversion, and subcultures will be formed. With supporters hungry for more and more depth of knowledge, writers were able to carve themselves their own unique niches. Arsenal were the first club to sprout blogs about the youth and reserve teams, or to have their own unlicensed video highlights sites. The Internet has infamously allowed pornography to cater to specificity. Arsenal fans have embraced it similarly, fetishising the careers of players that ten years ago we simply would never have heard of.

For the club, the initial emergence of this chorus of online voices was something of a threat. Until then, the official website had been the sole authority on all things Arsenal: no dissenters, no discrepancy. Now they found themselves having to contend with a bunch of noisy, opinionated and increasingly influential independents. Relations between blogs and the press office were on the chillier side of lukewarm.  To be fair to the club, their reaction was more of bemusement than belligerence. New media was exactly that – brand, spanking new, and no guidelines or etiquette existed explaining how to deal with them. With time, the frost has thawed and positive relationships have blossomed. The club have, if not embraced, then certainly offered a firm gentlemanly handshake to the unofficial sites, inviting them to be interviewed on Arsenal.com and initiating what ought to be a mutually beneficial affiliate scheme.  Arsenal have gained a powerful ally and invested in a fertile new avenue in which to plant their press releases.

Moreover, it seems the club recognised that they too had to become a part of this digital world. On top of a redeveloped and more in-depth site, and initiating engagement with the blogs, they moved to create an official Arsenal Facebook page and Twitter feed. Of course, the sheer scale of the following of the official Arsenal channels means it’s impossible for them to behave in a truly social way: they can’t reply to every tweet, or ‘Like’ every Facebook comment. Instead, the club seem to have found an appropriate role as a concise authority: they are the definitive destination for news on the club. The blogs happily continue to buzz around them, satellites of speculation and conjecture, providing a voice for the fanbase.

The world of old media has followed suit. Newspapers now firmly encourage their journalists to join Twitter, interacting with fans to build and engage their audience.  It’s no longer good enough for Paddy Barclay of The Times to simply file a match report: he is obliged to tweet minute-by-minute observations, dissect the game during a live web-chat, and debate the controversial issues on The Game podcast. Engaging in this world has a benefit for journalists that goes beyond their employers’ commercial interests; occasionally the better blogs can become sources for printed stories, in an inversion of the traditional media hierarchy. The landscape has changed.  It’s true that fans are still fans. Their opinion remains governed by one principle factor; performances on the pitch. Changing the way they communicate has changed the football supporting experience irrevocably.

Take, for example, the instantaneous speed at which opinions are now transmitted.  Views that would once have been lost amidst the roar of the terraces can now be digitally amplified. When the originator of those views has a significant following, it intensifies the effect. Inevitably, consensus forms faster, and a musing or rumour can quickly become an accepted wisdom. Footballers are over-hyped, or written off, more swiftly than ever before. What was once a steady drip-drip of exposure is replaced by the equivalent of standing before a fire-hose.

This has had a direct impact upon the team and the atmosphere within the stadium, and more than one player has been caught in the blast. A memorable example is the now infamous booing of Emmanuel Eboue against Wigan in December 2008. In the months prior to the game, an online discourse had accelerated surrounding the player’s perceived poor attitude and application. Now, I’m not naive enough to believe that every supporter in the Emirates on that day was part of the online community around the club, nor am I discounting the ability of fans to judge what they see with their own eyes. However, the unprecedented degree of impatience and rage directed at a player in our own colours was undoubtedly characteristic of the online debate. The ill-feeling towards the Ivorian had built up on the Internet and spilled in to the Emirates. In the interest of balance it’s important to point out that it was an initially ironic online movement that subsequently turned Eboue in to a joyful Internet meme, beginning the slow process of restoring his reputation at Arsenal. Until he ruined it again.