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Aging In (10th) Place

There are a few benefits of getting older (not old, but older). One is a natural gravitation to earlier bedtimes and meals. Another is collateral to that: being awake before everyone else and enjoying a moment of peace. A third is knowing some recipes by heart, and being able to make a mean short rib without having to refer to an oily piece of paper.

A less-contemplated (and yes – less pleasant) benefit is that, if you are a sports fan you’ve been through a number of cycles of both quality and awfulness with any team for which you root. Age means that you’ve (hopefully) seen a height or two, but it also means that you’ve trudged through more plentiful dark times with your affiliated franchises. And this steels you.

It doesn’t make you less emotional in any given moment (Twitter says hello) since sports is essentially about a weirdly intense emotional connection between you and some random group of athletes in a zero-sum competition. Your first instinct is to demand victory, and the secondary (though important) factor is to be entertained. But that first part typically rules the moment. If you can survive sports fandom simply on entertainment value then more power to you, but we usually demand some combination of success and pleasure with the former taking the lead. If the first part is not there then the second can only go so far.

Age tempers things, though. Mostly because teams lose. Fandom involves supporting failures, for the most part. And if you are older you’ve supported a LOT of failures. So what’s going on with Arsenal right now is familiar, nothing new. It’s not the end of the world, even if it feels like it in the moment. Age means knowing that this situation isn’t really at all weird. It’s disappointing, and unfortunate, and frustrating, but it’s also what mostly happens in sports. It is the norm.

The measure of our franchise (and the ownership of our franchise) will in this moment not be one of wins and trophies, but of how quickly it can turn things around. Because age tells me that a turnaround will happen. ”Success” at this time, is thus about compressing failure, about truncating a moment of difficulty. It isn’t about not losing – because we are going to keep losing. It’s about shortening this moment, about how swiftly we can correct the path. About speeding up the aging process.

With a bit of sleep and a cup of coffee my wizened self feels a tad less angry. Because I’ve seen this all before. I’ve cavorted with a lot of losers, paid good money in the interest of observing spectacular misadventure. So, to one last benefit of aging: associating with failures can, in certain moments, bring a small modicum of personal peace.

Onwards and back upwards, Arsenal, at some point.*

*(but make it swift, if you can – this “getting older” process doesn’t reverse itself)

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The Whole Kit and Caboodle

Yesterday a leaked ad from Adidas hit the internet, roiling and enthralling all of us Arsenal supporters. Our new kit manufacturer and their ad agency – Iris Worldwide – pulled all the strings in the film. Global star players, historic icons, fallen heroes, the team members mostly overdubbed (not you, lovely Hector!) with London accents in a funny, smartly emotional, yet deftly un-cynical pitch for the new style.

A new kit is symbolic, and purposeful. It offers us a distraction – if momentarily – from the mire in which we are stuck. It offers us escape: we can literally put on the uniform of someone else and imagine ourselves as professional athletes, as progenitors of our own vision for the team.

A shirt is one of the first significant items we obtain as a small child to show our allegiance, and it’s one of the very few things we will buy until we are wizened, elderly. There’s (strangely) no stigma to remaining that excited child, play-acting an athlete even at the age of 50 or older.

A kit, new or old, also joins us to others. At a game we see dozens of other Bellerins, and we immediately know we share something. We see a Mesut Ozil grabbing a pint at the concession stand and we know that fan also loves the player amidst all the polarizing critique. Cynically, it’s merchandise, a cash source for a club in dire need of said cash. Romantically, though, that kit is also part of us, part of our personality. The excitement of the new reaffirms us as part of a broad and diverse community, as part of a group of people who (mostly) share a common desire: to see those shirts sweated in, covered in dirt, and up on the balcony with a medal draped over the front, shirtsleeves lifting a trophy in the air.

Well done, Adidas. That uniform has sprung just a touch of hope, perfectly timed.

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Safe Harbor

I am not a huge fan of turning sports into simplistic allegory. Indulge me, though. This Arsenal team us set up to be conservative, and conservatism – in most walks of life – is a philosophy of control, of limits, of non-expression, of comfort borne from predictability and familiarity.

We see it in art, in architecture (my chosen field). Systems are followed. Rules are adhered to. Ordering. Known-ness. Sometimes that order can be comforting, thanks to the aforementioned familiarity. We recognize something, we thus feel safer within and around it. But familiarity can also become too predictable and veer towards the authoritarian. And there’s no room for the improviser in such an authoritarian system. It’s too risky. Too much is unknown.

If one is uncomfortable relinquishing control then forget it, having a player who might not do exactly what you want or expect isn’t an option. Because they aren’t in control, or under control. And I am realizing that’s where we are – all other factors acknowledged (like an imbalanced squad, or players on expiring contracts, or injuries, or just plain sub-standard talent). We have a manager who seeks control, who asks for and basks in the familiar.

We have a manager who wants roles played with predictability, who is fundamentally conservative. And I am not that, politically or otherwise. I don’t prefer that kind of sameness, especially not in sports, entertainment, and in my own work. I don’t prefer rote repetition. Invention is difficult, brings risk, but also reward in the new, unexpected. It can often result in artfulness.

So I don’t believe in the world (or, at least, footballing) view that seems to be Unai Emery’s. One can surely argue that conservatism is what we need in this moment, with the team in this state, the talent below what we’ve come to expect, and with the squad turning over.

But yesterday, and against Brighton, and Huddersfield, and West Ham, and others, it seems the evidence is mounting that this just isn’t the time for a manager who prefers a safe harbor.

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Yielding the Advantage

As a US sports fan, in particular a long time baseball fan, the looming Mslintat exit hurts in a very pointed way. In the early aughts baseball went through a big change in how front offices assessed value. It’s cliche now, but “Moneyball” (the book) was the emblem of that change, when analtyics and value became heavily tied to each other, and the early adopters flourished. But the early “Moneyball” era here has passed – from a revolution in the early days – to the status quo. Hardball scouting utilizing and privileging data-centric assessment is much more the norm, and in a much more mature place. Everyone’s doing it.

In football, leaning on statistical analysis seems much more in a period of infancy. Even if some purveyors have been at it a for a while, with public data much more accessible than in the past, the sport is still catching up to hardball and the deeper measurements that allow us to compare players against each other. So when Arsenal hired Mslintat it seemed as though, even as he wasn’t a true unknown and had done great things elsewhere, we were ahead of the curve. This was a big move, a real moment of futurism from the leadership at the club.

But now, with what sounds like a regressive move back to Raul Sanllehi’s “relationship”-centric model (where analytics may not be ignored, just de-centralized), it seems like we are willingly giving up a competitive advantage. “Moneyball”, as Michael Lewis framed it, was centrally focused on the exploitation of market inefficiencies, not just on specific statistics. And Arsenal, in hiring Sven, identified a market inefficiency, smartly. Not xG, or distances run, or the statistics he looks at. The inefficiency was that we had a guy like this, while many others did not. Not only did we hire an elite, inventive scout who knew his way around the data, but we did it at time when these types are rarer in the EPL.

Soon this type of hire will be commonplace. The market inefficiency will have evaporated. In baseball most teams got wise, making the advantage of having Mslintat-types smaller. Front offices now have to be that much better in their analysis, just to keep up with the Joneses. And we are relinquishing that head start, in a moment when the advantage is far greater than it will be over time.

For someone who has seen the fields level in baseball it hurts to see Arsenal seemingly dis-inviting themselves – intentionally and knowingly – from the revolution.

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That’s (not) Entertainment

We’ve hit a rough patch now – our beloved Gunners have started to gather points commensurate with their underlying play, the 22-game unbeaten streak that gave something of a gloss to sub-standard performances now in the more distant past. This rough patch has come with an associated roiling of the supporters’ waters. Garden-variety discussions about rotation have given way to exuberant (and rancorous) speculations about rifts within the club. The pleasure derived from good results via lesser play has transformed into frustration catalyzed by bad results from even worse play. And, the kicker: it’s no fun to watch. Boring, boring Arsenal.

This raises a question: can a team be both mediocre and entertaining? Is the latter quality a result of success? Is entertainment value correspondent with win percentage? Does anyone remember fun, but less talented, squads? Is this asking too much, that a team be both enjoyable to watch even while it may be devoid of accomplishment in the table? In the decades I’ve watched sports I am trying to recall teams that were fun, yet weaker. My memories lead me to baseball and those September call-ups when a team is out of the playoff picture, when the kids are given ample time to audition, to show their stuff. I go back to some 1970s and 1980s Boston Bruins ice hockey teams: inartful but tough, never a threat to win the Stanley Cup. But even in meaningless regular season games you could expect to see physical, energetic action (or, before I realized the stupidity of them, a good donnybrook).

Saturday’s game against West Ham was, more than any game this season, unenjoyable. I exclude Porto and Wolves at home – both were mundane affairs but I was there at the Emirates – therefore it was for me inherently fun. We played joyless, uncreative, mundane football. Whether that’s because our world-class creator is hurt, being frozen out, or tactically incompatible I don’t know. Whether it is because our manager is fundamentally conservative and trying to plug a leaky boat first before moving that boat towards shore is uncertain. Or whether it’s because our players are simply less talented than we think, that’s unclear.

What is most disappointing for me, in this moment, is this lack of entertainment. I can (mostly) accept the hard times, the slow and choppy transition from where we’ve been these last couple of years to something hopefully better. But if the times are going to be erratic and difficult, I do want those efforts to be flamboyant, risky, and fun. I don’t mind the flaming car wreck, the 4-3 loss, throwing it all at the wall and hoping for something to stick. That might be playing our kids and letting them run around like puppies. That might be to bite a bullet and play our central creator, to unlock the middle of the field and put pressure on the opposition. That might be to forget trying to shore up a woeful defense and just run and gun. Just to make it more fun. Saturday, especially, was drudgery – it was as if the game was a bunch of disassociated tasks, a series of chores, an exercise in damage control.

I want at least one thing from our team – whether that team is in sickness or in health, richer or poorer. And that’s entertainment. I want to watch a game and know that the two hours has been well-spent, win, lose, or draw. I want to believe that I would not have been better off re-ordering my cellar storage room, or re-caulking the bathtub. Those are chores. Watching football should not be.

Please, Arsenal. Entertain us.