Arsenal bottlemageddon schadenfreude is inevitable, absolutely fine and nothing new | OneFootball

Two questions are bobbing around our head this morning.

The third one is good because the answer is straightforward. No. Managers almost never actually resign. They might engineer a sacking by going on a wild rant after a draw at Southampton, but almost never actually resign. A key plank of any good destroy-and-exit is safeguarding the payout.

The answers to the first two questions are much more complicated. The first? Dunno, but probably not. An entirely plausible set of results over the next week sees them with one foot in the Champions League semi-finals and 12 points clear in the Premier League.

But the second question is the most difficult and interesting. The three-word version we’ve settled on is ‘Up to you’. But we’ve checked with the boss, and apparently neither they nor more importantly the Google Overlords are big fans of three-word features.

So we’ll go with a longer version.

Johnny Nic, who is in every way the best of us, doesn’t really get the schadenfreude of revelling in Arsenal’s current woes and potentially far greater despair to come.

We, a much pettier and hollowed-out individual, absolutely do get it. And will happily endorse it.

Johnny makes the reasonable point that it’s not really about Arsenal. It’s just that right now they are the team in position to be sniped at. It’s obviously true up to a point, but we’re not sure it’s quite so simple.

Yes, if it were Liverpool or Man United or even Chelsea or even Man City in Arsenal’s position there would still be mockery and second-hand enjoyment of their current agonies.

But it definitely is also a little bit an Arsenal issue. It is definitely louder and more gleeful because it’s Arsenal, and it seems necessary to acknowledge that.

Something fascinating has happened with Arsenal over the last couple of years. A combination of factors including hubris, self-satisfaction, assorted gobshitery, Mikel Arteta being so very and relentlessly Mikel Arteta and above all Arsenal’s ongoing schtick of nearly winning everything while actually winning nothing has proved a heady brew.

Everything is definitely heightened and tilted slightly to the absurd now when it’s Arsenal. It’s not entirely their fault, obviously, but they’re not blameless either.

We’ve spoken before about the apparent disconnect between real-life Arsenal fans, who in our experience are no better or worse than any other large fanbase, and the now caricatured-into-oblivion idea of the Online Arsenal Fan.

Whenever we think about Arsenal fans, we often come back to an unnecessarily wise line in an unnecessarily silly film: ‘A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.’ Really, this applies to all fanbases, but – as with everything else right now – especially Arsenal.

Unfair as it almost certainly is, the Terminally Online Arsenal Fan is an instantly recognisable and relatable character. If you’ve ever said anything online about Arsenal yourself, then you will have met them.

The idea of them far outweighs their actual number, but they do exist. There is a reason why they have become cliché. There is truth here, even if an exaggerated one. Not all Arsenal fans are Piers Morgans, but all Piers Morgans are Arsenal fans.

The result is that Arsenal discourse is, in all directions, over the top. Their tendency to over-react to both triumph and tragedy triggers an equal and opposite reaction from everyone else.

You know this to be true, because when you look at the things that have become very specifically associated with Arsenal in the last couple of years you quickly realise just how utterly generic and endemic they actually are.

There must also be acknowledgement of how much responsibility the media bears here. We all love a narrative, we all love a hook, we all love a long story arc with heroes and villains.

Based on the last couple of years, you’d be forgiven for thinking Arsenal had invented: playing boring but effective football, scoring goals from set-pieces, not always winning every single game they play, not winning the quadruple, celebrating too much, getting ahead of themselves, believing referees are out to get them, having a manager who’s quite odd and, now, pulling players out of meaningless international friendlies for reasons that are small and twatty.

Absolutely none of this is remotely new or in any way unique to Arsenal. Absolutely all of it is now associated entirely or predominantly with them. Almost 30 years since Arsene Wenger invented pasta and maybe not having eight pints the night before a game, Arsenal continue to break new ground.

And the real if overplayed Online Arsenal tendency for self-aggrandisement makes the idea of ‘The Arsenal’ falling flat on their face a delicious one. That’s just human nature.

This crystallised in a specific moment a couple of weeks ago, in a social media video of Spurs fans celebrating Arsenal’s defeat in the Carabao Cup final.

The overwhelming reaction was one of derision, coming as that game did hours after Spurs had themselves been humped 3-0 at home by Nottingham Forest in a relegation six-pointer. How – the popular response went – could they be celebrating anything at this time?

We understand this. But while our own response was also to wonder how they could be celebrating anything at that time, it was in a rather more impressed fashion. Jealous even. What a triumph of the human spirit to be able to derive joy in even such miserable circumstances. We’d love to be able to do that. Sure, it was joy in the failure of others rather than success of your own, but what do you want Spurs fans to do?

You can argue that finding joy only in the failure of others is a miserable, nihilistic kind of joy. Barely even joy at all. But if you’re a Spurs fan, it’s also all you’ve got right now. If Arsenal losing a cup final made those fans feel a tiny bit better for a brief moment about the miserable blight that has gripped their own club and refuses to let go then who is any of us to judge.

The argument here usually becomes about priorities. ‘How can you be more bothered about Arsenal than your own club?’ became a recurring theme in the mocking replies and quotes. But that’s not what this is, is it?

Show us a Spurs fan – or indeed Arsenal fan – who wouldn’t right now accept the season finishing with Spurs staying up and Arsenal winning the league, and we’ll show you a crazy person. But these are not related contingencies. Man City winning the Carabao and some Spurs fans enjoying it has no influence or bearing on their own travails.

This isn’t even like a couple of years ago when Spurs fans were ‘supporting’ Man City against their own team to stop Arsenal winning the league. But we still defend Spurs fans’ reaction to that awkward scenario; it was a difficult situation and the fans did what they did and – crucially – had no bearing on the outcome of the match itself.

It really is just a standard part of banter-based sports fandom. Had Spurs won that day and Arsenal gone on to win the league, Arsenal fans would have inevitably and entirely correctly revelled in it.

They would have mocked Spurs fans for handing them the title. It would have made their own title win even sweeter. Arsenal fans still – again, entirely correctly – recall the fact that they have on more than one occasion won the title on Spurs turf.

There is an entirely plausible scenario where Arsenal, having already secured the Premier League title, lose to West Ham on matchday 36 to send Spurs down in a wild party atmosphere at the London Stadium. Arsenal and West Ham fans will adore it, and the agony for Spurs fans will be even greater. There is no chance that the identity of the day’s victims won’t enhance an already jubilant mood for both Gunners and Hammers.

But even if it’s not a party enhancer it would still be a thing. If Arsenal don’t win the league, their fans will still enjoy watching Tottenham get relegated. It won’t make up for their own failures, but it won’t be nothing either.

Absolutely none of this should be controversial to say. We honestly don’t think there has ever been a time when football fandom was only about supporting your own team and not caring at all about anyone else, and it would be far less intoxicating if it were.

The rivalries enhance and elevate the whole experience of fandom. Be they ancient and local like Spurs-Arsenal or thrown up by direct competition in a particular era.

Caring more about others’ misfortune than your own success probably isn’t healthy. But we also don’t think that’s actually happening, not really. We don’t believe any Spurs fan was happier that both they and Arsenal lost than they would have been had they both won on Carabao Cup final day.

But that doesn’t mean that those of them who were still able to leave with something from a terrible day were wrong or unusual.

Genuinely being interested only in the success of your own team and deriving no pleasure at all from watching a rival suffer puts you just one step removed from the sort of danger who says things like “I like to see all the English teams do well in Europe”.

Fans enjoying the thought of another Arsenal f*ck-up are also very entertained by the idea of Spurs getting relegated. In our head, none of this feels remotely difficult to comprehend.

Schadenfreude isn’t a new, uncommon or even unappealing element of football fandom. It is and always has been a core element of the experience.

Just like everything else Arsenal are apparently now responsible for creating all by themselves over the last 24 months.