God help us because Arsenal grindcore will be copied across football | OneFootball

Arsenal have found a way to win a lot of football matches and thus trophies. Fair play to them.

Admittedly, Saturday’s final was no Largs Thistle v Auchinleck Talbot in the entertainment stakes but across a season they’ve done very well. It must take discipline and a lot of effort to play like that for 90 minutes. Do the fans enjoy it or just enjoy the result?

But if you just enjoy watching football, it looks likely to be a disaster for us. Because successful teams get copied. Even 50 years ago, teams tried to pass and move like Liverpool; we know how almost everyone tried to copy various Pep Guardiola teams.

Except few were able to do it and just became watery imitations. But worse, the less talented just thought a lot of sideways passing would be as good. They kept the obsession with possession but lacked the progressive ball control and we ended up with goalkeepers and defenders trying to play out, failing, ceding possession and invariably conceding in a comical manner.

In Arsenal’s case, the lesser teams will copy their wrestling at corners, copy their appalling degree of reputation-damaging and near-constant time-wasting, copy their feigning of injury, copy their reliance on set-pieces, copy their 10 behind the ball, copy their fragmented game-play. But they’ll not have a team of expensively assembled players good enough to copy the one or two moments of quality to actually win.

Defensive performances can be really entertaining. Watching Giorgio Chellini or Leonardo Bonucci was fantastic, dramatic and exciting. Somehow when Arsenal do it, it lacks edge and drama in quite the same way. Probably because they’re so efficient and don’t look like hairy Italian hit men carved out of pig iron and parmesan.

The quality of entertainment will suffer markedly as teams try to win by scoring one goal and by being defensive; ‘getting it over the line’ will be everything. The result will be paramount, not the performance. That’s stated so often now that it’s become a compliment.

And those who want more will be regularly frustrated. The intensity won’t make up for the lack of entertainment, no matter how much some will insist it does, and that the story of this Arsenal team is an admirable one of patience and perseverance. Arsenal are so good at their chosen mode of playing that they make the other team, no matter their qualities, play poorly. It’s quite a talent to make good teams turn bad or at least have to compete with them down in the boondocks.

There is a narrative developing that you have to be a footballing aesthete intellectual to appreciate Arsenal’s qualities. That there is a higher form of art on show here that we’re just too neanderthal to understand. I understand that pretension but it only holds water if you don’t have to watch them. The argument for them is great on paper but dissolves when they take to the pitch, at least for non-fans.

They disrupt flair and creativity and make it as tedious and frustrating as possible and then produce a set-piece or one bit of skill to score, and then defend fiercely to see the game out. If they score early, you can leave now if you want some flair football or excitement. You won’t be missing much. No doubt it’s a skill of sorts. And it obviously works brilliantly most of the time – less so if you get a centre-back to take a decisive penalty. And maybe that’s enough. We’ll certainly be told it’s enough over and over and over.

As I say, those who only care about the win aren’t bothered but for anyone wanting to see the kind of football that sets the pulse racing or is even amusingly bad, is it worth the money? Fans of it will point to the skills of throwing a ball a long way, to how hard it is to be intimidating at corners or hit an accurate free-kick. Others, with a different set of aesthetics as their guide to football enjoyment, will disagree.

All this is obviously subjective and if you can get joy out of it, good luck to you but don’t be surprised if it divides opinion. It’s not all blind bias, it’s just appreciation of different values. No way is the right way or the wrong way, as hard as it is to believe your view is not the right view.

But if you’re hoping for a more entertaining Premier League next season, don’t hold your breath. It’s likely to be full of very unattractive games as teams attempt to copy Arsenal’s tactics badly. It’ll be death by football but not in a good way. If the Champions can play a CL final with 24.7% possession with one shot on target, be second on almost every positive metric, yet still take it to penalties, you better believe others will see that and try to imitate it.

This particular grindcore directive requires little flair or creativity and replaces it all with a suffocating blanket of negativity where you score from one or two shots in the whole game. Arsenal are well capable of playing attractive, entertaining football but choose not to. And they’re probably right from a results perspective because their results would probably be worse; certainly against PSG but the non-Arsenal fan isn’t watching for the result but in the hope of some excitement. Is that unrealistic?

Other managers will think it can be copied wholesale and applied to their team, perhaps without realising they need the requisite mindset to play it effectively and not give in to the temptation to play attractive football. Arsenal are experts in it. I hope you like it because we should expect to see more, inferior versions soon.