Arsenal Soccer Quotes

When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.

Who’s this?” I point to Soccer Guy. He’s wearing red and white, and he’s all dark eyebrows and dark hair. Quite good-looking, actually. “Cesc Fàbregas. God, he’s the most incredible passer. Plays for Arsenal. The English football club? No?

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real.

Arsenal hasn’t been a great soccer club lately, but it has been a good business. This is what a soccer club run as a business looks like: high ticket prices, little desire to win trophies, and respectable profits. If FFP takes force, and other big clubs end up being run like Arsenal rather than like Abramovich’s Chelsea, then we predict:        •   A fall in players’ wages        •   A fall in transfer fees, which would mean less money trickling down from big clubs to the rest        •   A rise in club profits, which would mean more money being taken out of the game by people like the Glazers

That summer, two of Wenger’s French boys went off to join their national team at the 1998 World Cup in their home country. Les Bleus marauded their way to the final, where they overpowered Brazil, 3–0. The final goal was swept in by Petit and assisted by Vieira. In London the next morning, the front page of the Mirror carried a photo of those two players locked in a hug beside a headline that showed just how much their stodgy old London club—and English soccer—were changing. ARSENAL WIN THE WORLD CUP, it read.