FA Charges Arsenal and Aston Villa

This season has been quite a strange one from an Arsenal perspective. We saw the FA decide to take no action when Richarlison violently pushed Ramsdale in the face after their collapse in the North London Derby on 15 January 2023. We often talk about what messages we are sending to children when our players act out, or in the case of Arsenal when they “celebrate” too vigorously after a match. But for me, there are times when a player’s emotions do need to be checked or it can provoke fan violence against players or against referees. In the Richarlison incident, a fan followed up Richarlison’s absurd emotional outburst by kicking Ramsdale. I feel like these incidents are directly related. The police did take action against the idiot fan but oddly the FA chose not to charge Richarlison or Tottenham for failure to control their players and fans. It was, in my mind a crazy decision.

The FA and PGMOB also failed to charge Bruno Fernandes for shoving a referee in Man U’s 7-0 loss to Liverpool on 5 March 2023. In the incident above, Bruno was basically out of control. He’d gone over and tried to smack the ball out of a Liverpool player’s hands and when the official told him to quit it, he shoved the official out of the way. Again, the FA, the Premier League, and the League’s officials often seem keenly interested in putting an end to referee abuse and for good reason: fans and coaches in the lower leagues are so abusive toward refs that there are suggestions that they might want to start wearing bodycams. So, why they chose not to do anything to Bruno is a mystery.

And today the FA have announced that they are charging two analysts from Arsenal and Aston Villa for something that happened in the dying minutes of Arsenal’s dramatic come-from behind 4-2 win on Saturday 18 February 2023. I didn’t even read about the bust up because it was only reported in the right-wing goss mags that Brits seem to love to read (in this case it was the Mirror but others include the Star, the Sun, the Daily Nudes, etc. There are so many of them that it’s hard to keep track.)

From what I can gather, an Arsenal data analyst was in the stands at the end of the game and reportedly blew a kiss at the Aston Villa data analyst. There may be some animosity there because the Villa guy used to work at Arsenal under Unai Emery. The Villa guy got angry and had some words and there are some reports that he punched the Arsenal man. The two were separated but later there was another fracas in the tunnel to the dressing room and again, there are some reports that it came to blows. After the match, Arteta suggested that there might be some truth to all of this and said that the club would handle it.

Now, look, I don’t want Arsenal officials, coaches, or analysts popping off at opposing team officials. I don’t think it’s cool to blow kisses at your professional rival and I totally don’t want Arsenal officials fighting at any level. It’s a bad look for everyone involved. You’re a grown ass man (these are both men) and you should know that hitting another grown man can actually lead to pretty serious charges. If you hit a man, knock him out, and he fractures his skull on the way down, you could be looking at a manslaughter charge. So, it’s pretty much never a good idea to hit someone and that person should be dealt with in a very serious manner. It would be a pretty tall banning order if it were two fans fighting like this, I believe.

It’s also terrible optics to provoke someone after you win. I think I learned sportsmanship when I was fucking five. It’s one thing to be jazzed that your club just won, and another to blow kisses at your rival. I know that we live in the age where people think it’s dope to “own” someone for something they tweeted 6 years ago but it’s childish behavior, honestly. So I do hope Arteta fines him and lets him know that he won’t be allowed to do that going forward.

And ok, so maybe the FA should get involved in this. Give the clubs a good old fashioned fining. Hit them where it really hurts, in the £10k fines department. We don’t want people fighting and being douchebags. But it does really make their previous decisions hard to understand and raises the question why these pother perps are getting away with awful things – which are televised – and why they are focusing in on something that almost no one knew about and which we almost all wouldn’t even have cared about if not for their charge highlighting it.

I know that consistency isn’t really possible under the laws of the game but this smacks entirely of some kind of agenda against Arsenal and Arteta’s coaching staff, if I’m honest. We know how much his – and the players – celebrations have driven every stiff lipped Brit mad over the last year or so and this feels like the FA are “cracking down” on it. Which is fine, but shouldn’t they also be a bit more worried about Richarlison maddogging Ramsdale until a fan kicked the keeper? Or a player showing a ref? These seem like much bigger problems if you ask me.

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