I heard Hector Bellerin’s comments about Arsenal Fan TV and my first reaction was “meh.” This is just the world we live in now.
In case you missed it, speaking to Oxford Union Bellerin said: “It’s so wrong for someone who claims to be a fan and their success is fed off a failure. How can that be a fan? It’s just people hustling, trying to make money their way, which everyone is entitled to do.
For us players it doesn’t affect us. If they want to have fun with it then have fun. When you grow you realise what is important to you to take. If a coach comes to me and says you’ve done something bad I’m going to take that advice. If someone from ArsenalFanTV says this guy needs to do this or that I’m not going to listen to him.
They’re entitled to their opinion and the way they want to do it. If people find it funny then go watch it.”
The debate over these comments has already broken in several rather predictable ways.
First are the people who say he’s trying to shut the fans up. He literally says the opposite but somehow these days whenever someone criticizes people who are paid to be critical the first reaction is to respond by claiming you have a right to speak and to also say that the (opponent?) is trying to shut down your free speech rights.
Second, his criticism is spot on. AFTV is full of people who are now YouTube celebrities. The big names literally get paid to be critical. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. The football landscape is littered with humans who are paid to be critical. Congratulations to them on finding a good skive.
Third there’s the predictable outrage over his comment that he doesn’t listen to the fan’s criticism of him and only listens to the coaches. They trot out the lines like “do you even know how much we spend watching you season after season” which is intended to add cache to their opinions via how many games they attend and how much wad they spend at them. Because that spending translates to “loyalty” (true fanness) or as Mr. DT (one of the big stars of AFTV) puts it “I’ll say this one last time for all of you that don’t listen, @HectorBellerin has a right to an opinion, but he don’t have a right to question a fans loyalty to the club, he’s one of the reasons why we are so poor defensively, but I’m still there every week, supporting for 90mins”.
There is so much to unpack there… the first is the idea that he can have an opinion but only the opinions that Mr. DT approves, specifically that you’re not allowed to criticize a fan’s loyalty to the club. But oddly, Mr. DT himself doesn’t mind questioning fan’s loyalty. For example, just two days ago he excommunicated all fans who sent death threats on twitter/instagram saying that they aren’t real fans. That seems fair to me but he also questions the loyalty of fans who “don’t go to every game” and wonders whether they should have access to cup final tickets if they haven’t gone to all the other Carabao Cup matches.
There’s going to be a lot of fans trying to get cup final tickets when in reality they shouldn’t get them, they were not there against Doncaster, Norwich or West Ham, they couldn’t care less about the competition, but now there’s a day out and a p**s up they’ll be all over it!
— MR DT © (@MrDtAFC) January 25, 2018
Mr. DT isn’t questioning the loyalty of fans who criticize players for a living but rather the loyalty of fans judged by how many games they go to. The more games, the more obscure games, that a fan attends, the more they deserve reciprocity of their loyalty from the club in the form of first crack at tickets. This may seem like a reasonable demand by Mr. DT, but there is no doubt that what he’s doing here is questioning these fans loyalty. He makes that clear in his follow-up tweet.
And this tweet was not directed at fans who struggle to get to midweek games due to work, family etc it’s directed at the fans who just couldn’t be bothered to go because it’s the Carabao Cup, but they’ll be the first in line for a ticket to the final.
— MR DT © (@MrDtAFC) January 25, 2018
“The real fans who struggle” are better than the other season ticket holders who Mr. DT has decided don’t go to Carabao Cup games because they “can’t be bothered.” Fans who go all the time > Fans who wish they could go all the time > Fans who go when they could be bothered and so on. I’m sure there are literally hundreds of layers to this onion.
I’m not actually criticizing Mr. DT. The reality is that there’s a hierarchy of “true” fans among the members of any group. That’s how it has always been and will always be. In punk circles, “real punks” don’t listen to or like new punk music, real punks are over 50 (can I say 45 yet?), real punks go to certain shows and have been to certain very memorable shows or seen certain acts live (uhhh, I saw Flipper), real punks dress and act in a certain way, have specific tattoos, or share very specific similar life stories.
And you know what I’ve learned? I immediately distrust anyone who tries to tell me what real anything is. What’s real punk? Fuck you. You’re punker than me? That’s true. You’re like a tiny icon of punkness that you can sell at Hot Topic for $10. What’s a real Arsenal supporter? You’re more Arsenal than me? Fuck you too.
Inadvertently and not too subtly Young Hector has lifted the curtain on modernity. Players these days are not like the players were 30 years ago. The club, football, the world has changed. Identity and what it means to be Arsenal or punk or anything, has also radically changed. Those identities have become fractured into multitudes and then reified and commodified.
When the world was small, the fractures within any identity were smaller but not insignificant. There were East Coast punks, West Coast punks, London punks, and we all used to argue over authenticity: who was the first? In the 90s through the 2000s Arsenal was still a largely localized identity, though it was spreading rapidly to the continent (through the players like Henry, Vieira, Bergkamp) and out into Africa and beyond. But there were still fractures, the “realest” fans who went to all the away games, the EIE crowd, the middle-class prawn sandwich eaters, and so on. Identity has never been monolithic.
But now Arsenal twitter has 13 million followers from all over the globe and “Arsenal” is a complicated morass of identities. There are Yankee Gooners, Tollington Gooners, Swiss Ramblers, Positive Gooners (who are really really negative!), WOBS, AKBS, Mumbai Gooners, Shanghai Gooners, and literally millions of other identities gathered around this weird red and white shield with a cannon on it (facing the wrong way). Arsenal’s fundamental Arsenalness has become so diluted that as far as I can tell there are either 13 million true Arsenal supporters or there are no true Arsenal supporters.
That’s why Bellerin’s criticism stings so. Because when we all get to say that we are the real Coke, we are the real Arsenal supporters, authenticity becomes a commodity. Mr. DT trades in that commodity: he signals to all of his followers his authentic fanness by being from London, by going to all the games he can, and then cashes in on that authenticity through the medium of YouTube. I cash in on my authenticity: I’ve been following for 17 years, I don’t take any advertisements, and I only get paid to write “whatever I want”.
Arsenal cash in on authenticity as well, selling the idea of “our history and values”. Beyond just the replica shirts from the 1970s possibly the biggest project to show how “real” Arsenal are was the “Arsenalization” of the stadium. The Emirates Stadium is wonderfully new, with its large concourses, and many places to eat food or make a bet, but it wasn’t Highbury. It had no history – the steps weren’t worn down from millions of feet, the stadium didn’t sigh with the ghosts of a hundred years of fans and players. What represented Arsenal for 100 years was ripped out of our hands and sold to the upper middle class. What we got in return was a very large place where the club could sell many seats and make loads of money off matchday merchandise. It wasn’t Arsenal, so it had to be made authentic through facade. Out came the paintings, the statues, the blurbs on nearly every wall, reminding us of our history while the real history was a block away.
We live in a society where authenticity is so valuable, so powerful, that even the facade of authenticity is is all it takes to sell people nearly anything. Look at what Trump and the Brexiters have done. There is nothing real to these people’s claims but they signal outward that they are the ones who “speak the truth” that they are the ones who are “bringing real Britain back” or “Making America Great Again”. Trump is lauded as a “straight shooter” who “tells it like it is” but who is objectively the most untruthful politician we have ever seen in the United States. A man who calls fake news reliable and reliable news fake. And people love it.
And it’s all comedy – or it will be comedy in a few years when we have had some time and distance from what is now very tragic. Think about Bellerin for a minute. Is he authentically Arsenal? Won’t he be going back to Barcelona as soon as they make him an offer? And here’s this kid from Catalan, telling other people how to be “real Arsenal”.
It all feels like bullshit to me. Like the whole thing is just one big skive that everyone is trying to pull over on one another. Get your real Arsenal over at this web site! We have the true Doner kabobs over here! Real punk is going to this show over here!
If capitalism is an ouroboros – a snake that eats itself – then surely authenticity is the very tail.
As for who Bellerin should listen to about his performances? He’s kind of right that he shouldn’t listen to the fans. 13 million different bits of advice is probably too much. But it would be nice if his manager and coaches could tell him to stay on his feet. This thing he does where he runs around kicking people like a kid mashing all the buttons on Street Fighter is not going to get him his dream move back to Barcelona.
That’s my real opinion.
You must be logged in to post a comment.