Wenger doesn’t need new players; he needs to spend money on some new fans « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
Ian’s piece brought a number of the employees of the Ministry of Disinformation onto our site. and I though I would look for a moment at how they are working, what their current message is, and most challenging who is employing them.
In doing this I am returning to a couple of pieces posted by myself and others in the comments yesterday – apologies if you read them before, but my summary will be brief and I will try and take this further.
What these writers do is use what seems to be a common sense approach to analysis which simply does work. To show what I mean here’s a classic from the literature of social science (an area of study in which I have my research degree, so it is an area in which I feel able to say a few things with a slight chance that for once I might know what I am talking about).
There was a study in the US to see which men adapted best to their time in the ranks in the American armed forces in the second world war. After the research was concluded a report was put out to the effect that the rural Americans fitted in best. The reason suggested as that they were used to being on their own and the report said that men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during the army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.
The results were then criticised for wasting government (ie public) money because it was obvious that rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labour and so would of course adjust. Obvious. (You could imagine contemporary commentators saying “Durhhh”)
But the social scientists had been deliberately misleading the public by giving them the wrong results. The real results were the opposite – it was the city men who were happier. A few people were given the right results in advance and they said “what a waste of money doing this research. Urban men are more used to work in crowded conditions in corporations, with a chairman in command, strict standards of clothing and etiquette. The result is obvious, I could have told you that.”
My point is that common sense answers are disregarded by social scientists because they can lead you anywhere.
So to return to yesterday’s piece by Ian one writer said…
“You are missing one rather large point from your analysis and that is that Arsenal were considerably adrift of Manure, Citee and Chelski last year and so must improve the squad to catch up.”
Now looked at from the common sense point of view that is correct – we are behind and so must improve the squad to catch up. The league table of the previous season gives a real clue as to the difference between one club and the other.
But an analysis of this concept shows it doesn’t work – or at least doesn’t always work:
In 2002/3 Arsenal ended up five points behind Manchester United. In the summer of that year the press were full of Vieira leaving. It was the back page headline every day of the close season. Arsenal were in deep trouble because no one would come to Arsenal and our best players were going.
What did Wenger do in such a crisis?
He sold some players. Seaman went to Man City and Luzhny went to Wolverhampton.
The transfers in were modest; some unknown 16 year old kid from Barcelona, Lehmann who was considered a lunatic, Senderos an 18 year old nobody and Clichy (ditto).
We were five points behind Manchester United and one of our best players was about to leave and we bought dross like that and an unknown Barca kid who clearly was crap otherwise the club would never have let him go. That was the common sense view.
One year on Man U ended up 15 points behind us.
Commentators like common sense approaches like the one above, and like the two contrary answers to the military personnel question, because there is one thing they don’t require: thinking.
Actually there is a second thing they don’t require: theory. If we want to work out how Arsenal moved from a crisis position to being 15 points ahead at the end of the next season we would have to evaluate a load of different point, try and give each one a weighting and then pull the bits and pieces together.
But that is time consuming. So it is much easier, as another writer said, to say… “We could have bought Samba”, without asking,
a) did his club want to sell him
b) did his club want to sell him to Arsenal
c) did he want to come to Arsenal
d) did he have wage demands that were not going to cause ripples throughout the other players.
e) could he play in the system that Arsenal are devising for the new season.
f) did he have any hidden injuries
g) did he ask for his salary to be paid into a secret Virgin Islands account to by pass UK tax (something which it would be illegal for Arsenal to be involved in).
In short, simplistic common sense statements, like simple observations that we should do this or that, are usually just that: simple and simplistic.
Matters are made more complex by the fact that the data we have to work with is largely invented. Did Arsenal make a £10m bid for someone last week? Who know! It appeared on one site and within an hour was everywhere.
Take a look at the rumours that appear each day on BBC Teletext service (page 302, its the bottom item each day) and make a list of them, and then see how many are true by the end of the transfer window. About 5% by my reckoning.
Put another way, the overwhelming majority of stories are wrong, and yet they are picked up by the Disinformation Service and treated as fact. When this is combined with a reliance on common sense we have utter disinformation.
Juan Mata is about to sign, Nasri is not about to leave, we are going to sign Lucas Biglia, Mongongu is coming, as is Falcao, we going for Hazard…
I could go on as I was only half was through the list of transfers on Goonernews as a I write this, but really it is all too tedious.
The fact is that the clubs themselves are using similar weaponry on each other. When we got Cesc in the summer of 2002 we exploited a law that says we could sign him, while Barca (under Spanish law) can’t. When a player from South America comes to Spain he can pick up a permit to play, and indeed an EU passport very quickly. If he comes to the UK he can’t – a disadvantage to us. It is just one element of how the world is uneven – a more obvious one is that Chelsea and Man C have money to burn, we don’t. So clubs play up the bits of the law and local situation that they want to and ignore the rest.
Games are played, and they are not football. Bids are mentioned by agents, not by clubs. Bids are put in at ludicrously low levels just to muddy the waters. Tottenham see that we are about to sign some kid they have never heard of, so they go in with a bigger bid just to look clever. Arsenal pull out leaving Tottenham paying £5m for an 18 year old who has never played football in his life.
In short, remember we have a buyer and a seller here, plus an agent, and every is playing games all the time. Nothing is true, nothing is real, until the player signs.
At Club Z you put in very low offers for three players a) b) and c). You wouldn’t mind b) and c) but really want a). Then you say to the club with a) “we are only taking one of these players – if you want it to be a) you should move quickly and accept our price.” Your bluff might be called, you might end up with your second choice but at a bargain price… It’s the stuff we all do every day in the Big Boys World. I don’t know what world the little people in the Disinformation Service live in, but it clearly doesn’t involve any form of business negotiation in a competitive market.
Our Disinformation Service laddies see what’s going on not as a ploy, but as a real situation in which stupid Arsenal have no idea of the real value of a player and so put in bids that will never work. In fact I am certain that over half the bids put in are just moves in a game, and not real bids at all.
Add to this the complexities of the market which involves agents who make money from moves and new contracts, and the fact that everyone is waiting to see if Chelsea, Man C or PSG want the top player before selling him (because those three pay over the odds), and you start to see the real world.
That then is the Disinformation Mix. But it still doesn’t answer the question, why is Arsenal on the receiving end of negative commentaries so often?
I think it is possible for Arsenal’s central position in this to be exaggerated for as Ian pointed out, most clubs have their problems at the moment…
- Man City fans must have worries about Balotelli and Tevez
- Chelsea fans are probably a little worried about Torres and his form
- QPR fans must be wondering where it all went wrong so quickly
- Tottenham are wondering if they can hold onto their best player
I could go on and on, but there’s many many more. All clubs are going through a torrid month trying to work out who exactly will be where and when.
But to summarise, to become a believer in the Disinformation Service you have to be gullible, you have to believe in common sense, and you have to think that these things only happen at Arsenal.
And this now leads to one other point:
Is the Disinformation Service a number of like-minded folk who share a rather simplistic point of view, (and who quite often like to make up multiple email addresses and user name and hit Untold with their whimpering, while prestending to be different people?
Or are they being encouraged from without.
Anne has shown us in her article that the Sun has used one journalist to mount of a vigorous anti-Arsenal campaign, and this has fed a lot of misinformation to the Disinformation Service which they have used. Why did the Sun do that?
There is also the fact that other papers have run and will again this season run similar campaigns. So why?
Here’s the possible answers:
Explanation 1. Knocking Arsenal gets lots of readers, and is a better ploy in this regard than knocking various clubs. You alienate Arsenal readers but draw in supporters of 19 other clubs who like it.
Explanation 2. It is just a special thing for the Sun as they try to recover from the hatred of the paper in the Liverpool area. They think that by knocking a southern club they can win back Liverpool. But then they will surely have lost Arsenal fans, so is there a benefit there?
Explanation 3. There is some sort of relationship between the media and the match fixing that we found last season. Clearly the media must know that it is going on, and yet they are not running the story much. I have suggested in articles that it is interesting that the major broadcaster of football (Sky) is linked to the newspaper group at the heart of phone tapping (News International), and speculated that News International journalists are under orders to stick with the private lives of footballers, and not use anything they find on match fixing. If Arsenal is the only big club not involved in match fixing then Arsenal is a club to be worried about.
Explanation 4. Someone somewhere wants to de-stabilise Arsenal, perhaps in order to allow another club to rise, or to make Arsenal shares available at a knock down price so that a new take-over can be organised. I have no evidence for this of course, but the way things have panned out are the ways they would pan out if this scenario were true. That does not make it true, it just keeps Explanation 4 in the frame.
Clearly whatever the reason for the existence of the Disinformation Service, those running the show know that they can get a number of others to do their dirty work for them for free. There seems to be no end of blogs and blog writers who will write under different names, email addresses, false email addresses and IP addresses, and carry forward the Disinformation Service stories. And there’s no end of newspapers, radio and TV stations that will do the job too.
Some are so pathetically childish in their approaches that they are laughable, but some are more sophisticated and more insidious.
I keep hoping that those predictions from one such blog about everyone giving up their season tickets at the Ems would be true, so that we could clear out all the Disinformation Service supporters and just have Arsenal supporters at the match. I wonder how we could do that.
And I wonder who is behind all this Disinformation.
For clarity can I point out that this is an article about the spread of Disinformation, and not about whether Mr Wenger is a good manager or why we should have bought Samba. I think that’s fairly obvious, but I know occasionally some correspondents can make a mistake and start sending in commentaries about other matters.
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