He took a team from the Swedish 4th tier to the Europa League knockouts in 7 years and has comfortably kept Brighton in the Premier League when they hadn't been there in 3 decades. He is a phenomenal manager. Whether he can drag a squad of mostly middling talent to mid-table or better this season is mostly immaterial.
Yes. This is a problem with a young core - it lacks the leaders. By that I don't mean a John Terry Brave Lion figure. I mean experienced pros who know how to go about the business of winning such games on the field. This is what Sven M talked about as well. Arsenal don't have a Marco Reus who can really drive the team from the centre of the pitch.
Disgusting. I'm angered. I thought this club was one of the most "open minded" fan bases on this planet. So much for that line of thinking...
Yeah hopefully this will get people to realize it isn’t just at other clubs that shit like this is normal. Racism and misogyny are everywhere.
Sad but true. That's why they call it systemic. We like to think Arsenal's fanbase is more enlightened than most, i.e. Sparta Prague... surely. But then there's a fair bit of wishful thinking mixed into that. I'd like to believe that we're making slow progress, but I don't know that there's any good way to measure that.
Not excusing this behavior in any way, but I saw this stuff this morning even before seeing DaPrince's post and, thus, went down the Twitter rabbit hole a bit today on this. Apparently, this is linked with the AFTV debate and the pro vs. con factions in that regard. Pippa is an AFTV employee/presenter, etc. I didn't know this, as I never watch it. But apparently, some of the abuse she has suffered is because she's associated with AFTV. Again, and I can't stress this enough, NOT ACCEPTABLE, no matter the alleged reasons. And I'm certainly not naive enough to think all our supporters are great people. Just thought I'd add some of the background story. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, I thought Tim Stillman had the best Tweet about all this, paraphrasing, he said, "if you hate AFTV, don't watch it. Don't racially and/or misogynistically abuse people because you don't like it."
I realize we are talking about racism within the fan base, but “We” as a country, took a major step backwards almost five years ago and what was sublimated is now proudly overt. Unfortunately, we face the prospect of repeating that mistake in three years.
You're probably preaching to the choir, at the least for the majority of us, here in this forum. But let's keep politics in the "Non-football" threads.
This is how I’ve always felt. I like that Crucial Robbie is making money and giving fans a voice, but this ain’t for me. However the fans who abuse them—and the club kinda fans it—are absurd to me. Don’t watch the damn show. It’s not hard.
Five years? Lol the country is founded on elitism and slavery. It’s the core. And the 80s brought it back.
Having been reprimanded by Yossarian, I want to be careful not to get too political. While I didn’t link it in my post, I was responding to a post above about slow progress. When White Supremacists feel emboldened that’s a step back. It’s certainly not the first time, but it is the most recent.
It never really went away. If you haven't already, read Nixonland. Fascinating and depressing in many ways. Yikes, wasn't really meant to be a reprimand. As Jitty can tell you, I don't mind talking politics, history, etc. But we've always just had a rule to try to keep non-football talk in other threads. No, that rule has never been adhered to with perfect consistency, nevertheless, I'll start getting reports etc., from folks complaining if footy threads veer too much into politics.
Is there a team anywhere that has found a formula for successfully confronting malicious behavior among its fans, or do we feel that's beyond their reach? I know every base will have it's rare nutter or have a particular event draw a few folks out via some rage, but this issue with large groups of fans consistently getting vulgar is becoming a real problem, I fear.
Last year my youngest daughter gave me Nixonland as a Christmas Present. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll ever read it, I have too many others books on my to read list to subject myself to reliving the politics of that period of my life.
In general I think the main locus of change would be within the fan groups themselves. Unfortunately at Arsenal there aren’t really fan orgs that have any major clout
Agreed. Change has to go from the inside-outwards. Change enforced/mandated from the outside-inwards never works.