Arsenal to bottle the lot? I feel indifferent and maybe you should too

There’s something close to delight at Arsenal’s latest loss and ‘bottlemageddon’ is headline news. The schadenfreude at their collapse, such as it is, seems near universal. It’s a better story than their title-leading form.

There’s widespread amusement at the suffering of their players and manager, who in turn are the target of ad hominem attacks on a daily basis. In distillation, it sums up widespread attitudes and not just in football. You see this in all walks of life.

At times it seems like the glee at their failure is retribution for some perceived crime they’ve committed. And while there’s plenty of reasons to dislike them, the same can be said for every team in the league, and they’d be equally pilloried if they were top. In other words, it’s not actually about the club or individuals concerned, though it seems that way sometimes. It’s more generalised than that. It’s now part of the contemporary entertainment landscape.

I think it’s part of a wider trend which loves the failure of others more than your own success. A kind of mean-spiritedness which when you expose it to civilians not familiar with football’s ways, seems a bit weird to say the least.

And that’s the position I find myself in. I cannot for the life of me find it in my heart to delight in the ‘bottlemageddon’ narrative. I just don’t care enough either way. Win it or don’t, I just really don’t care. Why would you? It doesn’t seem worthy of emotional investment.

It was entertaining to see Southampton beat them but that’s where it ends. Arsenal are not alone in how they conduct themselves, nor in how they’re run or the source of the money underpinning the club. Why is their failed quadruple gathering so much more attention than anything positive?

Of course they’re massively rewarded for their failures, but this is elite football today: amoral, blinkered and self-absorbed, not to say greedy. Them losing isn’t a blow against the establishment, it isn’t politically motivated or point to a more fair and sane future. They just played a bit sh*t a few times. I wish it was heralding a new age, but it’s really not.

So I’m left with the conclusion that all this schadenfreude is just part of a general mindset which treats everyone’s failures with satisfaction and finds ways to downplay anyone’s success. I’m not surprised people aren’t welcoming their potential victory but rather that anyone not an Arsenal fan should care either way beyond a point.

But you see this kind of attitude at matches with people jeering and gesturing at opposition fans if they go a goal down. Not ‘yay we’ve scored’ as much as ‘ha ha, you’ve let one in’. That’s a weird mindset. There was a time when this didn’t exist. When did it start? Taking more pleasure in the opposition’s woes than your own team’s success?

I’m not pearl-clutching about this, obviously things get adversarial at football and creative songs taking the pish out of the opposition have a long history. But this is something else. Something more visceral.

I’ve said before that it may be down to economic unfairness that people commonly endure. They see the players and manager as the beneficiaries, puffed up on massive largesse which feels unearned and created at fans’ expense. The whole gold leaf/Salt Bae nonsense seems like a perfect metaphor for this.

But if you’re offended by such things, it’s best not to watch football at the highest level, as that’s the model it’s predicated on.

If objections to unfairness are behind the glorification of failure, it’s doubtless unconscious anyway. It seems more instinctive than wilfully deliberate. Not that I expect anyone to be delighted about Arsenal’s success who isn’t a supporter; I actually expect indifference.

I suppose there’s a lot more hate around in society, deliberately stirred up by a cabal of bad actors and media intent on fermenting hatred, twisting the minds of the credulous. Football, as ever, reflects societal trends, so perhaps it’s all inevitable. But we shouldn’t accept it as a new normal because in the end, being happy at unhappiness is a dead end.

Alternatively: Arsenal bottle the lot, Spurs relegated, Liverpool glory: The 10 best/funniest outcomes this season