Mikel Arteta is a compacted stool in need of footballing peristalsis

I cannot recall a prospective league-winning manager who has been subjected to so much vitriol – even from his club’s own fans – as Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta.

While there’s much easy mileage in the ‘bottling’ narrative and it’s obvious to think it’s all just a way of driving traffic (it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true), it falls on a fertile seed bed and quickly flourishes. The speed with which it became established shows you how Arteta and the team are widely viewed. It immediately satisfied a lot of pre-held positions.

Cycles gets established. At this point, I don’t think results like Sunday’s even matter, Especially as it was Spurs, destined for relegation as possibly the worst team in the league. Even Wolves play better.

Arsenal wins are easily disparaged and dismissed; that they celebrate beating a terrible side just annoys people. Every loss or draw immediately attracts frustration and anger at the manager, followed by the ‘you’re all just being negative, it’s actually alright’ backlash – which lasts a couple of days – followed by the ‘it’s all going wrong’ think-pieces, followed by people being positive once again about their prospects. That carries us to the next game, which starts the whole cycle again.

On and on it goes. The criticism won’t be silenced for long. Every Arteta presser feeds the fire with him uttering some new cobblers, such as saying “‘bottling’ is not in my vocabulary”, thus proving that ‘bottling’ absolutely is in your vocabulary. But he is speaking in his second language and we sometimes forget that.

Rafael Benitez annoyed Chelsea fans but no one else cared; not on this scale. Brendan Rodgers suffered parody for his nonsense monologues, but not the spitting rage that the Arsenal man inspires across the board. Maybe that’s because for all Brendan’s pretentious sixth form philosophising, Liverpool were an attractive team to watch (and fell at the last hurdle), whereas Arsenal, even their fans would attest, are anything but entertaining, even when scoring four.

Winning a league with efficiency is like trying to seduce someone with an analysis of your car’s fuel consumption at 56mph. If you win with your head but not your heart, it feels a much lesser achievement, which is why there’s so much fan dissatisfaction. Even those that are happy have to defend Arteta and the team as if they’re not the league leaders, which is very, very odd.

You might argue, as an Arsenal fan, that it doesn’t matter. That winning is everything. I understand that, but I don’t think it’s true really. You want to think you have triumphed through your overwhelming brilliance, not your cold efficiency, or somehow by default. It’s nowhere near as satisfying, hence all the grumbling.

It’s always the case that the champions make fewer mistakes than any other team but this narrative that’s developing about the standards of the league being low comes from a strange place. We live for the excitement of competition, so to criticise Arsenal on the basis of being the least worst isn’t fair and their manager should not be beaten with that particular stick. The least worst always wins. As neutrals we should be glad Arsenal are faltering. It makes it more interesting. Have we forgotten what that’s like?

But it seems to me that Arteta loses whatever. If they win the title, critics will point to the alleged tedious nature of their football as devaluing the achievement, citing the amount of time and money spent to achieve it. But if they fail, critics will still point to the tedious nature of their football and the amount of time and money spent only to fail. His attitude and football philosophy have painted him into such a corner that winning feels adjacent to losing.

Even so, they wouldn’t be the first team to win the league by being more effective than anyone else, even if they are not easy on the eye. But there are some characteristics football fans can’t seem to ignore about Arteta; he seems to evoke a sort of cynical rage. His touchline antics strike many as hysterical and hyper nerve-inducing. His words are mocked. People say his lack of calm is leaking into the players’ heads and making them as nervous as him. I even heard a man saying “I’d like to gie the c**t the malky” in a bar in Gourock, a desire usually only expressed for managers of Celtic, Rangers or Tories. But he does evoke that kind of emotion.

I did wonder if this was part of the whole populist/Reform bigotry, taking against foreigners. And while I wouldn’t totally rule it out, it seems to be more widespread than that heinous, festering cabal of roasters.

Maybe he symbolises the modern unfairness of those bosses that fail upwards or are overpaid for achieving not much, like water company or utility CEOs. But he’s not alone in football for enjoying unearned massive largesse, is he?

Something is definitely negative about him in the national psyche; you only have to read our mailbox regularly to realise that. Others get a kicking from time to time but with Arteta it’s absolutely relentless. Sometimes it’s as though he’s viewed as a fraud who has been found out or that he’s been personally insulting to us.

It’s all the more remarkable because Arsenal have been successful by most standards. It’s not like they’re as bad as Spurs (even if Spurs have won more than them in the last five years), but that seems to make it worse. It’s a case of ‘how dare you be regularly almost good enough to win something but not quite’ rather than ‘well done on nearly winning’.

It’s got to the stage where no one seems to think he’s on the verge of a winning streak of silverware. Quite the reverse. Neither good enough to win nor bad enough for the sack, but in some sort of apparently untouchable stasis between the two. A compacted stool in need of footballing peristalsis.

I do understand that some managers are very annoying and we love to hate them but the attitude towards Arteta is off the scale, symbolic of something bigger, wider and more profound.

Either way, win the league or not, I can’t see how he survives too much longer. This is the final chapter of this story. Time to bow out. Like it or not, people show every sign of being, at the very least, tired of him and whatever it is he represents to them. When even winning is held in the same contempt as losing, there’s no way back.