What does booing mean to Arsenal?

As the giant Saudi oil tanker seized by pirates in the Indian Ocean nears the coast of Somalia, so the Arsenal lumber ponderously towards mediocrity. The news is thin on the ground today my fellow sufferers. The players are saying things must change, consistency must be attained, blah blah blah blah. We have heard it all before, I’m not interested in hearing it again. Tell the squad, not the papers. The story regarding the hijacked tanker described the pirates as living the high life on board the captured vessel. This is sometimes how I feel about the Arsenal at the moment, that a bunch of pirates (over hyped players) have seized control of my club and are living the high life on fat salaries that they don’t deserve.

I read somewhere, I think it was the Online Gooner Editorial, that some sections of the fans were booing the team at the end of the Villa match. Booing the team is something I cannot condone, but I can understand it. A fan pays a fortune to go and see the Arsenal, more than most football fans in Europe, and probably the world. If the fan has a family the cost of seeing a game increases exponentially. Above the price of the tickets is the cost of travel, the overpriced Stadium food and of course, the merchandise. What the paying punters want is a victory obviously, but beyond that they want to see value for their expenditure, if the team are defeated the fans want to see them go down fighting. If fans invest high proportions of their income and emotion into a game then if the object of their investment can’t be bothered then they should expect to be booed.

Part of the problem is that fans are whipped up into a frenzy of belief by the Arsenal propaganda machine and by the glib interviews that the players and manager are constantly giving – saying that we can win everything etc. Ally that to the fact that in recent memory we were winning everything and you have a significant amount of expectation from the fan base. When that great expectation is bought crashing down in the most Dickensian way, as it is now, the fans are going to feel understandably upset about it.

Fans are quite rightly asking the question - how on Earth did we downgrade from Invincible to this in such a short time? We needed to build a new stadium. That is true. Fans accept that the purse strings would be tight during the construction phase. The reason for the move? Well, according to the club it was so that we could compete in the transfer market and with wages. Hmmm. I wasn’t aware that the business plan included paying vast salaries to average players and I’m sure that nobody mentioned to the fans that upon moving into the Stadium our transfer strategy would involve selling all our players and not replacing them. I was always under the naïve impression that transfer policy was meant to improve the team not balance the books. In fact, I was under the equally naïve impression that football clubs were about winning trophies not about profiteering.

Remember when the Arsenal used to refuse to release two new replica shirts in a single year on moral grounds? What happened to that? In the last few years I have been saddened by my club’s increasing dalliance with avarice. Fans have been and are continuing to be sold up the river for 30 pieces of silver. All the time we were winning trophies this encroachment on our ethics was tolerated, but now the fans are getting increasingly infuriated by this exploitation and the most visible symptom of this is booing the team. The club has lost its way, in the mad scramble to grab a piece of the football cash-cow that started in the 1990s, the club has forgotten about loyalty, grass roots fans and honesty.

Ashburton Grove is a phenomenal stadium, I love that we play there, that it is the envy of other clubs and our board should be congratulated on its construction but I preferred playing at Highbury when we used to win things. Football is about winning things. I realise that the Stadium development is about long term security but each season we are falling further behind our rivals at the top. Soon the gap will be difficult to bridge. What will be the point of having an amazing stadium then? The club would say that more fans get to see the team due to the increased capacity, that’s true, more affluent fans. Poor fans can no more see a game at the Emirates than they could at Highbury. Hence why the paying fans boo the team. Most of them can barely afford to be there, no wonder they get annoyed when the team display such a laissez faire attitude. Ultimately as long as there are bums on seats I don't think that the club give a rats ass whether the fans boo the team or not.