First up, I’m going to post a bunch of things as a disclaimer to ward off a whole lot of the instant responses that I know this post will get. I don’t consider myself a perfect fan but I do consider myself a supporter in every sense of the word. I might not be English, but I live and study in London and go for games home and away whenever I can afford it and no I do not hold a season ticket. I have followed the Arsenal since 1998 and I have been fortunate enough to not see the bad times of our club (like finishing 17th in the 70s). I do not consider this current time to be a bad time in Arsenal’s long history and I do not consider us a “laughing-stock” as some would ridiculously like to portray us. I personally believe that even now, being an Arsenal fan is easy when you don’t take things for granted – top 4, knock out stages of the champions league every year as one of the best teams in Europe, beautiful football, amazing stadium, classy players and a genius manager — I can think of a few hundred football clubs that would LOVE to be in our position and the fact that we consider this situation to be a “tough” time is a clear indication of how good we have it as fans. I do believe our ambition to win within our own means is the loftiest of ambitions as it is far easier to throw hundreds of millions at something until somehow it clicks and even then, it took Chelsea a massive amount of luck to achieve their recent but rather hollow and unworthy European success (I would hate for us to win that way). Now given that background about me, onto the main part of my post.

I see a lot of arguments being made about how the club is run badly, how the club’s motive is only profits and how as a club we prefer to leave money sitting in the bank instead of buying players just because AT THE MOMENT money is there to be spent (it wasn’t for a few years since the move to the Emirates). I see people declaring “something is very wrong with our club” and while I don’t think things are perfect, I do honestly think we’re a very responsibly run club in an irresponsible world and that seems to be a bit hard to understand by many for some strange reason. The contribution of the media doesn’t help either as they actively seem to castigate Arsenal for running their club prudently while praising the ones who have spent millions from oil money without consequence. It’s almost like they exist in a parallel world where spending so much without any fallout is possible for them and seeing that makes fans want similar without realizing, the consequences here would be dire. Also, there are a few others among us fans resorting to rather silly and disrespectful name calling about “the Yank” or “Ivan the terrible” that only serves to reveal how far away from classy they are and how startlingly little the ones doing the name calling actually know about running a club.

I further believe that while a lot of people think our club is riddled with problems everywhere, there is no quick fix for it because in truth it doesn’t need too much fixing when you really think about it. Yet somehow every minor slip up leads to people revelling in the explosion of reactionary “sack X, protest and stroll, board is shit, buy Y, Z is unfit to wear the jersey, play 4-4-2″. This sort of urge for instant fixes and immediate change is characteristic of the day and age we live in and there is nothing we can do about a society where instantaneous gratification reigns supreme but at the same time as someone wrote in the Evening Standard last season, this is sadly becoming a part of “the club’s blame culture”. It is the easiest thing in the world to lay the blame at obvious scapegoats which is what 90% of people end up doing. It is easier to find someone to appropriate the blame to and slate them and choose to get rid of them as though that is the quickest way to fix things. It is in truth much harder to actually find out what is wrong and even harder to realize that there isn’t much wrong besides the complete lack of patience on our part. People act like 7 years has been a lifetime when in the larger picture, for a club that is 125 years young and has many more years to come to add to its illustrious history, 7 years is but a minor blip.