Arsene, Arsenal and Hypernormalisation

I recently watched Adam Curtis’ documentary Hypernormalisation – you can find it on the iPlayer and YouTube. It’s an interesting yarn about why the world is in such a mess at the moment, but this blog is not about the connections between Syria, Gaddafi, Blair, Trump et al. Instead it’s about the concept of hypernormalisation. Curtis borrowed the title of the film from a book about the Soviet Union by Alexei Yurchak, a professor at UC Berkeley: “Everything was Forever, Until it Was no More.” To quote a review of the film in The New Yorker, Yurchak contended that in the final twenty years of Soviet rule:

[The] Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one within Russian society […] could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order. The system was unsustainable; this was obvious to anyone waiting in line for bread or gasoline, to anyone fighting in Afghanistan or working in the halls of the Kremlin. But in official, public life, such thoughts went unexpressed. The end of the Soviet Union was, among Russians, both unsurprising and unforeseen. Yurchak coined the term “hypernormalization” to describe this process—an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it.

Remind you of anything?

Look – I’m aware that comparing Arsenal and Wenger to one of the most brutal governments of modern history is ridiculous. I know. But read the quote above again.

Arsenal exists in a state of hypernormality. There is an inherent falseness to the picture we are painted each season as supporters. We are told we can compete with the top teams in England and Europe; we never do. We are told that Wenger can change things this season; he never does. We are told that this our season in Europe; it never is. We will win the league this season; we don’t. We're always 2-3 players from glory.

We lose by huge margins each season in the first knockout round of the Champions League, never showing any improvement; yet we celebrate finishing fourth, and qualifying for the same competition. We cannot even beat Leicester City to the league title, when, finally, all our rivals flounder; yet we are told that finishing second is a great achievement, proof of Wenger’s consistency in qualifying for Europe.

We have the same injury crisis each season, involving the same players in the same positions, but nothing can be done to prevent it. It's just bad luck.

Look at Giroud’s statistics! He failed to score in any of the games during the crucial run-in last season. Koscielny is a world-class defender! He makes catastrophic errors on a regular basis. Petr Cech will win us 15 points a season! He hasn’t. Cazorla, a 32 year old with knackered Achilles tendons, can be the lynchpin of our midfield! He won’t play again this year. The team is entirely composed of players who are both good enough and not good enough at the same time. They are Schrodinger's players - both world-class and not world-class simultaneously.

And what it all comes back to is this: Arsene Wenger can build a winning team this season! No, he can’t.  Hasn’t been able to do so for a decade. He can build a team that gets the requisite points for the Champions League cash cow, but the days of him building a winning team are years gone. Thirteen Years to be precise. The same mistakes, the same self-destruction, the same limp capitulations are replayed each year. But who can imagine an Arsenal within Arsene? Who could possibly do better?

Pundits know this, yet engage in the same nonsense. Gary Neville gives extended tactical analyses on Arsenal’s shortcomings almost every week, and then calls supporters ‘embarrasing’ when the ask for change in the club’s management. But I suppose he can give a cheeky grin, get on AFTV, and pretend to be a man of the people.

This is Arsenal’s hypernormalisation. We are painted a picture of a well-run club that plays great football with a fantastic manager. So why have we not won the league in 13 years? Why have we not mounted more than 1 or 2 credible title challenges in that time? Why have we had only 1 or 2 decent Champions League runs in twenty years. Why have our performances, if anything, regressed against the big sides, both domestically and in Europe. 8-2, 6-3, 6-0, 5-1, 5-1, forever. Either our expectations are too high (they aren’t), or the reality is not what it is purported to be (it isn’t).

In the end, Wenger will leave Arsenal, and the club will continue. Everyone knows the system is failing and one day it will end. When? Sooner rather than later. We will look back at the final years of his reign and wonder why it was allowed to carry on for so long, how a legend of the club was allowed to tarnish his reputation in this manner.

So why does it continue? As with all decaying forms of governance, ask the simple question: cui bono? The answer lies in the boardroom. Because for all Arsene’s faults, he is the only true football man in the senior ranks of the club. Kroenke and his idiot son don’t have a clue. Gazidis has been chancing it for years. The fans are told to pipe down if they dare raise a point of dissent at the AGM. Give us your cash and shut up – the system is working. "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." The banal inertia of Wenger’s reign makes a lot of money for a lot of people. They literally do not care if we lose 5-1 away at Bayern every single season as long as the cash keeps coming in.

But for the fans it’s not enough. All we can hope for is that, one day, reality will return, and the club is honest about where it currently stands. And if nothing else, when the end comes for Wenger, it will certainly be both “unsurprising and unforeseen.”

Gb.