There’s something about a football fan that sets them apart from other people.

It’s not their fervour in supporting their favourite team, or their stubbornness in accepting that their team isn’t the greatest team in the history of the world; it’s their curiosity that stands out more than anything.

Put a group of football fans together, and what will start off as a friendly discussion will almost inevitably escalate into a full-scale tribunal, no matter how trivial the subject being argued.

It won’t happen because one fan is trying to defend their own point of view no matter what, it’s because they’re trying to see if their argument is valid or not, and in order to do that, questions need to be asked.

LOTS of questions.

It’s this desire to find out what exactly is going on during a game or at their club that makes a fan read countless articles on the intricacies of zonal marking and listen to dozens of podcasts on the vagaries of the home-grown quota rules. We want to know exactly why our team is winning or losing, and we will judge the person giving an answer to our questions accordingly.

That is why there is one phrase in football that you almost never hear, primarily because you don’t want to be perceived as someone who can’t be relied on as a source of information for those looking to know more about their club, i.e everyone.

‘I don’t know.’

Football is awash with phrases and clichés that make little sense when used, and make even less sense when analysed.

For example, when was the last time you heard someone start a sentence with ‘At the end of the day…’ outside of a sporting context? It is a redundant phrase that is used in what is often a redundant response to a redundant question.

‘Well, Theo. You’ve won today and scored a hat-trick in the process. Are you happy with the result?

(Think about it, in what world wouldn’t he be happy?)

‘Eh, well, at the end of the day we got the three points and that’s all that matters.’

(First off, it’s not the end of the day, it’s only 2pm, due to Sky spending £5bn so that we can watch you score three goals during a Saturday lunchtime. You also have a goal bonus in your contract, so that new car you bought just paid for itself. Plus you just had 60,000 people singing your name. Don’t lie to us Theo.)

We get fed lines like this so often that it’s a media extravaganza when someone deviates from the ‘Boring-in-order-not-to-offend-anyone-at-any-time’ playbook. It’s no wonder that journalists love going to a Jose Mourinho press conference, not because they’re in awe of him as a person or a manager (although many are – Ed), but because they know they’re not going to be force-fed the same banal soundbites that most other managers offer in order to avoid answering a difficult question.

Keep it simple, stupid

Sometimes, the simple answers are the most explanatory.

Take Arsenal’s first two league games, for example. What’s been the difference between the two? Against West Ham, we didn’t take any of our chances, and they did. Against Crystal Palace, we did take some of our chances, and they didn’t. That’s pretty much it.

Because there’s such a demand for ‘reasons’ and ‘factors’, analysis of games often just become attempts to back up previously held positions. If someone thinks that Laurent Koscielny isn’t a good decision maker, then they’ll probably argue that he should have done more to try to block Palace’s goal. Yet if he had tried to block it, and the deflection puts the ball past Petr Cech, then the argument will be made that Koscielny made the wrong decision in trying to block it.

He can’t win.

It’s not just the average fan that falls foul of this, either.

Ruud Gullit walked head-first into this elephant trap on Match of the Day, arguing that Arsenal can’t maintain control of a game through possession and playing a clip of Mesut Özil misplaying a pass to back up his point. You’d have thought that considering this was Özil’s only incomplete pass of the entire game, more would have been made of his efficiency and not Arsenal’s supposed inefficiency, but that didn’t fit Gullit’s argument, so it wasn’t brought up.

It’s this reticence to admit a lack of knowledge that creates the catch-22 situation that everyone involved in the running of a football club finds themselves in; answer a question with a cliché in order to avoid starting an argument and you get labelled as boring, answer a question in an honest fashion and a million questions arise from the answer you just gave, leading you to regret answering the question in the first place.

The ironic thing about all of this is that the question fans want answering the most, are questions that can’t be answered.

We can’t answer, for certain, if Arsenal will win the league this season, because we don’t have a time machine.

We can’t answer, for certain, if Arsenal will sign anyone before the transfer deadline ends, because during the last two summers, we had no idea, with two weeks to go, that either Mesut Özil or Danny Welbeck would be available.

The one answer we will never accept to any of our footballing questions is the only answer that sums up Arsenal right now.

Will they sign anyone?

Will they win the league?

I don’t know.

Nobody does.