It’s not an easy time to be an Arsenal fan.
Not only are the team’s chances of finishing in the top four for the second season running looking worse and worse, Wenger’s men are playing appallingly.
The calls for Arsene Wenger, the man who’s seen Arsenal through 22 years of highs and lows, to resign have never been louder and the majority of it is coming from the fans. The same fans that have loved him dearly for two decades.
With the state of the club in such disarray, you can kind of understand why some fans have taken a step back from football.
Honestly, even though I still follow and support the team, if my job wasn’t to write about Arsenal, I probably would have too.
Watching defeat after defeat can get pretty depressing and if it’s having a negative effect on your life, it’s only sensible to take a step back.
However, the vast majority of Gooners are still hanging in there, waiting for times to change.
Here are the five types of Arsenal fan left in 2018:
Wenger in… still
Wenger has brought Arsenal back from the brink of crisis countless times during his reign. Admittedly, these times have mostly been during the later years.
There was the time when Spurs somehow managed to get beaten 5-1 by Newcastle on the final day of the season, allowing Arsenal to take second in the Premier League table despite being awful that term.
There have been numerous nightmare starts to the campaign, which Wenger has always managed to motivate his team to bounce back from.
In 2011/12, Arsenal were forced to play a severely weakened starting XI against Manchester United at Old Trafford due to injuries and they lost 8-2 – a scoreline that still haunts fans to this day. Yet, Wenger still managed to raise Arsenal up the third in the Premier League table come May.
Until last season, no matter what blips Arsenal encountered, they would always have that Champions League spot. Even if they really had to work for it.
Therefore, you can sort of understand the fans who still believe that Wenger is the right man for the job and the right man to turn this horror show of a season back around.
They want Wenger to stay at Arsenal and see out his contract because he’s turned it around before – why can’t he do it again?
My opinion is that, since last season, when Arsenal failed to finish in the top four for the first time in two decades, something changed. The players stopped performing for Wenger and there was no progress on the pitch.
Still, there are fans who still think Wenger knows best.
Next up, the Wenger out Veterans
Wenger out veterans
Although most Arsenal fans probably want Wenger to resign at this moment in time, the Wenger Out Brigade has been an actual thing for years.
Ever since the team stopped truly competing for the title, there has been a vocal section of the fan base who believe it’s been time for change for a long time and that the Frenchman is out of touch with modern football.
Even after winning three FA Cups in four years and pushing aside injury problems, these fans have been bringing signs to matches long before last season.
There have been marches, protests, chants and banners for so long that you can probably understand why Wenger finds it pretty easy to brush them off now.
They may be louder but he’s had to deal with so much hate from his own fans over the last 10 years that I imagine it’s become easy to block out. It’s all just white noise to him now.
There’s a smaller section of this fan base that appears to mistake his silence for arrogance, which only makes them angrier. Abuse gets hurled, people spit venom on YouTube and a toxic atmosphere is cultivated.
Unfortunately, these people are the loudest, which is why the media give them a voice.
They forget that what I imagine to be the vast majority of the Arsenal fan base do want Wenger to stand down but aren’t involved in all this mud-slinging. They just want what’s best for their club. And, unfortunately, it looks like a change of manager is the only solution.
Next up, the fans who will always see the silver lining
Seeing the silver lining
Whether you call them delusional or just ‘positive’ there are still fans out there that, while they acknowledge that Wenger probably does need to leave, believe things aren’t THAT bad.
It’s not the end of the season yet. Arsenal are still mathematically able to finish in the top four if there’s a massive screw up above them. Perhaps Chelsea, Spurs or Manchester United will hit the wall.
Arsenal may be out of the FA Cup and may have been torn apart by Manchester City in the League Cup final but they’re still in the Europa League.
If Wenger manages to win the Europa League, after getting Mesut Ozil to sign a new deal and securing the signature of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in January, we could almost view it as a good season!
Last term we won the FA Cup against Chelsea – the Premiership champions. Three FA Cups in four years is GOOD!
Obviously, I’m not in this camp. All I have to do is watch Arsenal play and there’s no way I can fool myself into thinking we can finish in the top four.
Sure, we are still in the Europa League but we’re facing AC Milan, who have been looking much better lately after a shaky start to their own Serie A season. I’m fully prepared to get knocked out by them.
I don’t want to judge the way I feel about my team right now on events that may or may not come to pass. What’s important is that, at the moment, we look awful and something, regardless of whether Arsenal win the Europa League or not, still needs to change going forward.
Maybe certain fans force themselves to mainly see the positive because the negative is so depressing.
Next up, woe is me
Basically Eeyore
Then, there’s the opposition end of the scale. The fans who seem to believe that Arsenal are about to get relegated.
If you hear them talk, you’d think Wenger had gone round their house in the middle of the night and taken a dump in all their cereal boxes.
The situation at the club is bad, I’m not going to try and put a spin on that, but it’s not so bad you need to start setting fire to your shirt or shouting down a camera lens.
Times will change. The worst case scenario is that Wenger will see out his contract, which runs out in 2019. There’s no avoiding that this is a possibility. But even if he doesn’t, he almost certainly won’t continue past then.
Change is coming and it might get even worse before it gets better – look at Manchester United. Just because Arsenal have built a new team behind the scenes doesn’t mean to say we’ve completely side-stepped the between-manager-slump.
It sucks but Arsenal are somehow still in the top six, despite how terribly they’ve been playing, and they’ve got the bones of a good squad there. With the right coach, they could be brilliant.
Ozil’s pledged his future to Arsenal, the club’s injury problems are lessening, and while it’s hard to see the horizon at the moment, it’s still there.
It’s easy to let football and the state your club is in get to you, especially when it was something you used to look forward to before, but perhaps we should be embracing this hardship.
We’ve been pretty luck since Wenger became manager. Perhaps we were due our own difficult period.
Next up, dead inside a.k.a me
Dead inside a.k.a. me
This is probably the camp I fall into and it’s the most dangerous one. Apathy kills football clubs, not anger. At least with anger, the fans still care. They may still turn up to the games and, even if they’re hurling abuse at the players and getting into punch-ups, they’re still paying money to be at the game. They’re still a bum on a seat.
Apathetic fans don’t care. They don’t really care about going to games anymore, not because they don’t want to watch their team get thrashed for the umpteenth time this season, but because they have better things to do and better ways to spend their hard-earned money.
If the club, manager, players and board don’t care enough to make a change, why should we care enough to take time out of our lives to watch the same match play out again and again?
I’ve found myself no longer wincing when Arsenal concede goals. I don’t really care when we lose. I’m used to it and usually expecting it, no matter how the lads are playing, because it’s happened so many times.
It’s like the footballing equivalent of depression – you’re not constantly upset, angry or in turmoil, you just feel numb, disconnected and dead inside.
Likewise, I don’t care when we score a goal. I hardly ever celebrate when Arsenal find the back of the net now. Usually because we’re already losing, I have no faith that we’ll hold onto a lead or we’ll still lose the next game, no matter how this one pans out.
I have no trust in Wenger anymore, who I used to defend to just about anybody who would listen, and even watching my favourite player, Ozil, doesn’t excite me now.
Apathy is the place football clubs go to die.