Booing Eboue: Corporation, Product, and Consumer.

[AnthonyG]

I went to the Wigan game on Saturday and I was eight rows back from the touchline where Eboue departed. When his number was raised, there was a cacophony of cheers (not boos), and I was cheering along with the rest of them.

Contrary to most reports in the media, Eboue did not have an exceptionally bad game. He had a terrible last fifteen minutes in which through a mixture of wayward passing, poor positioning and apparent laziness, he jeopardised our slim margin of victory. Though I have never been a fan of Eboue, I am sure that his long-lay off from injury and lack of match fitness can explain the large majority of his failures. But the tirade of jeers hurled at Eboue as he left the field on Saturday weren’t about any of this trivial stuff. Unfortunately they were about something much more important.

I think Paul Williams' article on AM (<a class="postlink" href="http://arsenal-mania.com/articles/3106092/Sour-times.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://arsenal-mania.com/articles/31060 ... times.html</a>) does a good job in noting the fact that the reaction of the crowd can be explained not by the nature of Eboue’s performance, but by the predicament that we as a club fund ourselves in at the current juncture. Most people sitting around me at the Emirates on Saturday weren’t jeering Eboue as a means of projecting anger at the player himself, but more so, as a means of projecting frustration at the fact that his performance was jeopardizing a victory in a type of game which Arsenal have always and should always win comfortably.

Arsenal fans this season are growing in frustration, not just at the embarrassing string defeats that the team have suffered at the hands of normally lesser opposition, but also the way in which these disappointing results and poor league position are seemingly being accepted by both the players and the management at the club. Many fans predicted an outcome like this in the summer, when despite our hopes of adding to a promising squad, following departures of 3 first team midfielders, we only managed to replace 1 of them. Wenger has understandably pleaded for patience, but many fans at the Emirates seem to be growing angry. As Williams notes, Arsenal fans are used to watching players of the calibre of Pires, Vieira, Henry and Bergkamp and the successes which these players brought; they are now beginning to become fed up the present string of mediocre performances, mediocre results and in Eboue’s case, mediocre players.

Williams, suggests that higher ticket prices are bringing in a new type of fan to the Emirates, that make the type of reaction we saw on Saturday more predictable, ‘the type of fan who won't support the team when they need it, the type of fan who has come to be entertained, the type of fan, in fact, who will boo one of his "own" if he feels the player is not up to the job’. I think Williams hits on an interesting point, but I’d refine it slightly. It is wrong to suggest that the only impact that higher prices have had is the way in which they have opened the flood gates to ‘outsider’, ‘prawn-sandwich’ types. Many of what you can call insider, ‘real’ fans can still afford and still go to games. Higher prices have had an effect on them too.

Ticket prices have been going up steadily for years, changing not only how much it costs for a seat at game, but also the nature of the game itself. As going to the games gets dearer, anyone, and I mean anyone, even the hardiest of fans, even you, is going to ask themselves the inevitable question: is this really worth it? This does not mean fans are giving up on their clubs or on football. It doesn’t mean that Arsenal fans are marching outside the Emirates, burning scarves and season tickets and taking lasers to their Victoria Concordia Crescit tattoos, it just means many people are starting to understand their fandom, including the way in which they attend games, in different ways. Fans, who still see themselves as Arsenal through and through, may still go to the odd came when the opportunity arises, or when they can afford it, but will predominantly, take their custom back to the couch, with their season subscriptions to Sky Sports and Setanta. Many fans are still sticking it out on the terraces week in week out, but they too know something’s changed, even within themselves, because no matter how much you love the club, that whopping great credit card bill that arrives on your doormat in August with the proof of your season ticket and replica kit purchases, will make you think to some extent, ‘am I getting value for money?’.

Talking about football in this way is enough to make my grandfather to turn in his grave, but unfortunately it’s not just fans who are succumbing to thinking about football in cost-benefit analysis. Arsène Wenger and the Arsenal Board have a habit of talking in management-speak and financial jargon. Our publicly stated aims have imperceptibly gone from wanting to be the most successful footballing team in the UK, to wanting at have the highest revenue. We want to be ‘financially responsible’, we try to ‘balance our books’ and be ‘economically self-sustaining’. All of these new objectives are admirable of course, but it seems to me that over the last year, one factor in the equation has become a largely forgotten issue. This issue is The Product, a club’s bread and butter, which far away from the real estate development, management restructuring and marketing strategies, is actually Football; footballing success, and the marker of this success: Trophies.

If football is The Product, then the fans are The Consumers. At the Emirates on Saturday, The Consumers demonstrated their unhappiness with The Product. The Product isn’t Emmanuel Eboue, or even the one-off match day experience, it is about football in the longer term, not long-term as Arsène Wenger seems to think of it, as in the sense of a club merely existing in fifteen years time, but a club’s footballing ambitions and likelihood for footballing success. I have been going to the Arsenal regularly for about 15 years, I’m a Silver Member and I go to the Emirates about 12 times a season. My frustration on Saturday, was not because a prawn-sandwich tasted like crap, nor was it borne from an annoyance that a one-off trip, on a rotated company season ticket, to Emirates was almost ruined by some lazy play by a make-shift left-winger. My frustration originates from a growing phenomenon felt in Premier League football grounds across the country, a phenomenon that has been spawned by football clubs themselves and the framework in which they have set themselves up to be judged. This framework is one of Corporation, Product and Consumer. The fact is if you make fans pay high prices for a supposedly high quality product, then you damn well better make an effort at producing it. Unfortunately, this season Arsenal are failing to do that. We are not ripping the badges off our shirts, we are Arsenal through and through, but the fact is, we want more.