Why Arsenal provokes such intense hatred in English football

A few years ago, American scientists bred a strain of “gene-edited” hamsters with the chemical that causes anger removed, presumably to achieve the dream of a more docile hamster.

Unfortunately, the opposite happened. What the scientists created was a race of hyper-angry hamsters, described glibly in the media as Mutant Rage Monsters. But science is nuanced. We should not put angry hamsters in a box, even when literally putting them in a box. Longer studies showed varied results: sarcastic hamsters, hamsters that hold grudges, hamsters that retreat into silence on long car journeys, and a subset of passive-aggressive hamsters who are, seriously, just fine with this.

Ultimately, the scientists concluded that anger is a highly complex response requiring broader study, and perhaps they should stop messing with rage-hamsters and take a job putting lipstick on moles. They are clearly right about rage. It is a strange, hydra-headed thing with hard-to-discern sources. At this point, Arsenal have already entered the room, the most reliable source of rage in English football right now.

Why do people hate Arsenal so much? It is a question worth asking. The league title could be decided on Tuesday. Why will the journey to this point be defined by dismay and resentment? Why, when it comes to Arsenal, do we all turn into rage-hamsters clawing at the bars?

The obvious starting point is: do people actually hate Arsenal? The answer is yes. A recent social-media study concluded Arsenal’s fans are the most disliked in the Premier League. Even Mikel Arteta drives people into a state of rage, from his unremarkable control-based tactics to his invariably bland public statements and his frenetic touchline appearances in a black zippy coat and sober gray slacks, like a traveling hitman on a fishing trip.

Last week, a post-match ESPN panel went viral after the host suggested other Champions League coaches might want to literally punch Arteta in the face, while panelists nodded along as if this were an entirely reasonable conclusion deserving a deep-dive around the lighted tactics table.

Among rival fans, the idea has long been fixed that Arsenal are the bad guys. Neutrals should want Manchester City to win the title and Paris Saint-Germain the Champions League final because this would be purer, lovelier, better for football. It is an interesting point of view, one that fully embraces the performative aspects of sport, where beauty, aesthetics, and the halo effect overwhelm everything else. PSG may be a propaganda project, destroyer of leagues, dependent on $2 billion in loose change and the will to power of a dictator state. But yeah, Désiré Doué is very cool. So good.

In reality, Arsenal is an objectively good elite-football entity. If we must have hyper-rich clubs, this is the model of how to do it: generate your own revenue, do not bend financial rules, do not run debts funded by shady interests. And yes, the ground is literally called the Emirates. Also, no thanks, I do not want to go Rwanda. But within the limits of a grubby and compromised world, this is perhaps as close as we will get to a functional mega-club.

Arsenal are also a counterpoint to the other great threat to football: the Chelsea society-model with its destruction of sporting culture and deeply stupid talent-clearing-house methods. This is at least a pure football project: produce your own players, field five Englishmen in a Champions League semi-final, give a young manager five years to build a team. Yet Arsenal are more likely to be held up as a model of all that is bad. It is worth trying to understand why. The simplest explanation is that this is a reasonable response to the way they play, which can be boring and fussy to watch, based on team defense and margins at set pieces.

There is a legitimate sense that football, and indeed life, is becoming overmapped, broken down into data-driven phases like the Vorticist view of nature; organic shapes transformed into units of human control, with Arsenal an ultimate expression of this. But there is also something paradoxically traditionalist in grinding out victory, in saying this is the level of defense you will need to beat. It should be difficult. If PSG do end up eviscerating the best defense in Europe with their speed and targeted dribbling, it will be hard-earned, ennobled by the strength of their opponents.

Plus, Arsenal are not cheating by playing like this. They have simply adapted better than others to the current permissiveness on certain kinds of contact at set pieces, in the same way Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal team reacted to the 1925 change of the offside law. The current rules will change again; everyone will have to readapt. For now, this is just good coaching, finding a way to top the league with a deeply basic center-forward and a very good defense.

But then Arteta is also a problem. Why do people feel enraged by him? Most obviously, this is a response to the way he leaps about on the TV feed, too close to the pitch, getting in the way of throw-ins, thrusting himself into the spectacle. But again, he is mainly yelling at his own players, not berating officials or doing the Diego Simeone conduct-the-spectacle thing. This is just a very intense man desperately trying to find an edge in his own team. Who is also, lest we forget, competing against people who stand accused of breaking the rules in pursuit of decisive points. Is it really the behavior of a mega-villain?

The other thing about Arteta: he is not cool. There is a deep awkwardness in his attempts to manage the vibe, to control and commodify being a bunch of relaxed, fun guys who are really up for it. Arteta has talked about being on fire and getting on the fun boat, which still conjures an image of a really terrible booze cruise with a bunch of corporate surveyors. He forced a dog to support Arsenal. He has somehow managed to make Pep Guardiola look relaxed and neutral, strolling around in his country green slacks like a dad at a sports day. But is this grounds for rage?

A little desperately, you look for more structural reasons. Is hating Arsenal something to do with London, because people do also hate London? Is this a Brexit thing? Arsenal are the most urbane, EU-ish, London-centered club. Do people hate them because of economic entitlement, because they are middle-class adjacent and a little smug, because they seem both tortured and triumphalist? If so, why do other London fans also hate them, although everyone also hates the other big London clubs for similarly grandiose, bodge-job, money-falling-out-of-their-ears reasons?

Or maybe it is not really rage at all but boredom at the spectacle, irritation at the capering man and the touchier parts of the online fandom. Either way, the next few days promise an outcome. If Arsenal cannot beat a relegated Burnley and a Crystal Palace team playing in wayfarers and tie-dyed trousers, they do not really deserve to win the league anyway. But there is still the prospect that the season is building to the promised mega-choke, hamster-backflips, hamster-joy, an all-you-can-eat schadenfreude buffet.

In the end, it is hard to avoid the simplest conclusion: people just like hating things now. The content space must be filled. Our hive-mind digital network, the voices in our ears, are geared to locate, reward, and amplify rage. A recent study of ocean life revealed that even whales are now required to shout underwater, so loud is the ambient noise from man-made activity. This is us. We are the hamsters. We are the rage-shouting whales. All we need is a muster point, a target, a place for the chemicals to go.