Mikel Arteta was sitting in the Emirates Stadium away dugout when he realised the scale of the task that awaited him. It was December 2019, and although he was still nominally the assistant manager of Manchester City, cruising to a 3-0 victory against Arsenal, thoughts were naturally beginning to turn towards the project he had secretly decided to take on. And – to put it mildly – he was alarmed.
This wasn’t simply a case of how bad Arsenal were on the pitch. Performance is a fickle thing. There are known variables, measurable objectives. Performance you can fix. But the energy in the stadium, the disgruntlement, the disconnect between the players on the pitch and the fans in the stands: as Arteta contemplated his first job in management, this was the challenge that worried him the most.
And for all the focus on Arteta’s attention to detail, the fixation on things such as set pieces and defensive spacing, at root he is a vibes coach: someone who thinks deeply about the relationship between the performers and their paying public, the synergy and the magic they can conjure together, the ingredients that create them. “Energy is everything, in life and in football,” he has said.
It’s fair to assume, then, that as Arsenal trooped from the pitch at half-time during their FA Cup game against Manchester United on Sunday, Arteta will not have been oblivious to the absence of warmth. To describe the Emirates as quiet barely does it justice: this was a kind of anti-noise, not so much anger or sadness as tautness, a pregnant vacuum, a stadium basically devoid of stimulus, drained of feeling. And as Arsenal threaten to stumble in pursuit of the league title that would define this group of players, this is becoming an increasing problem.
Earlier in the week, there was the sight of fans leaving early during the Carabao Cup semi-final against Newcastle, leaving banks of empty red seats with more than 100 minutes of the tie still to play. And tonally something seems to have shifted since the remarkable title-challenging season of 2022-23, when this stadium hummed and heaved with insurgent, life-affirming noise. What happened to that energy? Where did it go? And with a first home north London derby for 16 months on the horizon, and the biggest prizes still to be won, how do Arsenal get it back?
It is no coincidence that Arteta has spoken multiple times this season about the need for Arsenal’s fans to rally around them. He did so again before the visit of Tottenham on Wednesday night. “This is something that is in our hands,” he said. “Let’s create the best atmosphere that we have played [in] at the Emirates – that’s our objective. That’s something we control. This is something that is in our hands. So let’s do it.”
But of course incanting a great atmosphere and manifesting a great atmosphere are two different things. And as with pretty much everything at Arsenal these days, this is an issue without a simple cause and effect. No one thing is to blame here. This is a fanbase divided along multiple planes: the hardcore and the casual, the old and the young, the privileged and the struggling, the Arteta In and Arteta In, But For Heaven’s Sake Pull Your Finger Out A Bit.
In part, this in itself is the problem. The stirring, stunning singularity of purpose that defined 2022-23 Arsenal always felt like a particular brew of circumstances: an unexpected title challenge, a thrilling team full of young attacking potential, a certain bottled-up post-pandemic hedonism and the consequent demographic shift, a fanbase skewing younger and less jaded. It was never the sort of energy that could be sustained over multiple seasons, multiple Champions League campaigns, multiple visions of what Arsenal should realistically be.
Expectations are not the only thing that have risen. Arsenal’s lowest-priced season ticket is £1,073, a 16% rise in the past two seasons. The cheapest season ticket at the Emirates is now pricier than the most expensive at Old Trafford. And while this is clearly a function of increased demand, after the slump of late-Wenger and pandemic years, Arsenal are learning the hard way that decisions on access and ticketing have consequences that go well beyond the bottom line.
Last season, in response to surging demand, Arsenal introduced a ballot system to allocate tickets to members and allow a broader cross-section of fans to attend games. Almost overnight, silver-tier members who had previously counted on attending 10-15 games a season were struggling to get to more than a handful. It felt as if Arsenal were disenfranchising some of their most loyal supporters in order to squeeze in as many new casuals as possible.
In the meantime, supporters’ clubs have had their allocations cut and more stringent restrictions applied to tickets. The Ashburton Army ultra group’s ticket allocation was cut last year, and they were not given any tickets for the United game on Sunday. This has proved unpopular among many portions of the fanbase who appreciate the atmosphere they create, but welcomed by others uneasy at some of the group’s more unsavoury elements, which have in the past included antisemitic WhatsApp posts and tragedy chanting.
The wider context is that at a point when Arteta is demanding unity among the fanbase, speaking about the Emirates crowd as if it were an army to be mobilised, it is more divided, contested, in flux, than at any point since the early years of his tenure. Perhaps this has contributed to the weird atmosphere at times this season, players such as Martin Ødegaard and Declan Rice visibly demanding more noise, and only occasionally getting it. The football has often been less than thrilling. And so, is it the crowd’s job to raise the levels on the pitch, or the team’s job to raise the levels in the stands?
The answer, of course, is both. And as Arteta knew from the moment he sat in that away dugout more than five years ago, the synergy of team and tribune is more art than science. It is a mood, a vibe, a fragile and precious energy, hard to build and easy to destroy. More than a local derby, more than a misfiring attack, more even than a title challenge, his task is to recover it.
