I have a problem.
I know what a successful club looks like. The trophies, the glory, the squad full of killers capable of blowing you away 7-0 or grinding out the jammiest three points. I’ve seen it, and it refuses to move me. The tyrannical giant clubs such as your Man Citys and Bayerns impress me in a clinical way. I intellectually understand that what they do is amazing, borderline superhuman, but there is nothing that inspires genuine emotion in me.
My soul carries the burden of this attraction to a specific type of club. Their perception is fractured, their promise is endless but their output is frustratingly small. While there is so much to love, their achievements never line up with the accepted definition of success. These are clubs defined by the word ‘almost.’
Arsenal Always Try To Walk It In
Being an Arsenal fan can feel like being put under some kind of conditioning experiment. How much can we build and destroy this man’s spirit before his perception of football is completely broken? It took 12 years of being on this earth and about 5 years of being aware of what football actually was. I sat in front of the 2010 World Cup a pre-teen already littered with grey hairs painted on me by the likes of Denilson and Alex Song, and I fell in love with my first non-Arsenal side – the Dutch runners up.