Arsenal – recherche du temps perdu

I write this knowing that some who read it will think me mad. Some will see me on the road to recovery others to a sort of bleak meaningless existence. For those of you who are ambivalent about football this little missive might give you a little insight into the mentality of a football fan – well this football fan at least.

I first went to Highbury the spiritual and erstwhile temporal home of Arsenal football club 41 years ago. It was so long ago that I remember it as being in black and white. It was a cold foggy day in 1970 and I have to admit that aged 5 it didn’t grip me. Throughout my school days I was a very infrequent visitor to ‘The home of football’ I was always a Gooner but the mania really struck me in my twenties. I found myself living on Highbury Hill slap bang opposite the away entrance.

It was a time when you could decide to go to a game on the Saturday (in my case at 2:55pm) and for £8 which wasn’t that much even twenty years ago; money on the turnstile and in you go to another world. Like all all obsessions it doesn’t take you all at once it is insidious. My then girlfriend (and now wife) came to a match and fell totally in love with it. And from then on Saturdays (for it was only on a Saturday then) became a special day; a day of rituals, of triumphs and disappointments.

In 1993 we both became season ticket holders I seem to remember them costing about £200. Post Taylor Report all Football league grounds were all seater and the days of paying on the gate were gone. Having a season ticket isn’t just about the football. You end up sitting with and eventually becoming friends with the people who sit around you. You go to away grounds with them, sometimes you find yourself meeting them in another countries. They are people who I hardly ever see other than in the context of football but whom I have known for nearly twenty years. It is a strange and lovely thing – close but disconnected.

On the 7th of May 2006 I left the seat (which I only ever sat in at half time) for the last time and went with my neighbours to the gleaming Emirates stadium. Looking back it was a watershed – a point where things took on a different, more corporate hue. Around me were still some of the familiar faces I had known over the previous 13 years but they were somehow diluted in a vast sterile commercial space. At this point a season ticket cost just under £1000 pounds. Arsenal had made a point of holding down the price of season tickets – a somewhat hollow boast given how much they had gone up in previous years. Still you can’t really blame them – football was booming. Sky and European competition had raised its profile. Everyone wanted a piece of football. In 1991 after England got knocked out by Germany in the semi finals of the World Cup playing some really decent football the collective disappointment garnished with a healthy dose of Puccini and Des Lynam made  football main stream. Nick Hornby’s book fever pitch and the first major International football tournament hosted on English soil since 1966 (euro ’98) further cemented football at the centre of English life. football was now seen as a wholesome family, inclusive activity, a world away form the troubled days of the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters. Politicians and Commercial concerns jumped on this seemingly unassailable band wagon attracting even more money into the game and with the Bosman ruling that money found it’s way into the pockets of the players and their agents. All this time we who went to the matches week in and week out were slowly being squeezed. A season ticket was the only way to see Arsenal play at Highbury demand so outstripped supply that there was a reported 10 year waiting list. People around me now found themselves having to dig deeper and deeper into their pockets every May in order to stump up the ever increasing ticket prices and inevitably some didn’t.

Whereas in the past one could boast that ‘I hadn’t missed a home game all season’ as a sign of unwavering support. These days it is as much (perhaps more) a statement about your disposable income. We sat in our seats at the last home game of the season and looked around us. If it was two thirds full I would be surprised. As the game went on, the disappointment of a season where both on and off the pitch the good guys had not won; Arsene Wenger’s faith in talented youth playing total football had proved fruitless yet again and the club, the last of the top flight clubs independently owned was now a playing thing of an american businessman, took it’s toll. For the first time I could ever remember the chant went up specifically about ticket prices: 6 per-cent you’re ‘avin a laugh… By the time the announcer ‘Thanked us for our loyal support’ and flashed the total attendance  for the season (a figure much derided)  on the jumbo screen the chants were deafening.

We left the stadium knowing that we would not renew our season tickets. We toyed with the idea of selling them on, but that would have perpetuated a merry go round that ends with players earning more in a week than most of us earn in two or three years.

Perhaps I am wrong and it will be difficult to get tickets to games but I doubt it – we are now red members (red – a colour I am more comfortable with than gold) We can’t go to all the games anyway – we have another life. It has been a long process to get to this point. Its not one thing that has pre-empted  it: The change of the club crest to garner intellectual property rights over it or more recently the change of club motto from Victoria Concordia Crescit (Union enhances victory) to the rather more bland and prosaic ‘forward’. Its not the fact that we are paying very large sums of money up front for matches that we can’t both go to. Its not the vulgar thoughtless show of wealth or a rich American owner. It is none of these things in isolation. Football is no longer the darling of the media industry and politicians. Perhaps the bubble, if not burst has at least been pricked and ticket prices will become affordable again. One things for sure they wont be getting our £2.5k this year at least and although I am sure that they will find someone prepared to take our place this time I am also sure we are not alone.

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