#AgainstModernFootball - plane banners

At some point last week a group of Arsenal fans sat down with a stack of cash in front of them and pondered what to do with it. They could have donated it to charity. It could have gone to a food bank. Cancer research certainly could have used such a generous sum. The money, however, was spent on something they deemed to be more pressing – a plane dragging a banner that read ‘No contract. #WengerOut.’

Arsene Wenger has been the subject of fan protests for years, but Saturday’s away game at West Brom was something else. Not one, but two, banners were flown over the Hawthorns, one demanding his exit and another imploring supporters to ‘#TrustAW.’ One wonders what Gary Neville thought of the whole episode, given that he’d previously thought Arsenal Fan TV was embarrassing enough. This was another level on the cringe scale.

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Of course, most Gooners were horrified by what they saw in the West Midlands sky at the weekend. The decent, non-hysterical Arsenal fans will now frequently look to the skies and ask themselves whether it’s a bird of a plane, praying with every fibre of their being that is is a bird. The debate over Wenger’s future was already surreal, but it is now nothing but a pantomime.

The flying of banners over stadiums has become a bizarre epidemic in football. Any self-respecting fan movement now includes some sort of aerial display. Look at the banner flown over Old Trafford proclaiming then Manchester United manager David Moyes to be the ‘wrong one.’ In hindsight, they had a point.

Brendan Rodgers was also subject to the dreaded fly-over during his time as Liverpool manager. His banner even went as far as to suggest who should replace him, reading “Rodgers out, Rafa In.” It remains unconfirmed whether Rafa Benitez paid for the banner himself, with the demonstration visible from the Spaniard’s home in the Wirral. He might even have had the binoculars out.

Hearts fans paid for a banner demanding the departure of their manager Robbie Neilson last season, with Everton chairman Bill Kenwright also suffering the indignity of an overhead protest over his lack of investment in the club. Man Utd fans even hired a plane to fly a banner over Anfield taunting Steven Gerrard over his lack of league titles. Couldn’t they have done that with a chant or a social media hashtag?

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The plane banner industry is enjoying a resurgence thanks to the whims of Premier League football fans. Pilots who used to fly banners advertising two for one cocktails over Mediterranean beach resorts are now relocating to North London and the Northwest of England. There’s more business for them there, especially between now and the end of the season. If the past decade was the banter era, this is the banner era.

The worrying thing for Wenger is that in many of the previous case the fans whose money paid for the flying of a banner eventually got their way. Moyes and Rodgers both lost their jobs not long after their respective fly-overs, with Neilson ultimately leaving Hearts as well (although he admittedly left for another position as manager of MK Dons).

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And so the banner flown over the Hawthorns demanding Wenger’s exit, and the one demanding that he stay, are unlikely to be the last aerial displays witnessed in the Premier League. Maybe the subject of disgruntlement will get more whimsical. Before too long fans could be using fly-overs to complain about a substitution, or the price of the food and drink on offer. If plane banners can force the exit of Moyes and Rodgers, who’s to say it can’t also lower the price of a half time pie?