Arsenal are now an experimental art exhibition

After another defeat for Arsenal, the first time they have ever lost their two opening Champions League group stage games, it is time to take stock. I ask the question, and I ask it bravely, intelligently and sensitively: what is going on at Arsenal, and why?

Arsenal’s decade of high art

People say that Arsene Wenger has been at Arsenal for too long. They point to the decade of consistent failure, failure that is so profound that Wenger, the players and the fans are forced to pretend that winning the FA Cup remains a serious trophy to win. It got so bad and so desperate that they even took part in this charade in two successive years.

Wenger and Arsenal’s work has been mistaken. Arsenal are no longer pursuing football as a means of scoring more goals than the opposition - at least as a primary aim - but more to perfect another sport. The key for Wenger is, as he has said before, everyone believes they have the prettiest wife at home. That’s why Wenger dropped Petr Cech. If football to him was still about winning, then he wouldn’t have played David Ospina. No, this was about having a carefully curated art installation instead of a successful football team.

After all, he has won his tournaments, his Premier Leagues and proven that he can create some of the best sides in the history of the competition. He no longer needs to do that. Instead, he is experimenting with the emotions of the crowd. Expectation, hubris and disappointment, always in that order. Wenger, it clear clear, is saying to the crowd in North London that he wants to take these aesthetes - on and off the pitch - through the highest amount of human emotion in an hour and a half, with an interval to sell drinks, and to show them the futility of man.

There are those who will disagree. Who will say that Wenger’s construction of the Emirates is a money-making legacy that will leave Arsenal secure into the days when the financial goodies on offer from television are no longer the greatest sources of income for a club. They will say that with Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil, and Petr Cech now, he has actually laid the foundation for his next great side. That when he identifies a central defender and defensive midfielder, he will undoubtedly sign them and take Arsenal on yet another grand tour of triumph.

These are spectators and supporters who refuse to believe that Arsenal are no longer a traditional, working football club. They think that things are as they have always been under Wenger, always a year or two at most from being by far the greatest team that the world has ever seen. It is sweet, naive and charming, as much as it is perplexing and unfounded. To them, I would say, if Arsenal are not some grand art exhibition dedicated to futility, pointlessness and decay in football, then why do they play Olivier Giroud or Theo Walcott up front?

Platini’s selflessness

Much has been said about Michel Platini in this last week, ever since it became clear that Platini, in his role as a football adviser to Sepp Blatter many years, was paid more than a million pounds for his work, and waited the best part of a decade before he claimed his payment for the work. People have made accusations of venality and corruption, and claimed that he should never be able to run for FIFA president. He is, we are told, precisely what the organisation needs to expunge from their walls.

This is nothing but Anglo-centric prejudice, and it is obvious. First, Platini acted entirely altruistically in the last few years in his attempts to broaden the reach of football. Off his own back, he supported the Qatar World Cup Football bid. He could have supported his fellow European bids, but he knew that the moral thing to do would be to bring football’s message of peace and friendship to Qatar.

Others were outraged that Platini could do such a selfless thing, that he wouldn’t put UEFA countries first. They could not grasp that this is a generous man. Perhaps they would have expected it had they known about his actions over this payment.

He could have demanded this money now - a sizeable sum, but he deserves it such is the breadth of his knowledge and dignity of his contributions - but he knew that FIFA is a money where every penny counts. He wanted to make sure that this cash-strapped organisation needed financial assistance wherever possible, and therefore waited years and years and years, with no ulterior motive, to receive his payment. Not many of us will say it, so I will.

Michel, thank you.