Colin Sheridan: Dear Arsenal, don't kid yourself second is anywhere

POINTS DROPPED: Arsenal's Bukayo Saka reacts after the Premier League draw against Southampton at the Emirates Stadium, London. Pic: John Walton/PA Wire

Dear Arsenal Football Club, 

I hope this finds you well. The purpose of this letter is to impress upon you the importance of the next few days for your club - not just as a team - but as an idea. A sporting organism. A sociological project. I am writing this, not as a fan, but as a friend, an ally who has tested and tasted much of what threatens to befall you now. 

At the time of writing, you sit five points clear at the summit of the Premier League, which is quite remarkable given you’ve somehow conspired to draw your last three games, each tie more absurd than the one before. One of those draws - against Liverpool, was forgivable, but the other two were catastrophically careless. 

I know you know all of this, but it’s important to say the quiet part out loud. You are in danger of blowing up, like Elon Musk's billion-dollar rocket, and if you do, like Musk, I know you will claim that it was worth it. That you’ve learned a lot from the explosion. that those eight seconds you were spacebound were the greatest of your life. Don’t do this. People will be nice and patronise you and say “awwwww”, but they won’t mean it. They’ll look at the facts and they’ll come to the conclusion that you blew it, and honestly, they’d be right.

Blowing it won’t eradicate all the good you did, but it won’t sustain that good, either.

The Premier League is not a kibbutz. If it were a voluntary society in which people live in accordance with a specific social contract, based on egalitarian and communal principles in a social and economic framework, you, Arsenal, would be a fairly commendable example of how to do things right. Not quite Brighton, but certainly not Chelsea. 

After some difficult years, you put trust in a young idealistic manager, a principled man with an identifiable and admirable ethos. You invested in youth. You recruited well. You cut off the toxic fat - regardless of the significant cost - and made hard choices in lieu of quick fixes. This season has been a justification of that process. But, please don’t add in the “regardless of what happens” bit. That's what worried parents say to anxious kids the night before they get their leaving cert results.

You are not worried parents. You’re a Premier League club, and the league is not a kibbutz. It’s Wall Street reimagined on a football pitch. If you lose, your peers won’t congratulate you on your progress, instead they’ll come in the middle of the night and strip you of your assets.

First to leave will be your captain, Martin Ødegaard. He won’t go straight away, and ask him today he’ll likely tell you he won’t go at all, but go he will. Back to Madrid, most likely. As you hit a sophomore slump next season, languishing on the edge of the top four, Martin will start thinking about the delicious squid sandwich he had just off the Plaza Santa Ana, and how beautiful and easy life was there, compared to London. His form will dip, his agent will go to work, and before too long Toni Kroos will be out to grass and Ødegaard will be wearing the number 8 of Los Blancos. 

Bukayo Saka will be next, off to Man City, where he’ll be promised appropriate management of his outrageous playing load, instead of the flogging he gets from you, Arsenal, where he’s expected to play every single game. Granit Xhaka likely has one eye on Istanbul, Besiktas maybe. An easier way of life and the guarantee of decent baklava more tempting than another relentless season in England.

The point I’m trying to make, Arsenal, is that if you think finishing second from the position you were in - are still in - is some guarantee for future success, you’re kidding yourself. If you are going to push the line “we would’ve taken this at the start of the season” you’re doubly wrong. That’s like working up to the million-dollar question, botching it, before walking away with 50k, saying, well, it's 50k more than I came in with!

Cesc Fàbregas never won a Premier League with you, and neither did Robin van Persie.

Chelsea are being managed by a cartoon character and Spurs are being managed by a kamikaze chairman. Both dynamics will change over the summer. Despite your on-field brilliance to date, Man City are only catching you up because it took them a month to figure out how to use their Norwegian Weapon of Mass Destruction. This particularly bespoke set of circumstances are unlikely to ever repeat themselves.

When I was 16, Mayo got to an All-Ireland, and gloriously lost. The following year they got to another, and lost again. I thought it was going to be that way forever. Long, glorious summers of sports reporters and camera crews hanging around small Mayo villages like mine. That we had to lose one (or two, or three) to win one. Bullshit. Better teams came and went. So did the reporters. I don’t need to tell you, we never won. And we are still waiting.

This is it. Noli Timere. Don't be afraid. Be the hero in your own story. Your time is now.

Yours etc.

Angel City the real Hollywood feelgood story

Celebrity ownership of football clubs may have scaled its Everest with Wrexham AFC’s promotion back to the English Football League after a 15-year absence.

Hollywood owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the club in 2020 for just £2m, as Wrexham were at the lowest point in their 150-year history. A Disney+ documentary conspicuously accompanied the pair as they set about familiarising themselves with “soccer” and the idiosyncrasies of life in Northeastern Wales.

Notwithstanding an investment none of their competitors could match (likely between £10-15million), and recruiting players far too good for the league they dropped down to play in, it’s a story worthy of a movie in which Reynolds and McElhenney might star.

There may be a more interesting A-Lister ownership story, however, one which is less about the promotion of one team, and more about the evolution of an entire sport.

Around the same time Reynolds and McElhenney were teasing out a bid for Wrexham, Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman was putting together a majority female ownership group for an expansion team in the Women's MLS. Today, Angel City has an average attendance of a little over 19,000 for the 2022 season. 

While Portman attracts the headlines, the club deliberately has an all-female top table of chief executive, general manager and head coach. “Our dream is to make women’s soccer as valued as male soccer is throughout the world,” Portman explained at the time of the team's creation, but more pointedly, she highlighted the lack of pensions and comparable benefits for players as major reasons for her involvement. 

There is, of course, a docuseries about it all upcoming on HBO, but, while the Wrexham "fairytale” is the big-budget blockbuster that will put bums on seats, Angel City may be the sleeper hit that endures.

IRFU on the hook for women's woes

With the Ireland women's rugby team suffering another heavy loss in this year's Women's Six Nations to England on Saturday, pressure should justifiably mount on the IRFU and its apparent inability to properly fund, resource and support a squad of supposed semi-professionals. 

While the international men's game has never enjoyed such riches in terms of investment and acclaim, the women's game has lurched from one embarrassing episode to the next, both on and off the field. Part of the problem may well be the IRFU's overreach in “promoting” the women's game a decade ago - arguably to the point of overexposure - without backing it up with anything close to a sustainable strategic plan. Right now, everybody is losing, and something's gotta give.

Sligo a good news story

A good week for Sligo football, who backed up their dramatic U-20s victory over Galway to win a second successive Connacht title, with an unsympathetic ending of New York's All-Ireland dream in Markievicz Park on Saturday. Throw Summerhill College’s march in this year's Hogan Cup into the mix, and you have a county that is bearing the fruit of a coherent underage blueprint complementing a potential golden generation of talent. It’s good news for Gaelic Football, and an example for other counties on how to do their business.