There was a dream that was sports blogging for impact, and it wasn’t built in a day

Not everything should be a rocketship

Mikel Arteta was appointed Arsenal manager in 2019. Before Covid. Before Biden was too old. Before I’d heard of effective altruism, or thought about the tradeoff between a Bayesian approach to impact-maximizing career choices and the organizational stability required to take our best shot at solving the world’s most pressing problems.

A disciple of Pep Guardiola, the preeminent soccerball visionary of our era, Arteta arrived with a short CV and Big Ideas. His first season, Arsenal finished 8th in the Premier League, and despite the reservoir of goodwill earned in his former incarnation as player and captain, some fans already wanted him out. Second season, 8th again, he and his patrons mocked as frauds. The owners continued to trust The Process - it would take time to replace a squad ageing ungracefully with younger players more suited to Mikel’s methods, time to coach them into the cohesive unit he believed they could be, more time still to iterate his methods in response to real-world feedback - but third season and it’s progress only so far as 5th, wrong side of the Top Four rubicon, yet another failure to qualify for the lucrative and prestigious Champions League. Surely three strikes and he’s out, so much time and potential already wasted, a head has to roll.

Then it starts to happen, tangible progress anyone can see: the 2022/23 season, the boys, still young, still improving, becoming men together, turning Mikel’s weirdo tactics into beautiful performances and a season-long tilt at the title. They come second, to Pep, Manchester City, and the wealth of a petrostate, and are suddenly one of the best handful of teams in the world. Naysayers, though, still say results are all that matter and Mikel’s admirers are mistaking the beguiling patterns of au fait positional play for what it takes to win.

Season’s end 2023/24, Arsenal atop the table: the xG table. Expected goals, like the rest of analytics, are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent.^[1] Those untalented nerds (and, increasingly, after more than a decade of arguing about it on the Internet, everyone else) are liable to go around saying heretical stuff. Like, on the basis of probabilistically modeling the quality of goal-scoring chances teams create and concede and thereby being more predictive of future results than actual goals or points are, xG and the xG table are better proxies for underlying team quality than the table table.^[2] The table table in which Arsenal finished second, again, to Pep City, by two measly points, because them’s the bounces. And again, in an injury-plagued 2024/25 season, this time to Liverpool, because them’s the breaks.^[3] Second three times in a row capped by failing to capitalize on a rare down year for Pep City has even the staunchest Process truthers expecting better.

The 2025/26 season of whose end we’re several months shy is Mikel’s 7th in charge.^[4] Lo and behold, Arsenal are, according to where the money and the mana is, the favourites to win the Premier League, and the Champions League (and the famous FA Cup, and the infamous Carabao Cup). There’s a 2-in-3 chance they win the Premier League, a 1-in-5 chance they win the Champions League, and a 3-in-4 chance they win at least one of them. There’s a 2% chance they win an unprecedented quadruple.^[5] Soccerball is a funny old game though, and being, as far as anyone can tell, the best team in the world still isn’t enough to insulate them against there being a 9% chance they win nothing at all.

Real ones would never

Am I, a critic, a real Arsenal fan?

I don’t sing that they’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen when they’re in the process of finishing eighth in the league for the second successive season. Or insist they’re the best team in the league when the underlying numbers say they’re probably not, even when they’re top of the table table. Or believe Mikel Arteta is a God or Arsene Wenger is a fraud, or that Arteta is a fraud or Wenger is a God.

I don’t support them because my dad does (he doesn’t). Or go to many games. Or stand up because I hate Tottenham. I’m not comfortable saying we when I refer to the team or the Club. Or wearing the shirt any time other than when I’m going to a game or playing 5-a-side. I’m not friends only with Arsenal fans, or struggling to commune with members of my family who are Liverpool fans.

I don’t declare myself a fan in job interviews. I don’t deny it in interviews either. I’m not a doomer, a veg*n, a consequentialist, or a utilitarian (strict, naive, or otherwise). I don’t believe the Club is a unitary monolith, or that the Club has personhood (corporate, or otherwise). Or that every Arsenal fan on the Internet speaks for me.

I do sometimes criticize the Club, the team and the manager on the Internet. I regularly argue with, and despair about, other Arsenal fans on the Internet and irl. I have a different definition of Arsenal fandom than lots of others who think of themselves that way, without letting that stop me from thinking of myself that way.

I do prefer it when they win. I remember being there for Aaron Ramsey’s extra time winner in the 2014 FA Cup final, after having been 2-0 down within the first 10 minutes, after having been big favourites, after having not won a trophy for 9 years, as one of the most euphoric moments of my life. And I expect I’ll never feel the same way about it as I did before my prefrontal cortex got a slightly better grip on the wheel. I have an instant cross-cultural connection with anyone who calls Aaron Ramsey Rambo, let alone Welsh Jesus. I enjoy going to Arsenal fan pubs in American cities (especially if I'm the only person there who's been to the house that Arsene built in North London^[6]). I’m in a group chat, currently called Arteta’s Army, with only the Arsenal-supporting members of my family. And I hope my daughter makes up her own mind correctly to support Arsenal, not Aston Villa like her mother.

I do sing the Giroud song (to the tune of Hey Jude). And I believe that we’re unfortunate enough to be in the bad timeline, because if you played back the Banter Era (c. 2006-2013), the Late Wenger years (c. 2013-2018), and Mikel’s first half-dozen 10,000 times, Arsenal would win a lot more than zero Premier League titles.^[7]

When people ask me who I support, I say Arsenal, the mighty Gunners, without dissembling.

When people ask me whether I’m glad my uncle got me into all this (by being willing to buy 7-year-old me a football shirt when, despite or because of my parents’ abject refusal, it was all I wanted, on the one condition that it was an Arsenal shirt), I say yes, praise be to Welsh Jesus and life’s rich tapestry.

When people ask me whether I identify as an Arsenal fan, I might say something half-a-dozen-books-about-Buddhism-baked about holding the things we call identities lightly in light of there surely being no fixed self for myself to identify with. And then when pressed on whether, during the preponderance of my life in which I am not in fact enlightened, and during which words having colloquial meanings that form the basis of cultural progress is not something to be sniffed at, Arsenal fandom is part of my identity, I say yes, obviously yes, why are we even wasting time talking about this?

Afterward

Rocketship is adapted from a staff memo I wrote in 2023 - two second-place finishes ago for Arsenal, and one major momentum shift ago for CEA - about staying the course and building things that last. Real ones is a recent by-product of a Fever Pitch dream about intergenerational identity-sharing. Taken together, they’re my first foray into building the sorely neglected field of Sports Blogging for Impact.^[8]

I’m glad Toby and the Forum’s Draft Amnesty prompted me to post now, in this moment pregnant with possibility, before the coming months purport to settle life’s big questions once and for all. When the season ends, some people will be crying with joy, others will be heartbroken, others will be hungry, and none of us will have seen any further inside the matrix. Whether the course of my daughter’s life will be altered by being the baby born just in time to witness Mikel Arteta become a demigod will be determined by bounces and breaks beyond his control, and mine.

1. ^{^}

    This, to me, is Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

2. ^{^}

    There is, you better believe, also a decade’s worth of internecine Internet debate among the untalented nerds about which xG model, what the xG table clarifies and what it obscures, what’s beyond xG, and so on. Suffice it to say that Arsenal were the consensus pick for Best Team among the models I happened to hold in high regard at the time, although that’s hard to demonstrate today since lots of them have now disappeared from public view because, y’know, their predictive power is much less valuable if you plaster them all over the Internet for other people to bet against you with. Just one more way the Internet was better when we were young.

3. ^{^}

    This was Arne Slot’s first season as Liverpool’s head coach. Aha, a bright young thing solving it first crack out of the box? Perhaps partly, yes, but zoom out and you see the institutional stability he was slotting into: a modernized leadership structure with people other than an all-powerful manager empowered to make decisions about which players to sign and how much to spend that has been the Premier League poster child for integrating analytics, and a team that had been triumphantly coached for 9 years by Jurgen Klopp, the orchestrator of heavy metal football, and 1b to Pep’s 1a in the modern era. Slot, meet machine, machine, meet Slot. When Jurgen was asking himself whether he’d had enough, he could reassure himself he’d done enough to lay a firm foundation for his successors to execute and iterate on, safe in the knowledge the thing he was leaving behind would not require rebuilding completely from the ground up. The titans of the premodern era, Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger and Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson, absolutely could not have said that because they ran their clubs as personal fiefdoms. It also helped Slot that Mo Salah, a legend in his own lifetime starting to show signs of sliding down the far side of the age curve (not least being linked to a gilded semi-retirement home in Saudi Arabia, which is its own essay series), appeared to have an out-of-body experience in which he became the best player in the world for just enough of the season to get Liverpool within spitting distance of the line, then promptly fell off a cliff. And so it goes.

^{^}

 Among current Premier League managers, only Pep, who’s won six titles in his first 9 seasons, is longer tenured.

^{^}

 Odds from Betfair as of 16 Feb. Manifold markets make it 3% (all) and 9% (nothing).

^{^}

 Arsene spent £390m of someone else’s money building the Emirates stadium, which Arsenal moved into in 2006. Then he paid for it: the Banter Era (c. 2006-2013) was spent servicing debt, selling iconic players in their prime to clubs actually owned, not merely sponsored, by sovereign wealth funds, hunting for replacements in the bargain bin, and treating qualifying for the Champions League as a trophy. Now, thanks to having the 4th highest matchday revenue, Arteta’s Arsenal are the 7th richest club in the world.

^{^}

 The missing year, 2018/19, helmed by Unai Emery, was not at risk of troubling the scorers. Emery is accomplished, but there’s little to indicate he’s on the steep part of the curve where the greats separate themselves. Sometimes it is absolutely the right call to quickly admit your mistake and roll again. The hard part is knowing your Arteta from your Emery. The hardest part is building an institution in which you can afford to be wrong.

^{^}

 Moneyball was, in case you haven’t read this in between these lines, a major milestone in my EA journey. Michael Lewis’s book turned Billy Beane into the face of the sports analytics revolution (and eventually turned him into Brad Pitt), his cost-effective heroism getting a relatively poor baseball team with a low wage bill to consistently beat richer teams with much higher wage bills. Moneyball, to me, was proof that spreadsheets can uncover important insights about the world in the places you’d least expect, and most care about (proof, as well, that putting this unconventional approach into practice would be controversial). A decade of reading sports blogs primed me for when eventually I found books about analysis uncovering more important insights: The Life You Can Save, Doing Good Better, and The Precipice. The proliferation of no-longer-so-niche analytics content and communities suggests there’s a receptive-to-rabid audience of untalented nerds who might just want to get in the game.

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