On Tuesday evening, Arsenal suffered another one of those indignities that tend to pockmark its seasons. This time, the humiliation came in the driving rain of South Wales and at the hands of Swansea City: facing a team at the bottom of the Premier League table, Arsenal dominated the game, monopolized possession and then went and lost anyway, 3-1.
For Arsenal’s fans, these defeats have become wearily familiar in the last decade or so, as Arsène Wenger’s two-decade reign at the club has drifted into a sort of managed decline. They have turned Arsenal into a place hard-wired to treat every disappointment as an existential crisis.
The reaction, now, is so habitual that it is almost comforting, one of the few fixed points in soccer’s ever-changing landscape. There are the calls for Wenger to abandon — or be relieved of — his post with immediate effect. There are the videos, drawn from Arsenal’s compelling YouTube fan channels, of despair and rage, going viral. There are the fuming calls to phone-in programs, the cascade of former players bemoaning a great institution on its knees. Occasionally, when things get really bad, there are light aircraft.
Tuesday should have been a classic of the genre. Losing at Swansea in any circumstance, for a club of Arsenal’s ambition, would be a setback. Given that Arsenal has now won only three of its last 11 Premier League games, and that it sits 8 points behind Chelsea for the fourth, and final, Champions League spot for next season — the bare minimum requirement for a passable campaign, by Wenger’s own estimation — this defeat qualified as indicative of a deep-rooted problem.
Mesut Özil signed a new contract with Arsenal this week, but a loss in the rain at Swansea on Tuesday dampened the mood around the club — at least for a few hours.
And yet, by Wednesday morning, none of it had materialized. There were no grumblings of mutiny, no furious videos racking up the retweets, no flood of thinkpieces about where it has all gone wrong, no rending of garments or gnashing of teeth.
Instead, the mood around Arsenal was jubilant, even optimistic. Piers Morgan, the one-time conqueror of Gene Simmons and Stephen Baldwin in “The Celebrity Apprentice,” has long since appointed himself as spokesman for the most disgruntled faction of Arsenal’s fan base.
Last week, he presented Donald J. Trump with an Arsenal jersey at the end of his television interview with the American president in Davos, Switzerland, and implored him to replace Wenger. (To be clear: Morgan is not involved in Arsenal’s staffing decisions.) On Wednesday, though, even he seemed uncharacteristically buoyant.
The reason for Arsenal’s good cheer, of course, was that at 11 a.m. Wednesday, the club had confirmed the $78 million signing of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang from Borussia Dortmund.
Aubameyang, a 28-year-old striker, has never kicked a ball for Arsenal. His arrival does not change the gap with Chelsea. A rational analysis might suggest there are other areas of Arsenal’s team in more immediate need of reinforcement. And he left his previous club under something of a cloud after a number of disciplinary transgressions.
None of that mattered, however. Nor did the dispiriting defeat on Tuesday night, or the distance between Arsenal and its supposed rivals for a place in the Premier League’s top four.
There can scarcely have been a starker example of the restorative effect of a transfer, the palliative power of cold, hard cash, than seeing one hyper-stylized introductory video — Aubameyang shot in silhouette, a little strobe lighting, a bespoke hashtag — uniting Arsenal’s perpetually warring fan base immediately after an embarrassing defeat.
It is neither a profound nor an original observation to suggest that there has been, in the last 10 years or so, a seismic shift in significance away from what happens in full view on the field toward what happens in the smoke and mirrors of the transfer market.
