ARE ARSENAL NOT ONLY TOP BUT THE BARCELONA OF THE PREMIER LEAGUE?

Arsenal offer an attractive choice for the neutral fan but the numbers say another club is truly playing the beautiful game

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Arsène Wenger has taken Arsenal to the top of the Premier League with attractive football but are they the most attractive? Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

A friend of mine, an Arsenal fan, was explaining to me this week how her club's lofty standing in the Premier League was not only a triumph for Arsène Wenger's men but more holistically for football in general. Arsenal, she reasoned, were "England's Barcelona" – an elegant team committed to playing the game in a morally and intellectually superior way; right-brained players who were creative and spontaneous, using speed and stealth to tickle opponents into submission; a fusion of home-reared youngsters with previously unheralded foreigners, all curated without spiralling the club into debt. They were, in short, a team that any neutral could get behind.
I don't support Arsenal but I couldn't disagree with her. Wenger has argued; "Football is an art, like dancing is an art" – and he truly lives (and dies) by that belief. After eight trophy-less years he was allowed to open the wallet this summer. He could have bought a reliable central defender or a proven goalscorer, as everyone implored him to do, but he opted instead for an attacking midfielder – Mesut Özil for £42m – of which he already had an indulgent surfeit. It seemed insane until it became clear that Wenger was operating on a deeper conviction: if he was going down, he was doing it with the most stylistically pure Arsenal team ever.
You have to admire Wenger and, with his team sitting top of the table and practically assured of qualification for the last 16 of the Champions League, respect him too. After seven major titles between 1998 and 2005 he has now gone half his career in north London without winning one. The website sincearsenallastwonatrophy.co.uk details the time to the second since that 2005 FA Cup victory and links to a list of events that have taken place in the intervening period: these include the invention of Twitter and the iPad, as well as: "Six people have been arrested for kidnapping a llama and taking it on a tour of the New York subway."
So Arsenal are underdogs these days and there is nothing the unaffiliated observer loves more than a team defying the odds. Still there was a problem with my friend's analysis. Hadn't she seen how smug Wenger has become in post-match interviews recently? Arsenal may play the most attractive football in northern Europe but, oh boy, do they know it. To borrow Tony Cascarino's favourite phrase, if Arsenal were an ice cream they'd lick themselves to death.Read more