1989, another summer...when barely 10,000 people turned out in Miami's NFL gridiron stadium to watch the Arsenal Football Club defeat Argentine champions Independiente 2-1 on the strength of a brace by Rocky Rocastle in something called the Zenith Data Systems Challenge Trophy.
LINK: Local newspaper bothers to cover the match.
It was quite charitable of George Graham to field a very strong XI, but his post-match comments about "America needs to wake up" were far more telling. He certainly expressed a healthy scepticism about the USA's willingness to support the game, although in five years the nation would host what is still the most-attended World Cup in the tournament's history, re-launch a professional football league, and qualify for every World Cup finals since 1990 (England, ahem, 1994, ahem, cough cough). Yet at the time, with no interwebs to promote professional teams from Europe and South America, and more importantly no EA Sports FIFA video game to hype individual players, there was minimal interest in club football in the USA.
25 years is a long time to hold a grudge against an entire nation, however.
I've been very outspoken in my criticism of the decision makers at Arsenal (and by that I mean one person) and the club's unwillingness to come to the USA during the pre-season in the last 10 years, a time which has seen Spuds and Villa and Everton (hardly "big clubs") join the ranks of MUFC, Chelsea, Liverpool, and MCFC in touring the States. Arsenal are a decade or more behind other clubs in England, Italy, Spain, and even Portugal in building the "brand" in the USA.
The growth of the Arsenal fan support in this country has been entirely organic, with attempts by the club to reach out to the millions of fans here seeming to come only grudgingly after much noise being made on this side of the Atlantic. That's a separate topic, but it seems that Arsenal took a nation of 330 million for granted until someone finally (to use Graham's term) "woke up" and noticed it. Web stats show that the USA generates the second-most Arsenal-related web traffic after the United Kingdom. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Arsenal supporters routinely turn up in greater numbers at their local pubs and bars in the USA during match viewings. (This was certainly the case for our group in New Orleans, where the pub would open at 6:30 in the morning to cater to 30 or more bleary-eyed Gooners.)
Arsene Wenger notoriously loathed making pre-season tours, but was open to disrupting his Austrian camp preparations for far-flung trips to the workers paradise of Southeast Asia and other locales that seemed far more laborious to reach than the USA. A tour of Vietnam is nice, where the average annual income is less than $300 US, but isn't it a bit much to expect those folks to buy an AUTHENTIC (ahem) Arsenal kit that costs more than half that?
I know that I'm somewhat of an anomaly among the USA Gooners in that I've been following the club longer than Wenger has been the manager. I actually asked off work back in 2000 to go watch the Uefa Cup final (back then Cup finals could be played during the middle of the week with no thought to a USA television audience) and was one of 3 Yanks in an Atlanta soccer bar filled with ex-pats from both England and Turkey. My allegiance to Arsenal is now stronger than that for any other sport team that I've grown up following and when I "married" my support to the club I agreed to do so for better or for worse.
Wenger's infamous stubborn nature, which is now cartoonish in its ability to be parodied, was part of the "worse" in our marriage. Everyone knows that he essentially IS the decision maker at the club, that the board and Executive have deferred to him on every major move that has been made since Dein's departure. So one must think he had a hand in the club's failure to visit the USA even once while others made a concerted effort to grow their support and raise their profiles here.
The odd thing about Wenger's remarks the other day is that the translation of it seems to say, "We had no intention of coming to the USA until the support was big enough," rather than an intention to come here and proactively help grow that support. Every summer there would be sold-out matches in much bigger stadiums than Red Bulls across the USA featuring clubs such as AC Milan, Benfica, Barca, etc. along with Arsenal's English rivals. Chelsea? Really? A club that spent a considerable amount of time in the lower leagues before the arrival of Ken Bates?
It's so bizarre to think that Arsenal, at the moment that they were one of the two biggest clubs in England with some of the most famous World Cup-winning players on the planet in their team, didn't want to capitalise on that brand and equity to tour the USA. Or that when complaints about constraints on spending were the norm, nobody thought to raise a few million pounds on a visit to the States. Or that if the option of doing so were mooted (and I'll assure you that someone over here more than likely reached out to Arsenal more than once during this time), that it was rejected out of hand.
(Side note--anyone who thinks that touring North America automatically interferes with pre-season preparation and will prevent winning a championship may want to look at the summer travel schedules of recent title-winning sides.)
As an example, when MUFC announced their summer tour of the USA back during the winter months, the accompanying article on ESPN noted that "Manchester United haven't toured the USA since 2011." Wow! THAT LONG? Two entire summers passed without a visit here?
I'm pleased that someone somewhere at Arsenal has forced this visit to the States on Arsene Wenger, and that the growth of support here was finally deemed worthy of it. It's a pity that it must be a one-off in a small stadium, considering the pent-up demand that so many of us here have, not ever having had the opportunity to see the club play live. I hope it's something to build upon. The integration of the Premier League into the culture in the USA has been underway for almost 15 years, and this country will represent a tremendous growth market for years to come.
After 25 years, it's nice to say "Welcome back, Arsenal. Now don't wait another quarter century to come again, please."
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