The Arsenal captaincy has been an anomaly for a while. First, the Granit Xhaka affair, with its fractious ending in the second half of the Crystal Palace game. Now Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who is an excellent player, but who has the kind of single-minded personality which makes future controversy inevitable. Especially as, at the time of writing, he’s not sure whether he intends to stay at the club beyond this summer.
So, a stable situation this is not. But it does pose one very obvious question: why is Hector Bellerin not Arsenal’s captain?
Truthfully, English fans probably place too much emphasis on a role which, in other European countries, has become largely ceremonial. Nevertheless, given the many issues which exist at the club – and given how many of those relate to the relationship between its supporters, the team, and the owners – Bellerin’s appointment would have had such obvious virtues.
Primarily because he’s a rare person. Thursday was general election day in the United Kingdom and Bellerin took to his Twitter account early in the morning to make valid points about the rate of expected turnout and also the state of the current government.
It’s not important whether his views are shared, really just that they were cogent and that he was willing to express them. Because how many of his peers would have done so? As the recent Gareth Bale episode (in which he couldn’t name the Prime Minister) demonstrated, professional footballers can often exist within a social vacuum. They don’t have to pay attention to the issues of the day or a country’s mechanics, because their profession and wealth insulates them so completely.
Players who challenge that norm are very important. When a team is playing badly, the first criticism they generally face relates to their attitude. They don’t get it. They don’t care. They don’t understand what it means. Those are staples of the Angry Fan’s repertoire; just listen to how often fan channels touch on those themes specifically.
With Bellerin in particular, this little episode seems to reflect a more relatable personality - the kind, crucially, which can oppose many of the assumptions in steady rotation. He’s flamboyant and fashionable and carries himself like a wealthy young man. But he also communicates extremely well. He’s an easy, relaxed interviewee, but also someone who can address the Oxford Union with confidence, speaking expressively to a room of academics in a second language.
So while it’s fair to acknowledge the receding primacy of the armband, it's possible also to acknowledge that the player wearing it – away from the pitch at least – can affect how a club is viewed. That’s particularly true with younger fans with whom, by all accounts, Bellerin is very popular. It’s not hard to see why: he’s cool and urbane, he doesn’t um and err with the press, and he has the kind of forthright confidence which will always be magnetic.
Perhaps older supporters find his image a bit alien and would prefer something in the more typical, Tony Adams mould, but that isn’t quite as important. What really matters, at Arsenal and many other clubs, is that the fanbases of the future can have touchstones of feint relatability. Better still that a captain – by definition their club’s most visible figure – speaks like they do, is interested in the same things – be it fashion or Fortnite – and has a similar perspective on the world. They like X, so does he. Whatever the X in the equation is, it's important to recognise its value.
Arsenal presumably have their reasons. Perhaps giving Aubameyang the captaincy was a placating move designed to grease the contract talks which have subsequently broken down. Whatever the truth, it still seems like a wasted opportunity, though, and a chance missed to create a new set of synergies at a club which has never seemed quite so divided.
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