“It’s a madting, still” – On the impossible rise of Arsenal Fan TV

“2-0 down against Brighton. No disrespect to Brighton, but who the fuck are Brighton blud? Am I a prick fam? Am I a dickhead now blud?” – Troopz, Brighton 2 Arsenal 1

Football, they say, is a game of opinions. We are usually told this as a matter of fact, rather than opinion, but fundamentally it is true. We live to have opinions on the football. Pondering his own mortality, Prince Hamlet would ask aloud to Globe audiences whether he should be. Or, simply, whether he shouldn’t. Life or death. Existence or nothingness. I can assure you that he wouldn’t have bothered asking, let alone even had the thought, had he a subscription to Sky Sports, a /r/soccer account and a Fantasy Football team to his name. He would have known that’s all that there was, and all that there ever needed to be.

We are the opinion-wanters, the opinion-havers, the opinion-needers and the opinion-haters. All of the time and all at once. We are all of it, information and interpretation and instigation and implication, drowning in our molten sea of takes; ready to throw down with a stranger or better yet, a loved one, over a questionable straight red, a marginal offside or, most en vogue of all, a late, late VAR ruling. The pundits, while ostensibly qualified and well-compensated in their opinion-sharing, often fail to land with the common fan. We hold staunch opinions about their opinions. And usually, our opinion is that their opinions are the opinions of someone who shouldn’t have their opinions paid much attention to. But hey, that’s just what we think. That’s just our opinion.

It is rare, for instance, that during Match of the Day – a 55-year-old format by the way – that you will find yourself illuminated by the earth-shattering description-analysis of Alan Shearer, one of the greatest Premier League players of all time, who occasionally talks through match highlights with all the enthusiasm, lyricism, nuance and insight of a weary Midlands train conductor who spends his entire day saying things like ‘the next stop is Leighton Buzzard. Leighton Buzzard the next stop’.

He isn’t alone in facing the ire of the modern football consumer. Pretty much anyone popping up on an HD television screen is in the firing line from the fan who not only thinks that they couldoffer better analysis than the so-called expert, but now actually attempts to do so in all the far-reaching corners of the internet; in tweets, blogs, live streams, posts and, of course, reaction videos. Tim Berners-Lee probably didn’t have it in mind when he first joined hypertext with the internet at CERN, but, deep down, it must have been obvious that the real reason he was doing what he was doing was so a confused young soccer fan in Denver could watch a man called Mark Goldbridge thrash about the screen in front of a Manchester United game. That must have been the endgame, surely.

The common fan, you see, whilst under-qualified, usually knows far more about their team through virtue of their own relentless dedication. They’re not experts, no, but at least they do their homework. And they fucking love their homework. There is a chasm between what the sheened, BBC-salary nodders and mumblers think and what the fan who sits 10 rows behind the goal knows. At some point, to test the theory, Robbie Lyle decided to stop listening to the opinions he didn’t think were any good. He decided he’d go out and find some more. Some that were different. Some that, whilst not necessarily better, or more accurate, or more professional, were at least more honest, more emotional and therefore more representative of the fans watching at home.

The result was AFTV (called ArsenalFan TV before the club politely got in touch and told them to rebrand), a YouTube channel watched from Holloway Road to Hong Kong that started out as a surveyor with a microphone running around after games trying to get people to talk to him. And usually getting told “to eff off”.

Sat in a swanky board room on the top floor of a searing white office building overlooking St. Jame’s Park, a terrace that used to house prime ministers Cardigan, Palmerston and Earl Grey no less, Robbie tells me the reason he started the whole venture.

“Being an Arsenal supporter I just wanted to create something that gave every fan their say. I’d be driving home after the games listening to Talk Sport or Five Live or watching Match of the Daylater and a lot of the time the view of the pundits I didn’t share. I’d think: ‘Hold on a minute, I was just down the pub after the game and we were chatting amongst ourselves…'”

Six and a half years, 246 league games and over 593 million views later, it is still growing, a self-fulfilling mini-media juggernaut; Sead Kolasinac rumbling down the left flank with a full head of steam.

It is, as they say, a madting. Still.