Pre-season Panic seems to start earlier every year like a really sh*tty Christmas

Has your club succumbed to Pre-season Panic yet? If not, they soon will.

Pre-season gets to us all in the end. It’s a tantalising blend of what have become highly visible and official-looking games, often with a pretend trophy of some kind at stake, that still a) don’t really matter and most importantly b) have absolutely no measurable impact on the season that follows.

But that’s only the surface. Pre-season games are also all we have to go on in the desert of July. Flimsy unreliable evidence, but the only evidence. Having spent the last couple of months of the season exhausted and desperate for it all to end, by the time July comes around we’re all gagging for a football fix after an achingly long month without. So people leap on these pre-season games. And even more than that, pre-season games are particularly intoxicating because unlike proper games that matter, they can mean as much or as little as we want in order to confirm existing opinions and biases. Often within the same game.

They are essentially the perfect vessel for instant social media insanity, and this year’s very first example came from – to absolutely nobody’s great surprise – Arsenal.

Now it’s important to stress here that we aren’t singling Arsenal out because their online fanbase is a particularly virulent, loud and absurd online fanbase that remains sharply divided about the manager and direction of the club. That’s just a happy coincidence. The extremity and volume of the reaction may have been heightened by all those factors, but this fate can befall any club. Check the reactions to West Brom’s 2-0 defeat to Stevenage if you want confirmation this isn’t just an Entitled Big Six Crybaby phenomenon.

But back to Arsenal. Now, this one really was perfect. Because let’s be honest, there isn’t a better club for this sort of thing right now. They are a club in that sweet spot where the glass can be half-full or half-empty and both those views have some merit; the problem is that for the loudest fans the glass is either overflowing or absolutely empty.

Last season’s fifth-place finish and narrow Champions League miss can be portrayed as real signs of progress for a young team and manager with the chance to kick on again this season, or as evidence of a lack of killer instinct and a missed opportunity that may not come around again. Arteta getting a new contract is either evidence of the low bar at Arsenal these days, or a welcome return to stability…