Everyone have a good long weekend?
Without being able to go to the football it did drag on. Although no football meant no hangover and I ended up relaying the turf in my garden.
It is incredible what you can get done in your house when you do no lose 2 days at the game and then recovering the next day.
I am itching to get back though, allow my voice to be heard in the ground.
It will be interesting to see what happens when fans are back in the ground, especially with the protests against the Super League and owners.
In the past when there have been protests in a ground, Sky Sports have “turned down the pitch side microphones” so that they can not be heard on the TV. Will they repeat the trick? Muting the fans in the ground. Or will they allow the discontent at the top clubs be broadcast around the world.
The social media ”boycott” is now over.
It was interesting to see how people treated it differently.
At She Wore, we decided to not participate.
Our view was that it would have little to no impact. The clubs themselves should do more by instantly blocking abusers. Denying them access.
One thing Sky Sports introduced which was very productive was creating an “internal block list”.
You abuse one Sky Sport journalist, your name gets added and all other Sky employees will block you, as will the Sky official channels.
Clubs could do this in an instant.
You put homophobic or racist abuse under a tweet, your @ goes on the block list and not only will you be blocked by Arsenal and everyone to do with the club, but other clubs as well.
Yes, I understand people create “burner accounts” to abuse, but it will soon get tiresome if they tweet once, get blocked. Only so many times you can have the energy to set up a new Gmail and then new Twitter account.
What was interesting was that over the weekend Twitter actually seemed a cleaner place. My Timeline was filled with people having interesting discussions on all topics – from Arsenal to what happened at Old Trafford and Line of Duty.
My feeling is there was a lot of people involved in the social media boycott who sit their creating inflammatory posts every day to try and rile fans up. They are attention seekers and these sort of people were part of the problem.
It was interesting to see how some of these attention seekers interpreted the boycott.
Many announced they would be boycotting, but would continue to be posting to their YouTube channels. Channels built on abuse.
They also left the automation from YouTube to Twitter turned on, so their Twitter accounts were still tweeting.
Instead of boycotting, maybe these channels should look at their own behaviour and the behaviour of its stars? Stop broadcasting the abuse. Although this will make them less money.
It was also interesting to see how long people could last without the attention they crave.
Some boycotters were already back Tweeting Sunday and Monday. Showing that they crave attention on social media.
Get out your house, lay your lawn. Social media attention is fake, empty, will not fill that hole that is missing in your life.
It will be interesting to see if the boycott changes anything? Or if on Thursday when Granit Xhaka gives away a penalty the abuse begins again.
Thierry Henry came out of the weekend to discuss the Daniel Ek “bid”.
The most interesting line of the interview was:
“He [Ek] already said he collected the funds so he can make sure he can make a good bid. Now obviously they need to listen and see what they can do”.
This raises 3 points for me:
1) Ek is claiming to have raised the fans for a “good bid”. That does not mean that he has raised enough for the Kroenke’s to sell.
2) How has Ek raised the funds? He does not have the money himself to buy the club. Is it a consortium? If so who is involved? Is it loans? What are these loans to be leveraged against?
3) And when Henry says “now obviously they need to listen and see what they can do” it shows a lack of business acumen from Henry. The Kroenke’s do not need to listen to any bid.
I am sure this one will roll on for months, or years. Just like Alisher Usmanov’s open letters and Aliko Dangote’s interviews.
Ek is not the first billionaire to announce he wants to be Arsenal. He will not be the last.
Last thing. We designed these Arsenal Beer Mats in conjunction with KickOffMerchants.com.
Keenos
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon 