If Mikel Arteta’s dossier is part of a deliberate strategy, it is a dangerous one for Arsenal

The manager is not yet in Alex Ferguson and José Mourinho’s league, but his conspiracy theories have reached new levels

English football loves the word “dossier”. It doesn’t love dossiers themselves, of course; they’re for nerds – unless, that is, they’re a “secret dossier”, which have a thrilling redolence of spy dramas, invisible ink and dead drops. Non-secret dossiers, though, are inherently risible: call something a “dossier” in English football and you’re immediately signalling: this is absurd poindextering. Dossiers were preposterous when Don Revie was – imagine the pretension! – drawing up scouting reports on opposing players, and they are preposterous today as Mikel Arteta collates images of rival managers stepping outside their technical area.

Arteta, it should be said, did not use the word “dossier”; rather it was swiftly applied to what he had called “a massive storage of images”. During Arsenal’s 2-0 win against Everton last Saturday, he received his second booking of the season for leaving his technical area. This, it turns out, is another part of the vast conspiracy against Arsenal. Yes, Arteta accepted, he left his technical area (44 times before being booked, according to the former referee Graham Scott), but other managers do it too. “There are managers who have the record in the league, 36 times in 10 minutes [they] leave the touchline – no yellows,” he said. “I am clipping all of that … so if somebody comes to me I can say: ‘I am not in the record yet.’ Somebody else has the record so let’s see. Then it’s 36 yellow cards in 10 minutes for the managers.”

There are two ways of looking at this. Perhaps it’s genuine. Perhaps Arteta really is a ludicrous Pooterish figure, counting the misdemeanours of others, the worst kind of neighbourhood watch curtain-twitcher who happens also to have been cursed with a persecution complex: “I got a fine because my parking permit was partially obscured, but Mr Emery at No 17 has been six inches out of his bay on at least three occasions this month and … nothing.” Or perhaps he really is an inveterate snitch, glorying in telling on his peers: “Please, Miss! Miss, Daniel’s been chewing gum again, Miss.”

Or, perhaps awed by the misguided defiance of Manchester City fans after their club was found to have perpetrated the greatest act of cheating in English sporting history, he is trying to persuade his base that everybody is against Arsenal to generate a siege mentality. Declan Rice mystifyingly got away with kicking Malick Yalcouyé off the ball against Brighton, but it’s important to remember that Arsenal remain the real victims here.

The history of mind games in football is long and storied. Before the 1939 FA Cup final, for instance, Major Frank Buckley, the flamboyant manager of Wolves, claimed to have injected his players with “animal secretions”. A French surgeon, Serge Voronoff, had begun transplanting tissue from monkey testicles on to human testicles as an anti-ageing treatment, and it was widely believed that it was this monkey gland treatment that Buckley was employing. In fact, he almost certainly gave his players nothing stronger than vitamins but the idea was that Wolves’ morale would be boosted, while their opponents in the final, Portsmouth, would be intimidated by the prospect of taking on players juiced up on simian fluids. It didn’t work, Portsmouth winning 4-1 despite finishing 15 places below Wolves in the table, but the logic is familiar.

The monkey glands were relatively benign, little more than a publicity stunt, but it’s easy for attempts at psychological manipulation to take on a darker aspect. Before Inter played Liverpool in the second leg of the 1965 European Cup semi-final, for instance, their manager, Helenio Herrera, had 100,000 leaflets distributed claiming that at the end of the first leg at Anfield, Liverpool fans had sung “Go home, Italians” to the tune of “Santa Lucia” which supposedly was intended “to deride us and make us feel we are just a race of cheap mandolin players”. Suitably enraged, Inter fans ensured San Siro seethed with fury, which perhaps encouraged some questionable refereeing decisions (although it probably wasn’t the only factor) as Liverpool lost 3-0 and went out 4-3 on aggregate.

Alex Ferguson was a master of the art, while José Mourinho openly acknowledged that the next game begins in the post-match press conference for the previous one. Mourinho, in particular, often crossed the line of professional decency. Arteta, clearly, is not at that level, at least not yet, but if his dossier is part of a deliberate strategy it is a dangerous one.

Arteta’s conspiracy theory is likely to find fertile ground among certain online Arsenal fans, who remain convinced that referees have been machinating against them for years. Even on Tuesday there were those who leaped to the defence of Max Dowman after he had been sent off for thrusting a knee towards Harrison Neal’s chest, even though Arteta himself appeared furious with the 16-year-old’s petulance. Why, ran the argument, had Cole Palmer not been shown a straight red for retaliating against Mateus Fernandes in Chelsea’s defeat by Tottenham on Saturday? Dowman went with his knee and Palmer with his belly, which is perhaps enough to explain the discrepancy, but even if it isn’t, so what? If you don’t want to be punished, don’t go thrusting knees or bellies or anything at opponents, no matter how bad a foul they’ve just committed.

It’s not only that football is groaning under the weight of the paranoia of various fan groups, each adamant that Pro Ref is acting with the rosicrucians, the Masons, the mob, Opus Dei and the Cubans to deny their club a spot in the Europa League, a distraction that deflects from the game’s true crisis: its descent from an endeavour in which sporting merit and integrity are paramount into a grimly capitalistic vehicle to make very rich and powerful people even richer and more powerful.

It’s also dangerous because a mood of insecurity, of being convinced everything is against you, is not conducive to winning league titles – as Arsenal know. In 2024-25, their title bid was undermined by their early-season ill discipline, each red card greeted not with the resilience of champions but with bleating about how it wasn’t really their fault and everybody was picking on them, including the injury gods.

Abdicating responsibility rarely helps, snitches seldom prosper and, in English football, dossiers are always a bad idea.