We Asked a Grief Counsellor for Some Advice for Arsenal Fans

(Top photo: Simon Cooper/EMPICS Sport)

Arsenal is not the club it once was. The side's 3-0 loss to Crystal Palace this week – and, obviously, the thumping they've received in numerous other matches this season – is evidence enough of that. Of course, all this has led to the "Wenger Out" campaign, with some fans protesting the longstanding manager after games, burning Arsenal flags and generally believing wholeheartedly that sacking Arsene will change the club's fortunes.

Really, though, what this actually is, is grief. After the denial period – of ArsenalFanTV interviewees insisting all the failure was just a blip – we moved into anger (the protests) and are starting to progress into bargaining (the idea that hiring a new manager will change everything).

I spoke to grief counsellor and football fan Steve Guy to see if he could offer Arsenal fans any helpful advice.

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It's about rejecting the idea that something – or a person – has gone, and that the problem is not there. You perhaps think that it's not real and look for alternatives to reality because you don't want to accept it. This is down to shock in bereavement terms, but for the fans it's also based on how successful the team were years before. This is a kind of Freudian "defence mechanism". We also use projection, and project our emotions to something else, like other teams, or the media and so on.

Anger isn't necessarily straightforward. It'll be triggered by something and is the form of numerous issues. It can be about the lack of communication or being really upset. Blokes often find it hard to express themselves emotionally, and so it has to come out in a more gender acceptable form. It's all based on the whole, "Why are you upset about a game of football?" routine – and it's blasphemy to say something like that!

Anger can be a mask for the upset that someone is actually feeling, and can manifest itself in an actual physical form of pain. Loss can become contagious and you can sometimes forget what the start of this was all about. Especially in a crowd situation – they've written about football as a "tribe", so you can get swept up with what's going on and react in this way.

The anger will start to subside and lead to the "if only this had happened" phase. They'll question whether different squads or different formations could have changed the outcome [of a game]. There's a sense of powerlessness as you realise that you can't actually change anything about bargaining. Then it will be anticipatory: questioning whether getting rid of Wenger might change the circumstances.

The powerlessness of not being able to change anything will lead to depression and a serious knock-on effect. We have physical, psychological, emotional and behavioural changes with grief. This is the loss of prestige and status, and so it becomes difficult for fans to understand their identities. Anger will be taken out in the household and on friends, and things being said in the streets to Arsenal fans might lead to a scrap. It happens on multiple levels, with the fans and players. Everyone grieves in their own way, including Wenger. If he does actually get sacked they'll be a secondary grief. It's a bit like when someone has a relative with dementia, where you feel a loss of that person as they lose that identity, but then another grief process occurs when they physically die.

Finally it'll lead to a form of acceptance. This could mean continuing to support Arsenal and the new form of acceptance, or choosing to support a different team. It's the same for Wenger: he denied that anything was wrong, but now might have to accept the loss of his future and a 20-plus year legacy. There was an assumption that he'd never change and never be lost, and so it's come across as a "sudden death". He's also not going on his terms, say like Alex Ferguson, so there's nothing he can do about it, and he'll be trying to gain control by doing some bargaining himself. He's going to leave under a cloud and a feeling of depression.

In grief we forget everything, and people will forget the FA Cups and the Unbeatables and so on. But, in the future, they'll be able to go through anniversaries and cups and be able to look back on the memories positively. That's when there comes some feeling of guilt of how he was treated. But for now, he's the focal point of the team still. They might never get over the trauma of the loss.

@kylemmusic