Moments after Arsenal's extraordinary collapse this week, I tweeted my long-held view that they must be the most frustrating team in the world to support. Gunners fans were quick to agree, but others weren't so sure. A stream of Tottenham and Newcastle fans begged to differ, while supporters of smaller clubs, including my own Southend United, were just as dismissive. But while those clubs and others have problems far more serious than anything ever suffered by Arsenal, the point still stands.
Supporting Southend is not really that frustrating. Though they sit in an entirely respectable seventh position in League Two, generally they're not very good at football. Expectations are low and are only occasionally met.
Newcastle are frustrating in that they keep finding ever more inventive ways to shoot their own feet off, but no one really expects anything different. That's just what they do.
Tottenham's extraordinary habit of investing heavily in one ideology only to scrap it all at great expense and do the opposite two years later is certainly frustrating, but only one person has ever thought they were going to win the Premier League title and that, bafflingly, was chairman Daniel Levy shortly after the sale of Gareth Bale.
Arsenal exist on a different plane of frustration because, unlike those other clubs, great success is always possible. Indeed, great success for Arsenal, given all they have, is actually more probable than possible.
Yet they are so keen to squander their ambitions, and in increasingly ludicrous fashion. They were like the Wet Bandits this week. Bigger, stronger, more experienced than their pint-sized opponent, Anderlecht in the Champions League, they seemed certain to win out, but instead they found themselves being creatively and repeatedly assaulted in the last 20 minutes as they let a 3-0 lead slip away.
What separates Arsenal from the likes of Tottenham, Newcastle, Southend and all the other names that streamed on to my timeline on Tuesday night is that they have absolutely no excuses for this. Arsenal have everything in place to be the most successful, trophy-laden club on the planet and their failure to reach their potential is extraordinary.
Newcastle have outstanding support and a wonderful stadium, but in the era of FFP when clubs can only spend what they earn, they're hamstrung by the financial chasm between London and the north of the country. They can get over 50,000 fans through the gates, but they can't charge Arsenal's prices. Nor can they hope to attract the sort of deep-pocketed, international corporate sponsors who have such a presence in the capital.
Tottenham could, hypothetically, match Arsenal in the matchday revenue stakes, but they haven't yet got a stadium to facilitate it. They're held back by White Hart Lane, its 36,000 capacity and its lack of a whopping great business and conference centre attached to the side of the pitch. Such are the sad realities of modern football.
Arsenal have the prime London location and they have their giant stadium. It's almost paid for too. Thanks to Arsene Wenger, they also have an advanced training complex, an excellent academy, a wide scouting network, experienced and qualified staff and a philosophy that will always attract new supporters. Perpetual Champions League qualification enables them, when they choose to do so, to attract all but the biggest names in the game and, most importantly, to pay them high wages without risking the future of the club. All of which explains why so many people took umbrage at the idea of this being a frustrating existence. Most clubs in the world would love to be that frustrated.
But for all that they have, they still cannot make the leap to the top billing, a place they haven't occupied in the last 10 years, and it doesn't look likely to change any time soon. The only teams they've beaten in the league this season are Burnley, Sunderland, Aston Villa and Crystal Palace.
What makes it all so fist-gnashingly ridiculous, so grind-your-teeth-into-dust annoying is that Arsenal seem to make the same mistakes again and again and again and again until you start to think they're doing it deliberately as some kind of vindictive performance art.
They surge forwards when they don't need to, they lack a defensive midfielder to protect them when it invariably goes wrong, they waste set pieces at one end and then wobble precariously at the other. They overcomplicate, they prevaricate and they do it so often that any rational individual would just give up on them and go and watch something less stressful. Unfortunately, very few supporters are rational.
All of our teams frustrate us, all of them make us feel as if we're cursed, but very few of them are as close to greatness as Arsenal. That's what makes the difference. They should have everything, they should sit astride global football like a king, clutching all of the trophies and laughing their heads off. Instead, it's the rest of the world that can't stop laughing at them.
