The Cost of Control

By Alfie Cairns Culshaw (Chief Editor)

When Kai Havertz rounded Robert Sanchez in the 97^th minute on Tuesday night to send Arsenal into their first domestic cup final for five and a half years, the Emirates erupted. Limbs flew in every direction. Delirium took over. For a minute, it felt like this one isolated moment justified the steep £59 admission fee. However, the 96 and a half minutes that came before Havertz’s decisive moment were a hard slog.

In my row nine seat in the North Bank, for much of the game, phones emerged from pockets at an unusual rate, as the atmosphere fell flat despite the magnitude of the tie. For a semi-final, in the middle of Arsenal’s best form for a couple of decades, it felt strangely subdued. Collective disengagement isn’t what you would expect when watching a team built to dominate matches.

Chelsea, trailing by a goal from the first leg, set out to keep the affair tight for the first hour, before trying to steal an equaliser late on. The home side, on the other hand, leaned into the defensive identity Mikel Arteta has cultivated in recent years. This wasn’t caution born of tension; it was caution by default. And it asked very little of the people who’d paid to be there.

The culmination of these two approaches was a stodgy, low-event occasion. So little was materialising on the pitch that I indulged in a five-minute X scroll mid-way through the first half. Tacticos may claim to have enjoyed this semi-final, but in reality, it was a boring encounter.

Football has always had dull games etched into seasons, but they used to arrive sporadically. Goals are down this campaign across multiple men’s leagues, particularly from open play, as teams prioritise dead-ball efficiency. The tactical meta has shifted towards control and negating the opposition, and as a result, the entertainment value of the product has quietly eroded.

At its core, the beautiful game is supposed to entertain. Fans flood stadium concourses each week to forget about their problems and enjoy something that exhilarates them. In a time of economic instability - the most severe cost of living pressure since the 1980s - football is one of the purest forms of escapism. If it loses its entertainment value, it will cease to fulfil this role in society.

A low-event game feels like a betrayal of this escapism contract. Football is exciting when high-octane incidents happen at a relatively frequent rate. This constant flurry of action allows fans to take their minds off serious issues - when the action dries up, the distraction disappears.

It’s no surprise, then, that supporters are rapidly subscribing to the idea that the product is becoming more mechanical. While the excitement of Havertz’s late goal shows that football does continue to produce electrifying moments that few other vehicles for escapism can replicate, it would be naïve to dismiss the fans’ perspective, even if some of it is sensationalised. Individual moments will always excite, but they are doing the heavy lifting.

Can football still exist as the cultural phenomenon it is if games become increasingly low-incident? If matches continue to drift in this direction, it becomes harder to sustain football as a lived experience. We are already edging toward a reality where the sport feels most alive through highlights, clips, and reels — curated bursts of intensity designed to compensate for what the full game often no longer provides.

It's a paradox. Ironically, the increasingly intense demands on managers to win and the hostility of the footballing world to failure have led to this newfound pragmatism. Coaches have opted for control due to the fear of losing, and the game has suffered. Fans demand relentless perfection, and the tactical architects of the game have responded by building systems intent on mitigating risk. In a way, the hyper-fixated fandom has directly resulted in more turgid football.

There is reason to be optimistic about the future, however. Tactical eras in football are cyclical, and there will undoubtedly be a response to this defensive evolution. The sport’s great minds will concoct new ways of playing that counteract today’s dominant style, and excitement will return.

For now, we are all complicit in creating the football we have come to resent.