STATE OF THE CLUB
The manager, the players, and the fans: the only three things in this that aren't corrupt
Strip away everyone circling this football club right now, the officials, the league office, the press pack, and you're left with exactly three things still worth trusting. The man in the technical area. The eleven on the pitch. The people who pay to stand behind them. Everyone else in this story has a hand somewhere it shouldn't be.
The manager
Roberto De Zerbi took this job knowing exactly what he was walking into, a full rebuild, a new spine, a squad still learning each other's names under lights that never go off. What he could not have known is that he'd be asked to do it while officiating swings against him at the exact moments it costs the most, while a fixture list somehow finds the hardest possible run for a team still finding its shape, and while a press pack decides the story before a ball is even kicked. Any other manager doing this work gets called patient. He gets called a problem. The gap between those two words is not football analysis. It is a decision somebody made about him before he'd overseen a single training session.
The players
Say what you want about the results. What you cannot say, if you've actually been watching, is that this squad isn't giving everything it has. The front line chasing lost causes into the eighty-ninth minute. A back line being asked to learn a completely new way of defending on live television, every mistake magnified, every good block ignored. Academy graduates thrown into a Premier League that treats them like finished products before they've had a season to breathe. These are honest players doing honest work in front of the least honest audience in the sport, an audience of officials, panels and pundits who have already decided what they want the story to be regardless of what actually happens on the pitch.
I watch a tackle go unpunished against us and then watch the same challenge given the other way twenty minutes later at the other end, and I am supposed to call that consistency. I don't. I call it a pattern, and patterns do not apologise for themselves.
The fans
Then there's us. Nobody sings through a goalless night out of obligation. Nobody spends a Tuesday on three trains to an away end that smells like a service station toilet because a marketing department told them to. We do it because this club is worth it, because the stadium we built with our own money remains the best in the country whatever the glossy magazines pretend not to notice, and because somewhere underneath every bad result there is still a football club run properly, honestly, and without excuses. That is not blind loyalty. That is the only rational response to watching something be treated unfairly for long enough that you stop waiting for someone else to say it.
Everyone else
Now look at the other side of the ledger. Officials who have never once had a bad day when it benefits a bigger name. A league office that draws up a calendar that always seems to find our hardest run at the worst possible time, then calls it scheduling. A press pack that will spend a full segment on a lucky point for one club and call it character, then spend the same segment on an honest, unlucky night for us and call it crisis. None of these institutions are neutral. All of them have a story they'd rather tell than the one actually happening on the pitch, and that story rarely has room in it for a club that does things the right way.
Take away the whistle, the fixture list, and the headline, and this club wins more than it loses. That is not an accusation. That is just what's left once you remove everyone with a reason to see it differently.
So no, I'm not interested in another lecture about perspective from people whose entire careers depend on this club never quite being allowed to succeed. The manager is building something real. The players are giving everything they have to a competition that keeps moving the target. The fans never stopped believing, because we were never the ones who needed convincing in the first place. Everyone else in this story can keep explaining themselves. We'll be the ones still standing when they run out of excuses.