It would be going too far to say I feel “betrayed” by the club. But I would say, I did feel they must have been very confident this wasn’t going to happen to have continued playing Partey and to have considered renewing his contract.
The first time I felt that might not be the case was really quite recently, when it became clear they at least had reservations about renewing him. Because based on what he did on the pitch last season, not renewing him didn’t seem to make sense.
Obviously there’s no way for Arsenal to have known in advance the decisions that would be made, but I thought they must be acting on solid advice and its hard to still feel that way looking at this story.
Nah, it’s soccer. Everyone knows what soccer means. If you say football, I think of Gaelic football. The English invented the word and now don’t like using it. Took you guys 200 years to own up to colonisation, so in another 100 I think we will all be calling it soccer (aka the correct name).
Sounds like a parental responsibility issue if kids are idolising people who are mostly useless at everything other than kicking a ball very hard. Not saying it isn’t common but commonality doesn’t equate to being a good thing.
Parents should be realistic and teach kids the value of academics and developing genuine, widely-applicable skillsets rather than teaching them that soccer man is so awesome and he do good kicks. Sports is an escape, not something to base your life around.
If so many things the club does are morally reprehensible to you and you consider that important, why do you still follow them?
I don’t think we’ve officially owned up to that colonisation but there’s no doubting that the British have wrongly occupied and done genocides on the Irish and many other people around the world. I’m thoroughly ashamed of it but I know someone else on here will lambast me for saying so.
I’m not rising to the bait on “soccer” though. Even my Irish friends call Association Football “football”. Hell, even in the relative backwaters of County Kerry where I’ve spent a lot of time cheering on Kerry in the Gaelic Games association football is called “Football”.
I don’t feel any differently about at all personally when it comes to the club. I’ve made peace it’s a corporate entity more than a face of a community since it joined that attempt to make the Super League.
Only thing this would change on a guilty verdict is my thoughts towards Partey.
I’d only feel betrayed by the club if they tried to cover this up which is hard to believe.
Seeing how the club operated in the past, they’re not afraid to distance anyone for either footballing or even political reasons.
You’d think they’ve done their homework investigating the case themselves. Surely if they found clear cut evidence against Partey they would’ve acted differently.
Surely they would try to look into the matter themselves? Like some sort of internal investigation. Or is this a case where they purposely don’t want to have a look?
To clarify, I’m not a lawyer, but this isn’t some internal matter which the club can investigate itself and come to a conclusion on. This was a police matter. I would think that at the time, the club spoke directly to Partey and his lawyer about the allegations and assume were told by Partey that there was no basis to the allegations and he was innocent. Unless there was clear evidence to the contrary, I’m not sure what else the club were meant to do in the circumstances.
