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Southampton being thrown out of The Championship play-offs to allow Middlesbrough to take there place following what is annoyingly known as “Spygate” overwhelmed even the long awaited coronation of Arsenal as Premier League Champions and following the South Coast club’s appeal being rejected football is left with a question over how it handles unclean narratives.

There is a desire to great controversy or incident with a narrative which assigns some of the actors in that narrative as being entirely good, some as bad, and to minimise the impact of the actions under discussion. This is not at all unique to football. Anything from the Star Wars movies to how the Government works to the fact that people enjoy Taylor Swift is subject to this kind of analysis.

It is her fault, or his fault, or because of this reason alone or that specific thing which draws a tidy diagram of cause and effect which comforting, but ultimately untrue. The causal map of events which create the world with live in is spaghetti level of complicated and no effect has a single cause. We might want it to make sense, but the Universe does not especially care about our desires in these matters.

Spontaneous

A friend of mine spent Tuesday night in Islington as a part of the spontaneous celebrations around Arsenal’s Premier League win following Manchester City’s 1-1 draw with AFC Bournemouth. Soaking up the experience another fan opined that this victory would quiet the haters, and shut up the doubters while admitting that he did not think that Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta was good enough. Arteta’s abilities and methods has been the subject of much debate.

His playing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on massive speakers at the training ground to prepare for a game against Liverpool, his hiring of a team of pick pockets to steal from his players, his getting a club dog named Win for the players to cherish gives mental picture of Viktor Gyökeres being told to look after “Win” over the holidays like the School Hamster.

Those points which were laughable are now master strokes because Arteta has moved from being cast in the role as a person preventing Arsenal winning the League, to one causing it, largely without changing his methods. The underlying structures in the Premier League – the games per day problem which is putting emphasis on set plays, the failing and increasingly unconfident Manchester City, the emotional decline of Liverpool – these are all contributing factors to Arsenal’s success as well as a thousand others which are often hidden from view.

Those factors can all be dismissed or downplayed though, should manager Arteta be given sole authorship.

Tension

At Southampton the tension between factors hidden from view – perhaps not that well hidden – and the desire for a clean narrative came into conflict. The Championship club have – it turns out – made a habit of breaking the rules and in admitting that created a series of questions. How significant is the offence? What could one do with the information? Is it as important as what happens on the field? Where does the responsibility lie for this?

Once the notion of a rouge actor in Southampton was dismissed, and it became clear that the Saints were routinely watching other teams train expressly breaking the rules of the Football League then there seemed to be an effort to firewall people at the club away from it. Manager Tonda Eckert was not aware, then he was. The players are agitating about a lawsuit against the club, but also it is reported that they sat in briefings where it was clear that they were watching an analysis gleaned from watching the other side train. No one gets out of this clean, no one can.

Football is based around a level of trust that the things we are watching are broadly meritocratic and that every fluffed penalty or poor reach by a goalkeeper is an error rather than a fake. Given the commitment we, which is to say everyone involved in football, have to the game the need to make each occurrence of misconduct a discrete one is obvious.

Punishment

Which is why the English Football League’s punishment – called by Southampton’s Phil Parsons “manifestly disproportionate “ – seemed to be so shockingly large with the club fined points and expelled from the play-offs. Not that the punishment was unwarranted, but that it was a tacit admission that the factors hidden from view, and away from the field, were not only of significance but were more important than what happened on the field.

Training drills, formations, planning for upcoming games. These things sit uneasy in some quarters and the clean narratives that those quarters enjoy are in contrast to the approach taken to the Saints. Brian Clough infamously told his Leeds United squad “Stop Stan Bowles, stop QPR“, a phrase that has a soothing effect on all of us who would like it to be the case that football could be so simple.

As football supporters we maintain an idea that football should always be settled in a game, in the league table, and that sporting sanctions should only really be applied to supporting offences. We look at the 115 charges Manchester City face and imagine that the punishment for them will be enacted off the field, because the benefits were not felt on it. We are able to do this because we maintain this belief that spying, or paying a few extra bonuses, or paying from the “wrong” accounts, or playing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in training are silly fripperies stuck between the decisive matches which form football.

The EFL would, it seems, disagree.