BRENT A GOB: This week, Harry Brent's got Mikel Arteta on blast for the joyless, risk-averse football he has Arsenal playing, Arne Slot for his ridiculous excuses, and Liverpool fans for wanting him sacked
12:49, 06 Nov 2025
Harry Brent
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Harry's fuming in his latest column
Great. It looks like we're in for another Graham Potter style Premier League title race: one that, on paper, should be brilliant, but is actually just boring and really low-quality.
For the past few years, the Premier League champions – like the elected officials in this country – have been the best of a bad bunch. It's like sex after a night out: someone's on top, but only because everyone else is too wobbly to make any sort of meaningful impact.
This season's 'winners by default' look like Arsenal – a team so uninteresting they could be sponsored by Alan Shearer's punditry. Yes, they defend well, and yes, they can lump in a corner like nobody's business, but that just makes them Tony Pulis's Stoke with better skincare routines.
Watching them grind out 2-0 win after 2-0 win is like watching a fax machine send a document. Fair play, it gets the job done, but it's as mind-numbing as one of Matt Le Tissier's Covid rants.
Arsenal don't play teams off the park, they hold them hostage with paperwork. It's IKEA football – all tedious precision and no sense of fun. They don't win games, they audit them.
Mikel Arteta's risk-averse philosophy might win Arsenal the title - but it will bore the rest of us
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Mikel Arteta's risk-averse philosophy might win Arsenal the title - but it will bore the rest of us
If elite-level football is now just about who makes the fewest mistakes then – like Ange Postecoglou after his Nottingham Forest s*** show – we're well and truly f*****.
Idiots, the Slot of them
There were actually Liverpool fans who wanted Arne Slot sacked prior to their recent uptick in form, which is the daftest thing to come out of Merseyside since Wayne Rooney.
I get it, the Reds have been giving up titles faster than Prince Andrew, but the reaction to their poor run was baffling – Liverpool spending £116million on the German version of Charlie Adam-levels of baffling.
Sure, it's mostly just berks on social media – a place where knee-jerk nonsense festers worse than on Joey Barton's YouTube channel. But this is what modern fandom is.
Arne Slot
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The fact that some Liverpool fans wanted Arne Slot sacked last month shows how fickle modern supporters are(Image: Photo by Liverpool FC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
We have a generation of spoiled brats raised on instant gratification and FIFA Career Mode, where players and managers can be binned off with all the care, compassion and logic of Sir Jim Ratcliffe sacking Manchester United's tea ladies.
One whiff of adversity and their loyalty does what Mo Salah's been doing all season: it disappears. To them, patience isn't a virtue; it's a weakness, one as glaring as the issues in Liverpool's back four.
Yes, fans have always been fickle, but there's an extra layer of entitlement baked into it these days. It's almost as if Gen Z football fans don't really support teams – they review them like Netflix shows. A couple of bad episodes and it's off the watchlist – and someone's getting cancelled.
To them I say: sod off back to your algorithmic highlight reels and leave the real football to the rest of us.
Arne you being serious?
Arne Slot speaks during a conference
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Arne Slot's excuses were Jurgen Klopp-levels of ridiculous(Image: Getty Images)
Slot might be staying at Liverpool, but his lame excuses need to go - they're worse than his taste in full-backs!
In recent weeks he's been channelling his inner Jurgen Klopp – who infamously blamed the wind, a witch (no joke, check it out) and probably the Mersey ferry for blowing its horn at the precise moment Alisson was diving to make a save – churning out excuses faster than Chelsea churn through c*** goalkeepers.
Firstly, he blamed Liverpool's opponents for – get this – setting up defensively against him. That's like blaming Micah Richards for laughing too hard at an average joke: it's literally his whole thing.
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Then he moaned that he didn't have a very strong bench – which, from a man who spent nearly half a billion quid on new players this summer, shows the kind of self-awareness that would make even Prince "why won't anyone feel sorry for my private jet lifestyle?" Harry blush.
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I get it, losing all the time – including to Manchester United, with, of all people, Harry Maguire scoring a late winner – would send anyone loopier than one of Trent Alexander-Arnold's crosses.
But that's still no excuse for flat-earth-level delusion, even for a Liverpool man.