What is Arsenal?

I spent too long on Monday explaining how little as fans we really know our team. Instead I tried to emphasize the anomaly that the club is, in a league of slightly predictable anomalies.
We know what Man United is. We know that when we look at the parts of the machine, there are few players in that team we would like over ours. We could say the same about Chelsea and City, Spurs and Newcastle and so on. Actually, I bet out of all of the above teams, the most players we would want from any one team would probably be Newcastle – which is strange no?
We know how City, United, Chelsea and ourselves will get on. We know how Stoke, Everton, Liverpool and Villa will do. We know because like Malcolm Gladwell writes in Blink, “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. ...