Almost every week right now the Premier League throws up some new and ever more tangential semi-news story – the kind that even through the act of being denounced as a semi-news story manages to keep itself twitching and snarling with undeserved life.

So it is with the booing of Arsène Wenger, an incident that is newsworthy only because it was caught on video, the medium thereby driving the message, and above all because it can be conveniently packaged, a spur to ratchet up the dissatisfaction among some who follow and care about Arsenal’s fortunes. The basic arc of a story such as this demands these pegs, footholds with which to winch itself up into an ever greater state of excitement. A small group of drunk, disappointed men venting their feelings on a train: this will do for now.

There are two obvious issues here. Firstly, is it right to abuse Wenger on a train back from Stoke-on-Trent? Answer: of course not. This is the kind of treatment football should reserve, in extremis, for its real bad guys: the dishonest, the greedy, the unscrupulous. Wenger, by contrast, is a workaholic who cares only about the club and his players. His team are FA Cup holders and through to the last 16 of the Champions League, while the club is financially set thanks, in part, to Wenger’s own unstinting efforts. Abusing him now, and with such bile, feels a bit like like whining at your parents for only getting you five, not six, everlasting gobstoppers, the behaviour of the Veruca Salts of the the footballing world: shrill, entitled, stomping their tiny feet over perceived inadequacies of the in-house chocolate waterfall.

The second point is also pretty clear. Do Arsenal supporters still have the right, within boundaries of good taste, to boo and grouse and whinge? Answer: yes, of course they do. Football supporters have always booed managers. This is in essence what the manager is for, a patsy for the crowds, a lightning rod for the currents of dissent and blame that have long been a part of the sport’s appeal. Managers were being hounded from office as far back as 1930, when Herbert Bramlett was sacked by the Manchester United board after protests on the terraces (against the board). This is not an even-keeled global industry, but a pantomime-ish business of irrational ties and trapped rage. The time to start worrying is when these passions disappear. I may personally disagree with your graceless, short-termist booing and grousing. But I will defend to the last click of the keyboard your right to do it.

And yet none of this should detract from the fact there is a legitimate discussion to be had here, firstly about Arsenal’s under-or over-achievement in recent times and whether Wenger is the right man to take the club through the current period of gear change and secondly – and here the boos begin to make a little more sense – exactly how it has come to pass that this appears to be a discussion with no obvious answer, success so hard to call, tangible achievement so maddeningly intangible.

In this regard Arsenal are a genuinely interesting case study. What exactly is it, in any case, that Wenger is supposed to have been out there winning over the last eight years of cautious financial management? More Carling Cups? More player of the months? Manchester City, Chelsea and Manchester United, all of whom have billionaire-backed spending power, have divvied up the league between them in that time. Similarly since Liverpool in 2005 only Barcelona, United, Milan, Internazionale, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid have won the Champions League, with only Inter, arguably, bucking the era of the super-spenders of the modern game.

When it comes to measuring whether that recent period of trophy-less stasis was one of success or stagnation Tottenham Hotspur are probably the correct point of comparison: the north London club of similar means who did not go ahead and build that new stadium. In this light the biggest problem at Arsenal looks to be not a lack of relative success but the simple monotony of that sustained, fixed-gear commendable achievement. The issue here is not misspent resources or opportunities missed. It is simply the fact that sustained mid-range relative achievement is boring. An ingrained cash-driven hierarchy is boring. The same few teams winning trophies every year is boring. Elite level modern football is, from a certain competitive angle, inescapably boring.

Through this Arsenal fans have been deprived even here of the operetta of managerial comings and goings, the fresh doomed hopes, the thrill of unfamiliar methods. How much more refreshing, perhaps, to be raging instead over new failings, new outrages, purring at new and different strengths not just the same old familiar, maddening matrix of good and bad.

So much for the recent past. Wenger does not deserve to be booed, let alone sacked, for his part in where the club are right now. But can he be trusted with the future? His chief failing in the last 18 months as austerity has eased is not making poor signings, just too few signings. The players brought in have all been relatively good business, while the failure to sign a pair of energetic, high-grade central midfielders and a spare centre-half remains frustrating but not inexplicable. This is the Wenger way: the right player at the right price must be available. So far, in his opinion, they have not.

At the same time, even with the obvious holes, there is still a sense that this unbalanced, defensively short Arsenal team is a click or two away from functioning as it should; and that while the defending against Stoke was woeful (once again) this was (once again) a depleted line-up that had never at any stage been on a Premier League pitch together. The failings are hardly irresolvable. Arsenal could quite easily win six of their next seven matches, sign two key players in January and look an entirely different beast in spring.

All that really seems certain is that Wenger, who is 64, will leave soon enough; that the club he leaves behind will be in excellent shape and ready to be driven on by whichever managerial fortunate gets the chance; and that in the interim there will be booing, not to mention a collective mewling of enervating over-familiarity. What is to be deplored most in all this is simply the fetishising of this discontent, the fashion right now for the media, new and old, to feed and commodify anger, lending an unnatural focus to the familiar old voices of dissent and catharsis.