Why not? Plenty of people look down on possession football, and many of them are exactly the same people who get in high dudgeon about comments like this. On literally hundreds of occasions I've seen possession-based approaches describes as boring, tactically naive, and contrary to the back-and-forth combative essence of football, and nobody ever pops up to tell these people their opinion is arrogant and unnecessary.

You say "it's fine to prefer" one style but not to look down on others; in an entertainment medium I see no useful or necessary distinction between those two. It really just seems like a tendentious bludgeon to use against comments like Ben Arfa's: when somebody insults possession-based or proactive football, however stridently, they get to just be expressing an opinion, but when somebody insults defensive and/or counter-attacking football, they're somehow doing something different and more insidious. Ben Arfa may not have put "in my opinion" in front of his opinion, but that's still what it is; an opinion, a preference, which you acknowledge he has every right to. He makes a prediction about the future of the style which I don't agree with, so I'm not really arguing his opinion is correct - you're perfectly right to call it silly - but the idea that there's something wrong with it morally doesn't make any sense to me. He also says Atletico deserve respect, so it isn't as though he's going out of his way to be rude.

In short, I genuine don't see why football professionals don't have the right to be dogmatic about how they feel the game ought to be played. If I watch a movie, I don't just have the right to say I don't like it - I have the right to say it's bad and nobody else should like it either, and that other movies shouldn't emulate it even if it's commercially successful. That opinion doesn't do anything, but I don't see any problem with expressing it.