This has been a special year for us, because 2025 marked the 40th anniversary of Arsenal in the Community.
Our sense of community runs through our DNA and has done since we were formed in 1886 – and we have always felt a sense of duty to respond to the needs of our local area.
Islington is a borough of extremes, home to some of the wealthiest postcodes in the country as well as some of the most vulnerable pockets of deprivation in our capital, with mental health, unemployment and loneliness particularly pressing issues.
These challenges are interlinked. They fuel each other and form a cycle. Over the past 40 years, Arsenal in the Community – set up by Ken Friar and Alan Sefton in 1985 and led initially by Vic Akers – has worked to help break that cycle by giving people a sense of belonging. Since 2011, this has been strengthened further through grant-giving by The Arsenal Foundation.
We take great pride in all of this work. Through football, support and education, we have helped young people at risk of falling into a life of crime steer themselves towards a brighter future. We help tackle issues of social inclusion by providing safe spaces for vulnerable members of our community, building trusted relationships and offering valuable connections.
We raise aspirations by creating employment, education and mentoring opportunities that improve skills and help individuals thrive.
Significantly, this sense of belonging also naturally contributes to improved physical and mental well-being.
Today, our community team touches the lives of 6,000 local people every week through more than 40 regular community programmes, delivered by a dedicated workforce of around 100 full-time and part-time staff. These are special people – not just football coaches, but teachers, youth workers, mentors, health workers, employment officers and more.
Through our connection to this club and this family, we are able to reach people where other institutions may not be able to, and in doing so we help create opportunities and positive outcomes for people in our local area.
This is the story of our impact, and of the people without whom it would not be possible.
community in our dna
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Arsenal Football Club was born out of community. A group of munitions workers formed a football team as relief from their work in Woolwich, and that deep-rooted connection with the people around us has only grown since the club moved to Islington in 1913.
Even in those early days, matchday programme cards were sold to raise money for Homes for Working Boys at the club’s former home in Woolwich, south London. When we moved to north London, we wanted to continue that spirit of giving back and being part of our local community.
After the First World War, we made a financial contribution to the Islington War Memorial Fund and gifted 1,000 guineas to the Great Northern Hospital on Holloway Road for the endowment of a bed.
As the club has grown over the years, so has our ability to make a difference. This commitment was formalised in 1985, when we became the first club in the country to establish a dedicated community department. At the time, there was no expectation to do so, but we felt that giving something back to our community was simply the right thing to do, as we had done throughout our history.
The move to Emirates Stadium in 2006 gave us the opportunity to expand our reach even further across Islington and beyond.
Based at The Arsenal Hub next to Emirates Stadium, we deliver a wide range of sport, education, work skills, social inclusion and health projects. Many of these initiatives are long-standing and remain at the forefront of sports-based interventions.
“In 1985 the club felt it was right to give back to the residents surrounding Highbury to share in the team’s progress,” says Freddie Hudson, Director of Arsenal in the Community. “Corporate social responsibility wasn’t a thing and there was absolutely no obligation to do so. There were particular social challenges in the 1980s and early 1990s – unemployment was high, especially among young adults, there were racial tensions and a generation that felt disconnected and unheard.
"The community team quickly found a natural connection and ability to engage. Local people wanted to connect with the club, and our football projects started to address some of these social issues. The move to Emirates Stadium brought with it some of the most significant investment in our community since we were established as a club. The physical regeneration, including more than 3,000 homes, a state-of-the-art waste recycling centre and The Hub, has added significantly to the fabric of Islington.”
> “No one should feel excluded”
One long-time supporter who fully understands the role Arsenal in the Community plays is Lola Young, Baroness Young of Hornsey, who features on the Supporters’ Wall mural at Emirates Stadium.
“I was brought up in the care system in a children’s home close to the Highbury stadium. It was a really difficult time and I felt a real sense of dislocation – the complete opposite of feeling a sense of community, which is what I longed for,” she says. “My community was my friends at school, but then at 15 I discovered Arsenal and it blew my mind to have this point of interest that wasn’t the children’s home.
“Fast forward more than 50 years and I discovered Arsenal in the Community’s walking football sessions in 2018. I had been a season ticket holder since 2010 and I’d always been sporty, but netball was too brutal. So I joined the lost generation of women who had never been allowed to play football and I discovered there was an incredible connection between people from diverse communities.
"The football was good for our mental and physical health, and then we would all go for a coffee afterwards and enjoy that social connection. I realised how broad Arsenal in the Community’s support is: old, young, male, female, ethnic minorities, the socially isolated.
"Arsenal specifically targets minorities and does so much work with disaffected young people, who might be in a community but not a positive one that is going to help them grow and progress in their lives.
“A sense of belonging is so incredibly important, no matter how large or small the community,” she adds. “It’s easy to be disconnected and it’s important to feel your feet on the ground and feel a connection to the people you’re physically engaged with; to feel that pride, especially in a city the size of London, which can be so isolating. No one should feel excluded.”
ARSENAL KICKS
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One of our flagship programmes, delivered in partnership with the Premier League, is Arsenal Kicks. The Kicks programme launched in 2006 as a pilot in London between the Premier League and the Metropolitan Police, with a vision to build safer, stronger and more respectful communities through the development of young people’s potential.
The aim was to use football to bring communities together, engage with young people who were difficult to reach, and create opportunities for their personal development. This launch enabled us to begin our first Kicks programme in Elthorne Park that same year. The estate had been causing concern for years, with crime, drug use and anti-social behaviour on the rise.
Our first Kicks scheme was so successful that it soon expanded to four nights of football and a boxing session at Islington Boxing Club, before being rolled out to other estates.
Raphael Nyarko, aged 32 and from Hackney, is just one of the latest participants to have been inspired into coaching by taking part in Kicks. He explains that he first heard about it when coaches came to his local area, the Gascoyne Estate.
Seeing sessions run right where he lived made the programme feel accessible. He took part in a wide range of activities, including tournaments and trips, which helped him grow both as a player and as a person. Raphael says the staff are genuinely amazing and have supported him for years, helping him gain confidence and develop as a coach. They believed in him, trusted him with responsibilities and encouraged him at every stage.
He says he is extremely grateful for everything they’ve done. Being part of Kicks has shaped him into a better coach and a positive role model, giving him purpose and direction.
Kicks is open to boys and girls, which was a founding principle of Arsenal in the Community from the start, long before it was fashionable to encourage girls to play football.
Prior to The Hub, Arsenal in the Community was based at the JVC Centre behind the Clock End at Highbury, which is where England’s most successful women’s club was founded in 1987 when we set up a programme to provide local women with a safe and inclusive space to play.
Freedom from Torture
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Another of our long-running projects is a football and therapy programme run in partnership with Freedom from Torture, a charity that supports survivors of torture from across the world.
Many survivors face not only the physical and emotional consequences of torture, but also the social and practical challenges of leaving behind their homes, families and livelihoods.
On top of that, they must navigate the asylum system with minimal social or economic resources. Torture affects every aspect of a person’s life. The partnership between Arsenal in the Community and Freedom from Torture expanded in 2011 to include English classes and, the following year, a football group.
Clients are referred by their clinician at Freedom from Torture, provided it is medically safe for them to take part.
The sessions are held at The Arsenal Hub, offering a safe space and a meaningful connection with the club and our staff.
One beneficiary, Alex, arrived in the UK from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1999 but only discovered Freedom from Torture in 2012.
He explains that he joined the Arsenal football sessions through the charity. Although he loved football, he had not been able to play since suffering a stroke and was unsure if he would be allowed to join because he struggled even to walk. However, he was welcomed warmly and encouraged to take part.
He began going to the gym, where a staff member worked with him as a personal trainer to help rebuild his fitness. Having missed football deeply, he felt as though he had been given a new lease of life. He says football opens his mind and the group helps him feel free.
He has made many friends and describes the sessions as like having a second family—especially meaningful because he lives alone. This sense of belonging has helped transform his life from stressful to stress free, and his hope for the future is simply to return to the life he had before his stroke.
Playing alongside fit, active people motivates him, and he says football supports him both physically and mentally.
Coaching for Life
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We will not rest because our work is never done – there are always challenges to meet and individuals to reach. We are to a large degree self-sustaining, in that 60% of our sessional coaches are former participants, and those ties to the people we meet who feel that sense of belonging mean that, with every year, our roots grow deeper and stronger, both here in London and beyond.
And we go way beyond. The best example of that is a programme funded through The Arsenal Foundation called Coaching for Life, which is delivered in collaboration with Save the Children at the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, home to displaced Syrians who have fled the civil war.
Coaching for Life, which launched in 2018, combines more than 100 years of Save the Children’s child protection expertise and Arsenal in the Community’s sports-for-development experience to build vulnerable children’s mental, emotional and physical wellbeing through football. In doing so, we delivered a community programme in one of the toughest environments in the world.
The goal was and remains clear: together we give children back their childhoods, provide them with the tools to rebuild their lives and coach them towards a better future.
Since Coaching for Life started, more than 5,000 children have graduated from the programme. Our work in Islington informs our approach in Jordan. Coaches in Za’atari include students from our Coach Development Programme, a one-year course based at The Arsenal Hub that offers comprehensive education from our team of experienced coaches and industry experts, and involves leading and supporting sessions across our range of Arsenal in the Community projects at home and abroad.
Riley Butler was a student on the course whose ties with Arsenal in the Community changed his life beyond his imagination. “My relationship with Arsenal started over 10 years ago,” he says. “I started doing the Double Club project through my primary school, where I learned Spanish and played football during the holidays.
“Arsenal helped me grow as a person. I had a troubled school life and lost a lot of my confidence and will to go out. Then I started doing Employability sessions at The Arsenal Hub and got a lot of my confidence back; I got my first Saturday job working on a market stall selling Arsenal merchandise.
> “Arsenal have given me my whole career. My confidence, my ability to talk, my ability to coach – it’s all come from here”
"It has given me everything, and I want to do the same to give back to our participants, whether that’s walking football sessions with people who are in their eighties or primary school sessions with six-year-olds.
“For some people it’s their whole lives. Our fitness classes draw people who have disabilities, Parkinson’s disease, prostate cancer or mental health issues, and our coaches give them a chance to belong and be heard. Or a child can feel at home at our sessions and have as much fun as they want.”
Arsenal in the Community coach Rebecca Finch is a graduate of the programme who has seen first-hand the links between our work locally and at Za’atari. “I participated on CDP two years ago now and without it I definitely wouldn’t be the coach, or even the person, that I am today,” she says. “Not only did we learn how to coach a variety of different games, groups of people and styles of football, but we learned to communicate and connect with the community and each other.
"Being a part of Coaching for Life was truly a life-changing experience and one I’ll forever be grateful for. Meeting and working alongside the coaches in the camp was incredible; they are such creative and inspiring role models for the children in the camp to look up to, and they really capture and demonstrate the resilience and joy the programme aims to deliver to the children.
“The children in the sessions really invest and enjoy the programme, so much so that many have stayed on as junior coaches to help deliver the sessions and learn to coach themselves.
"It’s such a special programme and one that truly does positively impact everyone who is lucky enough to work or participate in it.
“Coaching for Life really does provide such a vital connection to the world for everyone in Za’atari who is involved,” she adds. “They feel seen. They feel part of Arsenal and its community, and rightly so. Lots of the games delivered locally are also delivered in Za’atari, as well as mini-leagues and work by coaches to invest in participants as people, not just players.
“Our work in the local community has always been with the aim to uplift and include, and extending that out to Za’atari in the form of Coaching for Life has done exactly that.”
arsenal in the community today
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Our goal remains the same as when Arsenal in the Community was founded: to create a sense of belonging that helps both our local and global communities thrive. “It’s what we strive for,” says Hudson. “It’s for our participants to find belonging in our club and our borough and places like Za’atari, but also a sense of belonging in themselves.”
For us, everything stems from our teams. We are a football club first and foremost, founded on community. But we perform at our best when our community is behind us, and we have more impact in our community when our team performs at their best. They fuel each other.
Working with our local community partners, there is no doubt that we are helping people cope better with the challenges they face. We don’t have a magic wand or quick answers, but we share a commitment to working in partnership to support those who are struggling in some way.
It’s hard to quantify emotions or neatly categorise the people impacted by our work, but there are some numbers that speak for themselves. Our first Economic and Social Impact report, published in November 2024 by EY, found that Arsenal Football Club contributed more than half a billion pounds to the UK economy during the 2022/23 season alone. We supported 4,400 UK jobs and reached more than 14,000 people through our community projects that season.
The club delivered £616 million in economic value (GVA) to the UK economy, with £425 million of that contributed in Islington. In addition, 5,000 people per week participated in Arsenal in the Community initiatives, which collectively delivered more than 140,000 hours of community-based activity, and that’s just one season.
Back in north London, Hudson looks ahead. “We’re well placed to drive outcomes for our community,” he says. “It’s not just football sessions we run. We have a workforce of teachers, employment officers, youth workers, mentors and health workers that care deeply about the individuals, groups and neighbourhoods they work in.”
“We appreciate the importance of partnerships and value the platform we have to help lift the voices of sections of our community who feel they are not heard – just like those in the 1980s and early 1990s when Arsenal in the Community first realised the impact we were able to deliver.”
Copyright 2025 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.