A discussion of why Arsenal’s title win and the resulting celebrations feel particularly special.
“What made you an Arsenal fan?”
It’s a question I’ve gotten a lot lately in the aftermath of the Gunners taking their rightful place as Premier League champions (damn, that feelsso good to say). And it’s a question I’ve always found easy to answer. Thierry Henry, 2006 Champions League final, blah, blah, blah, Arsène Wenger turning football into an art, yada yada. I’ve told the story a thousand times before.
But on Sunday, as I scrambled to watch the champions’ parade on free in-flight WiFi, I finally discovered the answer to a different question, one that no one has asked me but I’ve interrogated internally for years all the same: “why do you love Arsenal?”
It’s not that I didn’t have an answer, or that I didn’t know at least the gist of it. But I am, at least in some parts of my life, a bit of a perfectionist. I have long been quietly annoyed with myself for being unable to properly define what has earned my devotion to this club past inadequate nods toward diversity, inclusion, and values.
Okay, maybe my answers haven’t been that bad. But like I said, I’m a perfectionist. I have high expectations of myself when it comes to putting things into words. After all, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of them for this newsletter alone.
Those words finally came to me on Sunday after seeing at least a million people squeeze into the streets of north London, after watching hundreds of fans waving at the parade bus from the roof of Highbury Station, after observing more Arsenal shirts in my own corner of the world than I ever have before. When I beheld that crowd of people from so many races, creeds, faiths, identities, and backgrounds practically spilling off the building as the very air around them turned red, something stirred in the depths of my mind. At once, it reminded me of so many moments from my life.
It reminded me of growing up as a Middle Eastern kid, navigating puberty and a post-9/11 America largely on my own but with a little help from some good friends I made along the way, who saw the good in me even when I couldn’t at times.
It reminded me of the wily old biology professor who took me on as a teaching assistant during a difficult start to life as a college student, regaling me as I graded exams with stories about his golden retriever named Miss Heidi and having to eat Ritz crackers topped with ketchup for sustenance during his expeditions to Antarctica.
It reminded me of the charming corporate attorney who took a chance on me after a single conversation over the phone, guiding me through an interview for an internship and teaching me much of what I know about what I currently do for a day job.
It reminded me of a girlfriend who decided not to dump me despite the fact that I lived in a poorly lit studio apartment littered with hair, dust, and untouched kitchen appliances. Today, she’s my wife who loves to (correctly) tell everyone that she taught me how to cook.
And in that moment, I realized the thing about Arsenal that has earned my undying affection more than anything else is their belief in individuals. This club sees potential in people. The tales of the Gunners’ greatest achievements have involved placing immense faith in players and managers when others in their position wouldn’t have.
For me, that is the core value of Arsenal Football Club: trust. Trust in others to achieve greatness when it is the hardest and riskiest to do so, before that capacity for achievement is so obvious everyone can see it. By and large, this club sees its people for who they could go on to be. I thinkAmara Nwankpa puts it far more eloquently than I can:
“The best, and most enduring, encapsulation of the Arsenal identity is not a race, a trophy, or even a style of play. You will find it in a quiet statue at the Emirates: a boy in 1945, kicking a ball under the manager’s car outside Highbury, retrieving it, and being offered a job for nothing more than his enthusiasm. Ken Friar stayed seventy years: messenger, secretary, managing director, life president. He was recognised before he had proved anything, and he never left. That is the club’s deepest pattern. It sees people not as they are, but as they could become. Recognition, offered first, becomes loyalty that outlasts everyone.”
Before he achieved the only invincible title in the history of the Premier League, before he modernized diets and training regiments and revolutionized English football, Arsène Wenger was manager at Japanese side Nagoya Grampus Eight. The Frenchman was a polyglot with an economics degree and a rather unremarkable playing career behind him, a hilariously far cry from your typical British manager at the time. And yet, one of the most storied clubs in England rolled the dice and hired him against a backdrop of mockery and articles titled “Arsène Who?”. The rest, of course, is history.
The Non-Negotiables is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The paid subscription is more of a “tip jar” option; there are no additional benefits, you would just be exercising your generosity. Either way, I am grateful for your readership.
Wenger embodied that value himself throughout his tenure at Arsenal. Time and time again, Le Professeur entrusted relative unknowns with the responsibility of the badge. Henry was a struggling winger at Juventus before he moved to north London. Robert Pires was practically at war with Marseille when Arsenal swooped in. Theo Walcott arrived from Southampton aged 16 and played Premier League and Champions League minutes at the first possible opportunities. Laurent Koscielny had been playing for newly-promoted FC Lorient the season before the Gunners acquired his services. A year after sending him to Bolton on loan, Wenger deployed 19-year-old Jack Wilshere against Barcelona’s legendary midfield of Xavi, Iniesta, and Sergio Busquets.
Long before the years of self-imposed austerity that came with the move to the Emirates Stadium, Wenger publicly affirmed his commitment to giving chances to somewhat overlooked players. “We don’t sign superstars, we make them” is a quote that we have all proudly repeated in the two decades since the Frenchman defiantly uttered it. Unearthing gems, he understood, was part of what Arsenal were all about. It’s why with him at the helm Arsenal became the first English club to name nine Black players in a starting eleven.
Of course, the faith came with heartbreak. Robin van Persie, Cesc Fabregas, Emmanuel Adebayor, Olivier Giroud, and many others all eventually left to win their titles elsewhere. For years, Wenger watched on as even his most loyal disciples eventually gave in to the allure of riches and silverware.
But there was one player who continued to justify that investment of belief. In the wake of perhaps Arsenal’s most embarrassing loss in their history, the Gunners entrusted him with replacing a midfield superstar. It was a big club move he had perhaps given up on ever experiencing. He seized the opportunity, eventually earned the armband, and helped lead Arsenal to two FA Cup triumphs. That player was Mikel Arteta.
The Spaniard tearfully retired an Arsenal player before becoming an assistant coach under Pep Guardiola. But it was clear that his love for the London club never faded. As his Manchester City regularly routed the Gunners, Arteta could be seen on the bench barely concealing a sad look as his colleagues celebrated around him. Guardiola would later comment on how much “this guy likes Arsenal”.
This was doubtlessly apparent to Arsenal too. Accordingly, the club’s foremost executives traveled up to Manchester one evening late in 2019 to offer Arteta the reins of their first team. At perhaps the lowest point in the club’s history since Wenger’s arrival, Arsenal entrusted a full-scale rebuild with a former captain who had no managerial experience. Because they knew who Arteta was and what he was capable of. Based on the fact that they left his home in the dead of night hours after they had been received there, they were more than willing to hear Arteta out.
After hiring him for such a mammoth task, Arsenal stuck by their man in the difficult moments. When the Gunners found themselves bottom of the Premier League after three games in 2021, Josh Kroenke offered the manager words of encouragement instead of showing him the exit. After Arsenal finished second thrice in a row and even Arteta began to doubt himself, the club brought in a shrewd ally in Andrea Berta and reinvested heavily in the squad. I’m fairly confident Kroenke and company would have backed Arteta again even if he wasn’t now a champion of England.
Like his old manager before him, Arteta paid his faith forward. The cornerstone of his project is an academy graduate the whole of England vilified after a missed penalty in the Euro 2020 final. Its captain is a former wonderkid whom Real Madrid had cast aside. One of Arteta’s most trusted lieutenants was a little-known defender the manager deemed worth £50 million during a summer in which Ibrahima Konaté, Jules Koundé, and Raphaël Varane were chased by rivals. The man who effectively won the league for Arsenal this season joined the club from Chelsea as a pariah, despite having first arrived in London as a future Ballon d’Or candidate.
I could of course go on, but I’ve done so for long enough. This was all probably a little too much already. But such is the extent that belief in people is intertwined into the history of Arsenal Football Club.
The prominence of that main tenet is why the Gunners boast such a diverse and global following. With such a steadfast dedication to that core doctrine the club have, knowingly or not, tapped into a universal condition that resides within all of us. Every immigrant, every outcast, every person of humble means, the downtrodden, the persecuted, and the neglected all yearn for the thing that this institution has stood for over decades and decades: a chance. Arsenal are the club of the tired, poor, huddled masses.
We therefore see ourselves in this team, comprised of rejects, dreamers, and the underestimated. We know what it’s like to be written off from the outset. For so many Arsenal fans from different backgrounds, upbringings, and parts of the world, it is a lived experience. The club, its players, its manager, and even its set piece coach are systematically othered by media apparatuses in a way that, at least to me, is vaguely familiar.
And that’s why we have for so many years now been desperate to see this Arsenal side win. Long before they confirmed it for the world to see, we (or at least most of us) knew this manager and these players had the ability to become champions. We saw the potential in them, just as we all wish others would see the potential in us.
So the explosion of joy — and relief — in north London and all over the globe as Arsenal finally clinched the Premier League title was to be expected. Finally, the faith shown in Arteta and his charges had been unquestionably justified. The red and white ribbons dangling from that gleaming trophy served as a final vindication of our collective decision to believe in people before they delivered.
The celebration that has already begun and will continue throughout the summer is one centered around that foundational law, that it is good and natural to believe in people and help them along their way. In that titanic throng in London were artists, doctors, a man famous for playing a particularly sardonic doctor on TV, lawyers, engineers, chefs, architects, content creators, athletes, and the Mother of Dragons herself. Elsewhere, the congratulations and jubilation have flooded in from the likes of Zohran Mamdani, Lewis Hamilton, Idris Elba, and Cat Stevens.
All those people come from different heritages and origins. All have their own identities. All have aspired to be something. And all, to one extent or another, have needed others to believe in them in order to get where they are today.
With all that in mind, Arsenal’s Premier League triumph and the inspiration and joy it will bring to millions for years to come is proof positive of the club’s lighthouse principle. It is corroboration of the theory that people should be seen as what they could become. And in a world that feels dimmer and more dangerous with each passing day, this convergence around the ideal of honoring the potential within all of us feels significant. At a time when we are more isolated from and fearful of each other than ever, those celebrations — not just the parade, but in the hours following Manchester City’s draw at Bournemouth and as Arsenal officially hoisted the trophy — are an oasis of connection, a brief reprieve from the psychic onslaught of world events. Fleetingly but meaningfully all the same, we are finding each other in the darkness.
That’s why I love Arsenal. Because this club keeps me grounded in hope. They remind me to keep believing in people, despite what the powers that be may tell us. They remind me that I am not alone and that I am not nothing. And in the end, isn’t that what we’re all looking for?
If you enjoyed this post, please consider following me on Twitter@Shamsdale or on Bluesky@shamsdale.bsky.social.
Or you can buy me a coffeehere.