Despite a recent wobble, Arsenal enter today’s North London Derby against Tottenham as the favourites to win the Premier League. The title has eluded Mikel Arteta’s team since the 2003/04 season, and they have finished in second three seasons in a row. At the prospect of victory, emotions are running high, among both players and supporters. The latter camp includes Keir Starmer: the Prime Minister is a season ticket holder and a genuine fan.
The same is true of much of Britain’s liberal establishment and cultural elite – people like Starmer. If you speak to a barrister, senior civil servant or media executive in the capital, they will be more likely to support Arsenal than any other club.
This is not an accident. Over the last three decades the club embraced internationalism, anti-racism and professionalism, values which speak to liberal England’s idea of itself. English football in general has moved in this direction but Arsenal did so earlier and more overtly than rivals, marking a clear break with the violence and decay that English football represented in the 1980s. Being an Arsenal fan gained respectability in polite company before football more broadly did. To outsiders, though, the vibe of modern Arsenal fandom can sometimes come across as a bit smug, LinkedIn-coded, not quite proper – a bit like the PM.
The cultural moment that signifies the shift is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, published in 1992. It was a brilliant book on fandom that marked the first time that football was considered a mainstream literary topic, and its chosen club was Arsenal. In 1992, English football was changing quickly. The Premier League launched the same year as that book, injecting professionalism and money into a game that – following the Hillsborough disaster – needed both. The game had become associated with violence, racism and crumbling stadiums. Its loose connection with Middle England had been severed.
On the pitch, the cosmopolitan turn happened quickly. When the Premier League launched, there were barely a dozen foreign players across 22 teams. By 1999 Chelsea fielded a team without a single Englishman in the starting XI. Arsenal led this trend too, signing Dutchman Dennis Bergkamp in 1995 and Frenchman Patrick Vieira in 1996. Another Frenchman, Thierry Henry, signed three years later, is perhaps Arsenal’s greatest player ever. Finally, Arsène Wenger, also French, at Arsenal from 1996 to 2018, was the first foreign manager to achieve sustained success in England. His sophisticated ideas about diet, tactics and shopping for players abroad changed the domestic game forever. It all worked out on the pitch with Arsenal winning three league titles between 1998 and 2004.
It all chimed neatly with an ascendant liberal-cosmopolitan worldview. In 1997 The Fast Show parodied posh Arsenal fan Roger Nouveau who not only ate from a picnic basket but was obnoxiously ignorant of the rules of the game and how to talk about it without looking like an idiot. Three decades later almost the opposite stereotype is true – Arsenal fans are less likely to be ignorant than irritatingly overeducated, disproportionately data-literate professionals at ease with football’s statistical revolution. Yet in the same way, this can feel one step removed from the traditional blood and thunder of the English game.
Arsenal did have a longer tradition of openness. Before the Nineties, the club had established itself as the best-supported club among black Londoners of all social classes on both sides of the river. And Arsenal, while not uniquely virtuous, was never strongly associated with overt racism, unlike Chelsea, West Ham and of course Millwall. Black people felt comfortable going to games at Highbury earlier than elsewhere. Ian Wright and David Rocastle became terrace heroes at a time when the idea of an English football crowd embracing a black player as one their own was unusual. Arsenal also have the best-supported women’s team in the country and the most successful alongside Chelsea. The big northern clubs are light years behind. This too feeds into the club’s modern liberal identity.
The Nineties transformation was not total. Most Arsenal fans are not posh; unlike areas like Chelsea and Fulham, Islington’s reputation for wealth is relatively recent. For much of the 20th century, North London was rather hardscrabble compared to the West. It is truly ethnically diverse, while Islington has big council estates and some of the highest child poverty rates in the country. When property prices exploded in the 1990s and 2000s, many Londoners moved further out, to places like Hertfordshire and Essex, taking their football fandom with them. This means London football fandom is now less tied to geography. Arsenal are the best-supported team across the capital and you are almost as likely to see shirts in Croydon or Hillingdon as Islington.
Arsenal were the only sustained challenger to the dominance of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United for a decade. But the glory years ended when foreign oil money began to splash upon English shores, first in the form of Roman Abramovich who bought Chelsea in 2003, then with Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City from 2008. It would take more than a decade of patient building, with a new stadium and the dividends of the Premier League’s international TV boom starting to bear fruit, before Arsenal would challenge at the top again.
Despite less success, Arsenal retained their position as the natural club of the liberal establishment. Others represent different Londons – Chelsea the nouveau-riche west, West Ham the gritty east. Tottenham is a less salubrious pocket of the capital than Islington and the club’s recent self-image, despite a spectacular stadium and a European trophy last season, is one of chronic underachievement.
Whatever the result of the North London Derby, that elusive Premier League title feels eminently achievable. If the club does manage it, Mikel Arteta, the human embodiment of a Ted Talk or motivational LinkedIn post, will deserve his flowers. That is unless Arsenal drown under the weight of their own neuroses and finish second once again. It would be a very liberal establishment thing to happen.
[Further reading: The relentless drudgery of wedding food]
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Subscribe here to commentIt’s worth noting that in late March, the British Library is hosting an Arsenal Special Football Writing Festival featuring ‘journalists, fans, celebrities and some very special guests, all talking about Arsenal FC and the business of writing about, playing for and following one of the world’s biggest clubs.’
Not sure if this definitively proves D’Urso’s point about the club being the most popular amongst the country’s liberal establishment and cultural elite, but if the occasion sees Robert Peston, Nick Hornby, Tom Hiddleston, Martin Kemp, Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Anne Hathaway, Tom Newton Dunn, Amy Lawrence, Piers Morgan, Dermot O’Leary and Spike Lee all link arms and join together in a rousing rendition of ‘She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’ in celebration of the club’s victory against Manchester City the previous week, I – for one – will be applauding.
Ha, I had no idea about that! How very interesting. I simply can’t imagine a Tottenham or Chelsea writing festival, or not at the British Library for £32 a ticket.