Please Allow Me Some Self-Indulgence

Many people have waited 22 years to see Arsenal lift the Premier League trophy. I have only waited six, but that was long enough.

I was not born an Arsenal fan. My flatmate and longtime friend, S, is a third generation fan, the honour (or burden) passed down from her grandfather to her father and then to her. My dad was born in West London and he and all his brothers were Fulham fans. Supporting Fulham was what was expected of all of their children, including me and my brother. If you wanted to be a contrarian in my family, to support anyone other than Fulham, to fight with your uncles and cousins at family gatherings, you supported Chelsea. Everyone hated Chelsea in my family and that’s one thing that hasn’t left me.

Feelings were pretty neutral towards Arsenal, as I remember. I didn't think much about them, barring my crush on Theo Walcott. In fact, despite my dad's best efforts, didn't think much about football at all as a kid. My dad's investment in Fulham has always been very dependent on their form and he was never that keen to return to London to watch them play. The only time I saw them was when they played a pre-season friendly against Exeter City, who were pretty local to me growing up. My dad had a mate who was involved in the club in some way I never really grasped, so we went to see a few games at St. James' Park. I even went to see Exeter City in a playoff game at Wembley, which they ended up losing. My dad and brother went again the following year but I decided not to go. I was a very anxious child and I hated being far from home or being in a crowd. I think by that point both my dad and I knew that his attemps to get me into football had failed.

Years passed. My dad had moved on to bonding with me over music and left the football chat for my brother. I vaguely followed the progress of England at major tournaments but otherwise I was totally uninterested. I was bookish and uncoordinated and queer and felt that all of these things made football somehow incompatible with me. I worked in a pub during the 2018 World Cup and enjoyed the atmosphere and the busyness and got swept up in it along with everyone else. Then it was over and I sobered up and remembered I couldn't be a football fan.

But in 2019, something changed. The first domino to fall was the Women's World Cup. I was 21 and had spent nearly a decade curating an online community of other nerdy, lefty, queer people. These were not the kind of people, in my mind, to ever be interested in football, but suddenly they were all posting about the Lionesses and the USWNT. Suddenly there were cool, outspoken female athletes on my radar. (I must note here that I was always aware that women played football and I think I even went to a Lionesses game as a kid, but I never thought that I could be part of that community). And the best thing about these women? They were pissing men off. Specifically, right-wing red-or-orange-faced white men who played the keyboard bongos on Twitter. And I wanted in on anything that made those men mad.

When the Lionesses crashed out of the semi-finals, I caught only snippets of the action because watching the game made my mum "too anxious". But my interest was piqued and I was on a steady spiral into football fandom, whether I knew it or not. Unlike the previous summer, football remained on my mind after the tournament was over, all because Alex Scott was taking part in the new series of Strictly. (Now you see how this comes together!) This was big news for S, my good friend, Strictly-lover and life-long Arsenal fan. I became pretty invested in Alex's Strictly journey (partly because of the online hate she was getting and partly for gay reasons) and S saw her chance. I was going to become a fan of Arsenal Women and I didn't really have any choice in the matter.

Whatsapp messages between me & S in 2019

So, by the end of 2019, I was an Arsenal Women fan. S had regaled me with stories about the club's history, and how they had backed their women's team when no other club really had. I was absolutely hyperfixated on AWFC but I felt pretty guilty about it. It was as though I was betraying my dad for all his efforts to get me into football as a child, and as though I was betraying my mum for no longer being the only other member of the family who wasn't obsessed with sports. I started to watch games, secretly, in my room. I remember us signing Caitlin Foord in January of 2020 and the devastating cup final loss to Chelsea in March. I lurked on woso Twitter, feeling too old and tired for the drama but wanting to know about it either way.

Then COVID hit. The WSL ended abruptly several months early and there was suddenly no football for me to watch. Well, there was football, but men were playing it. I could have started watching Fulham here and felt like I was making it up to my Dad a little bit. But I didn't. I started watching Arsenal Men for the first time. It meant I could still text S about football and it also meant I got to see Hector Bellerin (the bisexuality factor must be considered in all of my decisions). The problem was, 2020 Arsenal were abysmal. The stadiums were empty, Arteta was fresh out of Pep's managerial school and the football was bad. I was suffering, but it was a collective suffering alongside millions of fellow fans, alongside a conviction that we would one day be rewarded.

It didn't take long. That summer we won the FA cup for a record 14th time and I cried in my childhood bedroom and then went downstairs and pretended to my parents that nothing had happened. I felt swept up in a wave of collective joy, stretching from North London, to New York, to Nairobi. Suddenly, I understood why so many people allow 11 players to dictate their emotions on a weekly basis, because there really is nothing quite like when it all comes together.

Football has brought me plenty of joy (and distress) since that FA Cup final. I have seen the Lionesses win back-to-back Euros and was present at Wembley to see them lift the trophy the first time. I have seen Arsenal Women lift two League Cups and even watched them win the Champions League with my own football team (not bad for a bitch with no talent!). I eventually "came out" to my dad as an Arsenal fan and it was fine. (Still not sure he knows how invested I am in the men, and he has asked me if I will change allegiance if Fulham Women ever get to the WSL but I digress). But it has felt like the men have always fallen at the last hurdle. And there have been things going on at the club that have really tested my relationship with the team, with the manager and with Arsenal as an institution. But I'm not going to dwell on that right now.

The fact is, we finally fucking did it! We are Premier League champions in spite of all the hate and the noise. It has been a long and winding road for to get here, but it all feels so worth it. Allow me this self-indulgent look back down what is, comparably, a pretty short and unconventional memory lane. I think we all deserve a little bit of that. We did it! Bukayo Saka, the starboy who carried us through those mediocre seasons and kept my hope alive, finally gets the Champions medal he deserves. Ben White, Gabriel, Martin Ødegaard, all of these players who I have become so fond of over the years, who suffered alongside us but always strove to be better, they deserve this.

The players deserve this and we, as fans, deserve this. Big shoutout toArsenal Bluesky, my international community of comrades who have kept me sane in recent seasons and have kindly left most of the drama for the football pitch. You deserve this. To S, who got me into this mess, and her family who let me watch games with them at their house, you deserve this. And, although my journey has been short and weird and aggressively bisexual in places, I think I deserve this too.