On Saturday, Arsenal will face Paris Saint-Germain in the UEFA Champions League final. Both near and far from the match in Budapest, the team’s supporters—self-described “Gooners”—will be watching.
Arsenal has a massive global reach. After the North London club won the Premier League on May 19, the official league account posted videos of thousands of Arsenal fans celebrating in the streets of New York, Uganda, and Kenya.
Fellow Premier League sides Manchester United and Liverpool have had worldwide fan bases for decades, but Arsenal’s popularity has particularly spread like wildfire, even amid frustrations on the pitch.
“People do not become Arsenal fans because it’s easy,” New York City Mayor and Arsenal supporter Zohran Mamdani tells Front Office Sports. The team is notorious for blowing its league lead, including in the 2022–23 and 2023–24 seasons, which added to its more than two-decade title drought.
“It’s not easy to wait 22 years. It’s not easy to go through consecutive 8th-place finishes. It’s not easy to have led for so long and then in many ways become the butt of a joke,” he says. “And we saw that for many years. We think about it as the ‘banter era,’ you know, and all of these false dawns. And now for so many, it’s just a sense of realization.”
“It Was All Red”
Since NBC took over Premier League rights in 2013, U.S. viewership has skyrocketed, with Arsenal consistently drawing the biggest audiences.
The Gunners played in each of the five-most-watched Premier League games in the U.S., all of which happened in the past four seasons. April’s Arsenal–Manchester City match, which was hugely important in the Premier League title race, set the record at 2.6 million viewers across NBC, Peacock, and Telemundo.
For that match, NBC Sports put on a fan event in Tampa Bay that more than 15,000 people attended. “When you looked out on the crowd, it was all red,” NBC’s Rebecca Lowe, who will host the FIFA men’s World Cup for Fox this summer, tells FOS.
Arsenal is among the roughly half of Premier League clubs that have been bought by U.S. owners. Billionaire Stan Kroenke owns the Arsenal men’s and women’s sides on top of five other U.S. pro sports teams including the Los Angeles Rams, Denver Nuggets, and Colorado Avalanche. He’s been Arsenal’s co-owner since 2007 and took full control in 2018.
“I think Arsenal are very clever as a club,” says Lowe, “and obviously with an American owner who’s had great success in other sports, they realize the importance of the United States.”
New York City’s Gunners
Lowe says part of Arsenal’s success in the U.S. comes from establishing ties with its supporters groups. That’s particularly the case in New York, where Arsenal fandom runs wild. The city’s official Arsenal supporters club has more than 150,000 followers on Facebook.
One of the strongest pockets of Arsenal fandom lives in Brooklyn. Founded in 2021, the Brooklyn Invincibles began with small watch parties at Fort Greene’s FancyFree, promising the bar it would “start making sense from a business perspective” to open its doors early for matches on Saturday mornings, cofounder Mosito Ramaili tells FOS.
Now with more than 16,000 followers on Instagram, the Invincibles regularly pack FancyFree for matches. Though the community, named after the undefeated 2003–04 “Invincibles” team, is not an “official” supporters group recognized by Arsenal, North London is certainly aware of it: FancyFree was featured in an official Premier League video last week of Arsenal fans celebrating the league title.
The pub is considered one of the main home bases for New York’s Gooners. For Arsenal’s Memorial Day weekend match against Crystal Palace—a game that was ostensibly meaningless, since the club had already clinched the Premier League title—lines snaked out of the pub and into the rain outside.
40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, founded by longtime Arsenal supporter Spike Lee, is housed next door to FancyFree, and the filmmaker is a staple at watch parties. Ramaili says the group members call him their “patron saint.” Another celebrity participant is Mamdani (who recently wore a custom Arsenal kurta created by one of the founders of the fashion-forward group) as well as Jason Sudeikis and NBA players.
“It’s manic now,” Ramaili says. “Just two years ago we were struggling to find a place in Brooklyn to watch this football club, and now people are traveling from all over the world.”
Another Arsenal madhouse in New York is O’Hanlon’s. Gooners have watched matches at the Irish pub in Manhattan for about 20 years, originally as a spillover for the now-closed Blind Pig. “Because of the Arsenal fans, we could survive financially COVID,” general manager Cristiano Adiutori tells FOS. “After that, kind of everything took off on a different level.”
The official Arsenal bar got a cameo in the club’s kit release last offseason. The Premier League’s official U.S. account posted a video of league title celebrations and fan interviews from O’Hanlon’s. A giant red cannon is painted on its exterior wall, and earlier this week, a Premier League trophy appeared beside it.
On Saturday, O’Hanlon’s will reach capacity hours before kickoff. Adiutori says he can’t share how much revenue the pub expects to bring in from the final, but he says, “We do good money.” He adds: “I’m not buying a Bugatti, I’m not buying a Ferrari, but I can afford a good bicycle.”
“Collecting” Fans Across the Globe
In the 1990s, the Premier League didn’t have many big-name African players. That began to change after Arsenal hired longtime manager Arsène Wenger in 1996, and he increasingly began signing African players. In 2002, Arsenal became the first English top-flight team to start nine Black players. Diversity is central to Arsenal’s identity, and it’s part of why the club for decades has resonated with Black fans around the world.
“People have seen themselves in this club that has always been universal in its makeup,” says Ramaili, who is originally from South Africa. “Just being able to see people that look like me play beautiful football and winning football is what really secured and anchored my love in the Arsenal.”
Mamdani agrees. Born in Uganda, he says he saw a “sense of self” in the team: “Many of us fell in love with a style of play and with an identity of the team, and for me one of those identities was Wenger bringing the world into that team.”
In two weeks, Mamdani and New York will host the World Cup. But for now, all eyes are on Budapest for the soccer season’s grand finale.
FancyFree will more than certainly be packed—but Ramaili won’t be there. He’ll be watching Saturday’s final back home at a bar in Johannesburg with about 400 other Arsenal fans from another supporters club he started.
“That’s the one thing about me,” he says, “everywhere in the world I go, I collect Arsenal fans.”
The post How ‘Manic’ Arsenal Fandom Went Global appeared first on Front Office Sports.
