Zadie Smith once wrote that “the square mile around Arsenal’s stadium could be a suitable surrogate for the whole wide world”. Perhaps you only really glimpse this on a match day, when the jerk chicken grills and paella pans fire up and belch delicious smoke across the rows of terraced houses, when the locals in weathered replica shirts brush shoulders with tourists bearing selfie sticks, when a small group of dedicated volunteers at a kiosk by the Ken Friar Bridge accepts non-perishable donations for the Islington food bank.
And you shall scoff, and you shall sneer, because there is a north London of the popular imagination, and Islington in particular, which has become a surrogate for something else entirely. A slur, an insult, a byword for privilege and entitlement and metropolitan effeteness, the place of Blair and Corbyn and Starmer and a shrink on every street corner. North London is elite, north London is out of touch, north London looks down on the rest of you while eating plates of £16 pasta.
In this telling the idea of Arsenal surrendering a nine-point lead in the Premier League title race feels richly poetic: just and right and perhaps even moral. The neutrals have swung firmly behind Manchester City, who assumed the lead with a 1-0 win over Burnley on Wednesday night. After all, Pep Guardiola’s team play fair, play football in the way it is supposed to be played, brook no underlying ethical or geopolitical objections. Manchester, as we know, is a city entirely devoid of liberal sensibilities or progressive sentiment. Every title race needs a hero and a heel, and while these two clubs may be inseparable in terms of points or goal difference, while many have no strong feelings about who should win, there appears to be a tightening consensus over who should lose.
And let’s be real here: objectively speaking, there is a genuine comic potential in the prospect of Arsenal blowing the title in a season where it has essentially laid waste to every footballing principle it may once have possessed in the pursuit of ultimate victory. Under Mikel Arteta this is an Arsenal team that has leaned almost religiously into the doctrine of restriction and restraint, patience and physicality. You will forgo the bodily pleasures of this life in order to know the eternal grace of the next. This is a bargain to which many of their own fans have willingly submitted. But of course winning ugly only really makes sense if you actually win.
“Quite a lot of us bought into that, and so there’s a kind of anger,” says Laura Kirk-Francis, an Arsenal season ticket-holder and content creator. “So there’s a kind of anger. You’ve lied to me. I feel lied to. You said you were going to do it. The end was in sight. Now it’s a bit more precarious.”
I moved to north London two years ago. From our house near Finsbury Park, just around the corner from the Emirates, you can hear the stadium’s screeches and groans even with the windows bolted shut.
At school drop-off on Monday morning, the day after the 2-1 defeat by City, there seemed to be more children than usual crying uncontrollably at the door, imprisoned by emotions they could not fully articulate. A long-standing member of the teaching staff confides that he wants Arteta out and Andoni Iraola in. “He’s taken us as far as he can,” he insists. Somehow the tribulations of a football club emanate in waves around its radius, inflecting the daily lives of its local area in a way agnostics have trouble truly grasping.
It’s not life and death, of course. We are constantly told that terms like “disaster” and “tragedy” are wholly inappropriate in a sporting context, perhaps even an offensive trivialisation of real privation. From an ethical standpoint, the question of whether a football team finishes first or second in the league table scarcely registers on the scale of human suffering. But if you’re a fan of any stripe, try and summon the very worst feeling football has given you. Did it not feel like a kind of catastrophe, a desolation, an emptiness of the soul comparable to hearing about some distant, shattering atrocity on the other side of the world?
“Panic on the streets of London,” read a banner in the City end on Sunday afternoon. No, a nine-point lead in the Premier League table is not life, and losing it is not death. But the evil genius of sport is that sometimes, your body can’t tell the difference.
“This is what we all wanted,” says Andrew Mangan of the Arseblog podcast. “When we were finishing eighth, when we didn’t have European football, when we were watching Arsène Wenger teams get turned over, when we were watching Unai Emery teams concede 35 shots against Watford … we’d have bitten your hand off for a scenario like this. And however much frustration there might be in the last few weeks, the only thing is to embrace that, and hope it goes the right way.”
No club wins all the time. Pretty much every fanbase in the world, with the possible exception of Real Madrid or Bayern Munich, has a rich reservoir of pain and disappointment upon which to draw. Is Arsenal really any different in this respect? Perhaps only in the sense of its location, as a locus of cultural and media influence. Fever Pitch could have been written about any in the club in the world, but of course Nick Hornby was an Arsenal fan living in north London. Every club has an online presence, but few other clubs on the planet generate a comparable volume of self-analysis, the heft and the means to project their institutional angst to a global audience.
“It is the kind of club that gets people very obsessed, whether they’re fans or not,” says Mangan, who started his site in 2002 when it was basically one of the first blogs dedicated to a single club. “It’s hard to look beyond the dawning of the internet era, the first big mobilisation of fans. Arsenal fans were among the first to establish a big online presence. That has an impact. Maybe it’s part of why there’s pushback, or the reputation that some Arsenal fans have online.”
And of course there is a performative element to all this, whether in the fans in the lower West Stand who seem to spend the whole game screaming at the press box, or the hordes of creators and YouTube personalities who rely on Arsenal for an outlet.
They will be there again when play Newcastle at the Emirates on Saturday evening. “Through my content I try and find a bit of humour in the situation,” says Kirk-Francis. “One, it’s my coping mechanism. And two, if you take a step back, it is insane going through this level of visceral grief over something you have no control over. And ultimately will have a massive impact on your life. Sometimes it’s fantastic. Other times, it’s pretty tough.”
A few miles away, in a very different part of north London, there is a very different sort of panic brewing. If Arsenal’s angst stems from a fear they finish second, fans of Tottenham are engaged in a more existential crisis: not simply over whether their club will stay in the Premier League, but whether there is even still a club in there worth supporting, worth calling their own.
Less than a year after the Tottenham High Road erupted in celebration over victory in the Europa League final, Tottenham are staring at the prospect of Championship football and a mass player exodus.
They have a board with only the faintest knowledge of football, some of the most expensive ticket prices in the Premier League and a new coach reviled by significant portions of the fanbase. Most of the Spurs fans I know currently exist in a kind of rolling trauma, a bottomless pit of emotion with no real end in sight. On Saturday they are at already-relegated Wolves seeking to find a way out of the relegation zone.
“I know some fans who, at the moment, don’t want to wear anything with Spurs on it,” says Ali Speechly, a Spurs fan and co-chair of Women of the Lane. “Like, even just watching in their lounge, sitting in their own homes. I think some fans just feel so disconnected, so broken by the decline of the club on and off the pitch.”
This is a decline that goes well beyond losing at home to Nottingham Forest, the slow slide down the table, the absence of any discernible midfield. “Football for some people, it’s the thing you look forward to each week,” says Speechly. “And it’s not cheap to go to that stadium and watch a game. So for a lot of fans to just be disappointed consistently, it genuinely will have an impact on their mental health.”
And of course these are intertwined complexes, the knowledge that Arsenal’s greatest season could coincide with Tottenham’s most ignominious. There is a whole spectrum of views here. I’ve heard Arsenal fans lament the demise of Spurs, and Spurs fans who have no strong feelings on whether Arsenal win the league or not.
“Makes no fucking difference to me, really,” says Mangan when asked whether he would like to see Spurs relegated. “Objectively it would be quite funny. But it wouldn’t really provide me any comfort.”
“It hurts just as much as it is worth,” the writer Julian Barnes once said. Five rounds of matches remain in this most bruising and debilitating of seasons.
Arsenal retain the best defence and the more favourable run of fixtures; Tottenham have a new coach and the more feverish sense of desperation, whatever that means.
And perhaps this is the curse and the blessing of these two tortured clubs: to be analysed and over-analysed and obsessed over, to be derided and reviled, and to feel that sense of longing at its shores, the pain that makes you want to curl up and die, the pain that drives you on nevertheless.