Happy Saturday folks.
We could do with a bit more sunshine here in Dublin, but it is what it is. Whether it’s raining or sunny, or raining and sunny at the same time (which is one of Ireland’s most magical qualities), Arsenal remain champions.
Yesterday evening, I ran into a young man who lives around the corner from me, he and his dad are Arsenal fans. I hadn’t seen him since the league had been won and he was still floating on cloud 9. Cloud 99 even. Regardless of Budapest, the Premier League was the be-all and end-all for him.
“The shit I’ve had to take for years from mates and lads in work!”, he said. And I think we can all understand how, when you’re in your early 20s, that is more difficult to cope with when, for example, you’re my age. Not to mention this is the first title win he can actually properly remember and experience.
I’ve thought a lot about how much Anfield 89 resonated for people of my age. It had been 18 years since Arsenal previously won the league, and we’d grown up – albeit in a very different media landscape and football environment – through a period of Liverpool domination. There were Liverpool fans everywhere, especially in Ireland. So to win the title, against them, at Anfield, was truly incredible. Someone should make a film about it, now that I give it some thought.
And while the circumstances of Arsenal’s 2025-26 title win are clearly very different, and we didn’t win it with a last minute goal from Myles Lewis-Skelly away at Man City for example, this is the Anfield 89 for this generation. An experience, regardless of how it happened, that will be as unforgettable as that famous win via the goals of Michael Thomas and Alan Smith.
Declan Rice’s “It’s not done” after the City game is in some ways equivalent to Steve McMahon’s ‘1 minute’ gesture. A communication from a player that came with the right intentions, but which had the potential to be a thing that haunted them. All Liverpool had to do was keep the ball in the corner via John Barnes. All Man City had to do was not drop points to Bournemouth. There were 3000 (?) away fans at Anfield that night, in the mists of time since you can find 300,000 who said they were there. In years to come you could interview 10,000,000 people who made their way to celebrate outside our stadium on that Tuesday night.
For me the title win this season came with such a helping of relief, and I’m sure that was true for the many Arsenal fans who were born around or after 2004. Growing up hearing the stories of what it was like when we did it, desperate to experience that themselves. But for them this was something entirely new. Many of us have seen it before, been fortunate to have seen it before more than once, and we understood what we’d been missing. For those in their mid-20s and under (because even if you were a kid back in 2004 the memories of it are hardly going to be vivid), this wasn’t just a title win on its own, it’s one that now indelibly affixes them to the stories that have been passed down by their mums and dads, elder siblings, the football loving uncles and aunts, and anyone who played a part in their own Arsenal fandom.
They now have the experiences and the stories to pass on themselves when the time is right. To their own kids, their nephews and nieces. They’re not living vicariously through something somebody else enjoyed, which is why I think the celebrations have resonated for as long as they have. It’s why I think anyone trying to downplay what this means to any Arsenal fan, but in particular this generation, needs to wind it in.
I get confused by the monikers, your GenZs and GenXs and all that. I don’t know what any of it means and I don’t care to understand it really. It’s not important to me. Maybe we have a new one though. Can we call it GenW where W = WILLIAMSALIBAHASWONTHEFUCKINGLEAGUE? I think we can do that. We should do that, because one of the essential qualities that makes football so compelling is storytelling.
Everyone has a tale to tell about a goal, a game, a win, a loss, how we experience a success or a failure, who we shared it with, where we were, how we got there, what happened along the way or on the way home, how it felt, whether it made you cry or throw up, whether you were at home or far from home, with friends or family or strangers who became friends and maybe even family down the line, there’s always a story. And always someone to listen to it.
Between last August and the end of this season, so much has happened. Books will be written that will try and capture it but they will barely scratch the surface, because they just can’t do any more than that. Around the world what Arsenal have done will create timeless tales, millions of myths and legends that will live on through the generations to come. Most of which we’ll never hear, they’re personal, they’re familial, they’re unique to the way those people lived through them.
What happens on the pitch is obviously the single most important thing about football, but what makes the game truly special is how our experiences of those moments creates these inter-generational chains that bind us in a kind of collective consciousness. As well as being the protagonists of our own adventures, we drift in and out of other people’s along the way. A mad football cosmos that will fade in time but which kinda feels easier to understand than the big questions about why we’re here in the first place.
I can’t explain why the observable universe continues to expand, billions and billions of light years into the distance – numbers which make your head hurt if you even try to make sense of them. But has anyone considered it might be because it’s like a big balloon, and each new story about Arsenal winning the league this season inflates it just a little more?
And on that note, I wish you a good Saturday. Go tell your stories.
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Cover pic by James Clifford Kent – https://www.jamescliffordkent.com/
