That sounds dramatic, but it’s true. Some people pick a club because of a player, a shirt, a winning season, a parent’s persuasion. I inherited Arsenal before I had the language to understand what the word inheritance meant. I was going to matches before I could walk properly, before I knew what league tables were, before I understood that football could ruin an entire weekend or make a stranger feel like family. To many, Arsenal, or indeed football, is a hobby. To me, it is weather. It is ritual. It is home.
So when people ask what it felt like to see Arsenal win the Premier League, I find myself struggling to answer in a normal way. Because it is not simply happiness. It is not just pride. It is something much heavier and stranger than that: a release of years I was too young to count, seasons I watched through my fingers, false dawns, collapses, nearlys, maybes, and “next years.” It is my family’s voices in the stands. It is the walk to the ground. It is wearing the red shirt as a second skin. It is being small and swallowed by noise, then growing up and realising that the noise had somehow grown inside me too.
Winning the league should have felt like completion. In many ways, it did. It felt like a debt being paid to everyone who kept showing up. To the people who sat through the ‘banter years,’ the bad away days, the seasons where hope was something you pretended not to have because admitting it made you vulnerable. It felt like proof that faith is not always foolish. Sometimes, very occasionally, the thing you love actually loves you back.
And then there was the Champions League final.
That is the cruelty of football: it gives with one hand and immediately takes with another. A Premier League title after all this time should be enough. Of course it should be enough. Any rational person would say it is enough. But football is not rational, and being an Arsenal fan has never been about wanting things in a sensible order. We wanted the league because we had waited too long. We wanted Europe because we have always felt its absence. We wanted the night where Arsenal finally looked at the biggest stage in club football and did not blink.
Instead, we got both glory and grief in the same breath.
That is what I keep coming back to. This season has been neither simple joy nor simple heartbreak: it has been something more complicated, more sobering, more Arsenal. We climbed the mountain we had been staring at for over two decades, only to find another peak behind it. We finally got the ending we had always dreamed of, and then immediately discovered that we were still dreaming.
Maybe this is why being an Arsenal fan feels less like supporting a football club and more like living inside a story that refuses to resolve. There is always beauty, always pain, always some ridiculous reason to believe again. And maybe that is the point. Arsenal is not in my life because it is easy. Arsenal is in my life because it has always been there – in my family, in my childhood, in my blood, in the part of me that still thinks next season might heal whatever this season broke.
We won the Premier League. We lost the Champions League final.
Both things are true. Somehow, I am still bursting with pride. Somehow, I am still devastated. Somehow, I already cannot wait to go again.