The Great, Unfathomable Curse of Arsenal—And Myself
When Arsenal went down 1-0 in the 17th minute on a lethal piece of play from Manchester United forward Marcus Rashford, I thought my jersey might be cursed. I’d resisted buying a home kit all through this 2022-23 Premier League season, even as Arsenal went into the World Cup break on top of the league. Even when they kept winning after the tournament was done and the European club season resumed, I resisted. In fact, I haven’t had a new jersey—there are a couple retro numbers in the closet—since the iconic white-striped sleeves of 2008-09, when I got a long-sleeved #4 with “FABREGAS” plastered across the back at the shoulders.
That was Cesc Fabregas, the all-action central midfielder Arsenal lured from Barcelona’s famed La Masia academy as a teenager to become the fulcrum of their midfield for eight years until he returned to Catalunya. He was the first of many absurdly talented players to pull on the jersey and make me believe, but those who came after—Mesut Ozil and Alexis Sanchez and Robin van Persie and Jack Wilshere—never made the closet. Gradually, as Arsenal steadily slipped away from the top, I stopped believing at all. It wasn’t until last week that I ordered a brand-new, engine-red collared number, an Adidas masterwork, with “ØDEGAARD - 8” where Fabregas once had been. Martin Ødegaard is the new midfield maestro and captain, the one pulling the strings, and even in my excitement while unboxing the transatlantic package, I couldn't help but wonder whether Arsenal’s roaring start to the season would come undone now that I'd offered this gesture of belief.
The time since I started watching a lot of Premier League soccer following the 2006 World Cup has been punishing on Arsenal loyalists who dared to believe. The decision to spend three figures on a jersey after so many years where Arsenal flattered to deceive with beautiful, intricate, worldly, ultimately fragile football had a highly irrational weight. I’ve met Yankee fans who send a newcomer out of the room if their arrival seems to have dented the team’s fortunes on the television. I know plenty of fans who physically cannot—or otherwise refuse to—watch any of their players take a penalty. And all the psycho mysticism of football fandom seemed to be validated again in the 17th minute at the Emirates Stadium in London, as Arsenal hosted the damned United—the team that, along with Chelsea, had caused so much of the pain of my formative years as a fanatic. Rooney and Ronaldo, Ferdinand and Vidic, Paul Scholes and Nani and Patrice Evra, the last of whom loved to characterize that team’s meetings with Fabregas and Co. as “men against boys.” This is a very different United team, towards the beginning of a promising rebuild after years in the wilderness just like Arsenal, but the club badge still glows menacingly on their chests. And then, in the 24th minute, a product of Arsenal’s academy, Eddie Nketiah—a young man who represents so much of what Arsenal have done right in the last few years after many more of mismanagement—evened the score. By the time 94 and a half minutes were gone, Arsenal had won to once again go five points clear at the top of the league.
They are setting the pace even for Manchester City, the perennial and defending champions of the league backed by coach Pep Guardiola’s genius and the unlimited resources of a petrostate investment fund. The resumption of the Premier League after the World Cup was billed as a showdown between the master and his pupil: Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta worked as an assistant to Guardiola at City for three seasons and change, the only job he had between playing for Arsenal and coaching it. At 40, he is the youngest head coach in the league leading the youngest team, and they have vanquished nearly everyone who’s crossed their path.
They’ve played 19, won 16, drawn two, lost once. They’ve beaten Liverpool, Chelsea, and their hated local rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, home and away. Their only loss came against this same United side at Old Trafford, the fortress in Manchester, and at a few different points on Sunday it looked like head coach Erik ten Hag’s rapid counter-attacking plans would once again cause Arsenal, the lords of possession and territory, enough problems to stop them short. The Gunners went ahead through a venomous strike from 25 yards from Bukayo Saka, another academy kid who is setting the whole continent alight at 21 years old. Then United leveled the score again after a rare mistake from Arsenal goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale. And then Nketiah stuck a leg out to deflect a bouncing Ødegaard shot into the net right at the death. Arsenal 3, Manchester United 2. “WE. ARE. TOP OF THE LEAGUE!” went the home fans' chant for the umpteenth time this season.
There is a kind of giddy humility in the Arsenal fanbase these days, a contingent that for so long was defined by high-volume dissension and sibling hostility. Year after year, Arsenal would come up short and rival fans would shower Gooners with ridicule. After a while, supporters started to redirect the humiliation and frustration at each other, blowing up at club management and their fellow fans on YouTube channels. Soon enough, the club earned the nickname “Banter FC,” as it became known for the schadenfreudian content it served up to its enemies as much as its footballing prowess. It struck again even last season, when Arsenal were clearly on the up and up but still came up short to those hated rivals, Tottenham, who secured the fourth and final Champions League spot after Arsenal blew it—amid some key injuries—in the home stretch. The top four English teams each season earn the money and prestige of playing in Europe’s super-playoffs the following year, and Arsenal have finished out of those positions since 2017. It’s a once-unthinkable position for a club that had an invitation to European soccer’s most exclusive club for 17 straight seasons.
Those were the days of Arsene Wenger, the professorial Frenchman who led the club to three league titles around the new millennium. He revolutionized the English game when he arrived in 1996 as a relative unknown, but over the years, the game evolved away from him and he lost his grip on a place at the top of the table. The end of his reign was the beginning of a period of raucous and uncivil turmoil for the club, where their stadium became a cauldron that boiled the home team rather than the opposition. In Wenger's last season, I stopped watching altogether as the outcomes became something worse than disappointing: they were predictable. The next manager, Unai Emery, never captured the imagination or commitment of a fanbase already itching for revolt. He was a quick fix like many of the players Arsenal were recruiting in the second half of the 20-teens, an attempt to climb back into the Champions League through some side window left ajar. So, too, was the club’s decision to get on board with the Super League proposal in 2021, a means to get them into a new pseudo-Champions League without earning it. The ploy failed, a disaster for the American ownership—Stan Kroenke also owns the Los Angeles Rams along with a string of Colorado franchises—that has gone some way towards mending fences since.
This new group want to make their names in the world, and they're doing it in magnetic style. At the halfway point of the season, Arsenal have 50 points. They are on pace to match the Manchester City team of 2017-18 that, under Guardiola, rewrote the rules of what was possible in a way only comparable to the Arsenal team of 2003-04—the one that never lost a game. They were “The Invincibles,” and no Arsenal team between that one and this has had the right combination of style and steel. Even the best Arsenal teams in that period, like the mesmerizing one-and-two-touch maestros of 2007-08, came undone with some (horrific) injuries and the psychological collapse that followed.
The Arsenal seemed close to Manchester United and Chelsea back then, but in retrospect, they were always clinging on to their coattails. After the Invincibles season, Arsenal went to the Champions League final in 2006 and lost to Barcelona in Paris. And then that team broke up, and their strength—both physical and psychological—was never replaced. Didier Drogba and Chelsea would bully the slick pass-and-movers. Those United teams would usually, somehow, find the cutting edge. At some point, I began to think that my decision to join up towards the end of 2006—after the Invincibles, after the run to the Champions League final—had spelled a kind of doom for the team and for me. The days of Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira were so far away that it nearly felt like they’d represented a different club. They'd played at Highbury, Arsenal's home since 1913, but since 2006 this new outfit had played at the Emirates Stadium, a brand new, state-of-the-art facility that felt empty by comparison. I began to doubt it would ever be filled with hope and history as its predecessor once was. And then this magical season arrived.
For many Arsenal fans, the comprehensive 2-0 victory away at Tottenham last week was a turning point after years where Spurs were the North London club on the rise, including last season when they snatched the last Champions League spot away from Arsenal with a run of results that included a victory in a head-to-head at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. It’s always most important to London-bred Arsenal fans to beat the old enemy down the road. But for me, and I believe a certain generation of American Arsenal fans, United is, along with Chelsea, the true enemy above all. Arsenal-Manchester United was the marquee Premier League matchup in the early years of this new millennium, but for those of us who joined up later in the 2000s, it was a perennial showcase of Arsenal’s shortcomings, a reminder that mental strength and canny know-how were as important as silky skill. We no longer had a Patrick Vieira to go to war with their Roy Keane. He felt less like a memory than the subject of a documentary I'd seen.
So yeah, when United went ahead, I had that sinking feeling. They didn’t deserve the lead, but they hadn’t deserved to beat us earlier in the season, either, and I learned long ago as an Arsenal fan that “deserve” has nothing to do with it. And yet somehow I was also feeling a kind of tranquility that Gooners have only recently started to recognize, a buoyant hope that’s replaced the scything anxiety of prior years. When the team goes behind at home now, the stadium’s response is no longer howls of indignation as doom blankets the stands. There is belief, always. There is encouragement, praise even, a beautiful symbiosis between the young men on the field and the supporters in the stands. Maybe it’s the glory of having everyone together again after years of pandemic and empty stadiums, a sunny feeling that we’re all lucky to be here on this unexpected ride and we ought to enjoy every minute. The Arsenal boys just beat Manchester United again. The Arsenal boys are top of the league.
There are no guarantees going forward, as Newcastle United are the latest outfit to buy their way into contention, just as Chelsea did in the 2000s and Manchester City did in the teens. Right now, Chelsea and fellow perpetual powers Liverpool find themselves mired in mid-table mediocrity. In their own new era of American ownership after Abramovich was forced to sell the club, Chelsea are firing the money cannon in every direction—including to steal away players Arsenal targeted to sign. (Liverpool's American owners are looking to sell the club.) Arsenal still have to play mighty Manchester City twice in the league, along with 17 other matches where their opponents will be sharpening their knives in anticipation of a fancy scalp. But after so many years where every game felt like a risk, a chance of humiliation, each now feels like an opportunity and a privilege. We’re the ones laughing now, laughing for joy, even as the referees dispense some incomprehensible decisions and the football commentariat goes on and on about how the manager behaves on the sideline. They’re getting desperate, unable to stomach that London’s great old power is on the rise again.
Before Kroenke took over, Arsenal’s board was a menagerie of names like Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith and Sir Chips Keswick, and the club’s problems have been, in fairness, the troubles of footballing aristocrats. They were always towards the top of Britain’s top league, and they've won the FA Cup—the world’s oldest knockout tournament—four times since 2014. Kroenke and his son, Josh, have (finally) overseen a remodel. They’ve chosen a top young manager and sporting director and stuck by them, and over the last few years those they’ve chosen have recruited new players well. But it’s the rank and file of Arsenal’s world, the fandom, that have responded to the club’s new direction with such warmth, the nurturing glow of proud parents watching their young kids shine so brightly. Nobody knows the risk of allowing yourself to believe quite like an Arsenal fan.
It was still left unsaid in some corners of the fanbase that we were really in a title race until the last few weeks, a run of matches—and wins—that has made this state of affairs undeniable. For now, talk of omens and curses will take the back seat. Buy your jersey or don’t, but The Arsenal are top of the league. Best believe it.
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