10 December, 2025. As a long time supporter of the Arsenal, I’d been toying with this idea for some time. It became a firm decision after reading in The Guardian that football is on a rising tide of popularity in the USA and that the electrifying Zohran Mamdani, democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York, is a fellow supporter of the Gunners.
I was born in a steel town in the north of England and naturally enough was a fervent supporter of my home team, Scunthorpe United, then in the Third Division North. However, the Arsenal was even then my second team because I had close family links with Canonbury, a district just south of Highbury in north London, where the team had had its stadium since before the First World War. Following his retirement from a job as a clerk in the City, my great uncle actually worked on the turnstiles at the Highbury stadium for a while before transferring to the offices.
I also loved playing as well as watching football. I was captain of my junior school team and later had a trial for Scunthorpe Town juniors but was too slightly built. At a small new grammar school, where I was also captain of the football team, I played for it every Saturday morning, and then played again in the afternoon for Little Haywood, a team in the Staffs Amateur League, Division Two, on the sloping ‘ground’ of which I had to weave around thistles and cow pats. At Durham University, which fielded five teams when I was there in the mid-sixties, I played left-wing for the Thirds and occasionally the same position for the Seconds on away fixtures when the stronger left-winger preferred to spend Saturday nights with his girlfriend. Eventually taking my cue from him, I dropped down to the ‘Casuals’, a team in which our centre-forward chain-smoked through the whole game.
So, with football in my blood, when I was staying in London, where I occasionally messed around in nearby Highbury Fields, I was naturally drawn into local enthusiasm for the Arsenal. (For aficionados, it’s always ‘the Arsenal’ for it was at the Royal Arsenal – a munitions factory – in Woolwich where the team had its origins in the workforce; hence also their nickname, ‘the Gunners’ or, if you will, ‘Gooners’.) As I left home and time passed, gradually the Arsenal became the only team for me, especially during the time when Arsene Wenger was manager. And under the leadership of Mikel Arteta, the beautiful game as played in north London continues to hold me rapt.
As for the article in The Guardian that inspired these recollections, it was written by Bryan Armen Graham, deputy sport editor of Guardian US, and called ‘The US love of football is reaching new levels. Just look at Arsenal super-fan Zohran Mamdani’. Graham writes that football, a global game, has become so popular in the United States that every big club now has a thriving supporters’ group and is bound to be boosted further by the arrival of the World Cup in the US next summer; though he might have added that Trump could wreck this by trying to ICE many of the ‘non-whites’ among the million or so supporters trying to get in. Football, he correctly notes, is so popular because it is ‘community infrastructure rather than luxury entertainment’; in other words, cross-class and cross-ethnicity. As for the Arsenal, this is at the pinnacle of popularity in America in large part because it has long had many black players among its stars, prominent among them in the 1990s legendary centre-forward Ian Wright. It was, Graham notes, a team ‘long intertwined with Black British identity and, increasingly, with the US-based Black creative community.’ Incidentally, it was ‘Wrighty’ who sent Mamdani a video message of congratulations on his election victory, and reduced the Mayor-elect of New York city to uncharacteristic speechlessness. As in football, so elsewhere in Europe (and America) – contrary to the nasty nonsense in the Trump administration’s treacherous National Security Strategy – multiculturalism strengthens societies, unless ethnic differences are deliberately stirred up by proto-fascist parties funded by the mega-rich ‘tech bros’ in order to make them even more money.
A footnote that might be of interest: In the early 1970s, Zeki Kuneralp, the gifted Turkish Ambassador in London, was a guest of Sir Robert Bellinger, Lord Mayor of London and a director of the Arsenal, at two Arsenal home games. These were against Derby County on 31 October 1970 and Leeds on 11 September 1971, both won 2-0 by the Arsenal. They are recorded in the ambassador’s Diplomatic Notebooks V, 1969-1972, The Second London Years (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2025), my review of which will shortly be posted. Since his notes on conversation with the mayor were entirely on politics and commerce, I had concluded that he had no interest in football. However, I have just learned from his son, Sinan, my Turkish publisher, that his father was in fact quite interested in the game, and was a faithful supporter of FC Bern, the local team of the Swiss capital, where he had his university education. There is a very good obituary of him by David Barchard in The Independent here.