I didn’t originally intend to return to the English Premier League so quickly after beginning to write about The Beautiful Game, but I do have to admit there are still clubs there calling out to me. Arsenal Football Club tends to stand out among many of them. There are a few reasons for this: One is that they’re one of the reigning giants in the most popular sports league in the world. Arsenal is not just a rich giant in the Premier League, but it’s a rich giant in the Premier League in LONDON. Second, back in my nascent soccer fan days when I was starting to look at adopting a European club, it was Arsenal that I tried on first. It made the most sense: My favorite sports book is about Arsenal. The Gunners had endured a lot of heartbreaking close calls mixed in with stretches of underachievement and basic middling. They adopted a slow-paced, hard style of the sport which they lived and died with for way too long, to the end that supporters created a chant out of it. (“Boring, boring Arsenal!”) They held on to their manager, Arsene Wenger, long after his style was outmoded and every other club was running circles around them. They relied on two-way warm bodies to hold the fort while casting off their stars – and frequently future stars – with reckless abandon. (Thierry Henry, Aaron Ramsay, Robin van Persie, Ashley Cole… Frankly, this list is way too damn long.) Their name, crest, and nickname revolve around weapons of war. Could Arsenal Football Club be… The European soccer version of my beloved Buffalo Sabres? There’s an argument to be made about it. The difference is that Arsenal has a rich title-winning history to fall back on. Before their drought, they had titles, and they won three or four more once that drought ended. The Sabres don’t have any such thing. (And as MY club, Arsenal didn’t take.)
Like a lot of English soccer clubs, Arsenal is an ancient club that began as a factory squad. This particular group was created in 1886 as Dial Square Football Club (following that great English tradition of clever and original names) by workers at the Dial Square workshop at the Royal Arsenal, an armaments factory in what was then Kent’s Woolwich district. (Kent was annexed by London in 1889.) They were led by a Scotsman, David Danskin, who was the one who, you know, bought the soccer ball. Their keeper was former Nottingham Forest mainstay Fred Beardsley, who got them a set of kits. They played their first match in December of 1886. Soon after that, they decided the Dial Square Football Club name was a little too stuffy even by their standards and changed their name to Royal Arsenal. The club was pretty successful back then, making the rounds and snapping up all the local competition trophies they could get. They also entered the FA Cup for the first time in the 1890 season.
Unfortunately for Royal Arsenal, the thing with factories is that they’re unpleasant places to work. So when a professional club in Northern England started hitting on a couple of Royal Arsenal’s players, those players didn’t have a whole lot of incentive to stay with an amateur club. So Royal Arsenal countered by turning professional themselves, but this turned out to be a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation: It meant the clubs in Southern England wouldn’t play against them, and they were banned from everything except friendlies and FA Cup matches by the London Football Association. In response, the club tried to set up a league of its own in Southern England which would have been like The Football League, but it didn’t work. So upon becoming a limited liability company in 1893 and changing its name again – this time to Woolwich Arsenal – the club jumped on an invitation to join The Football League itself that year. They were initially tossed into the Second Division, but that still made them the first southern club to enter The Football League. Ironically, THAT alienated some players who believed that Dial-Roywich Arsenal Football Club should have always been an amateur club, and walked off to form a whole other side of their own. (Spoiler: It didn’t pan out.)
Arsenal plied their trade in the Second Division for the next 11 seasons mostly taking up space around the middle of the table until signing manager Harry Bradshaw in 1899. Bradshaw was the first one who put together Arsenal as a side; he made a bunch of key signings, including keeper Jimmy Ashcroft and Jimmy Johnson, who was named the team captain. Together they brought Arsenal up to the top flight in 1904… Only for Bradshaw to walk off to Fulham that same year, before Arsenal played a single match in the First Division. Without Bradshaw’s know-how, The Gunners were only able to do so much, and instead of being mid-table fodder in the Second Division, they were now mid-table fodder in the First Division. While the club did put on some good performances in the FA Cup, they never actually brought home any hardware, and their league presence was, uh, they were there. Between 1904 and 1913, Arsenal only finished above 10th place twice. And their financial situation didn’t help. They were forced to sell off their star players in order to stay afloat, but that trapped them in THAT cycle. You know the one: No money, sell the star! Without the star, drop in the standings. Drop in the standings, no one wants to come and watch the club play. No one comes to matches, no money for the club. Close to bankruptcy in 1910, the club was already in voluntary liquidation when it got bought by a consortium of businessmen. Longtime readers of this blog – especially the ones who read my hockey articles – know I’ve frequently referenced what I’ve called the “Norris Rule,” a term I created to describe the NHL’s Original Six and how corrupt they were. That corruption was in large part due to a certain James Norris, who had ownership stakes in FOUR NHL TEAMS during that era. I’m bringing that up now so you know how funny it I think it is that the largest shareholder of Arsenal after the sale happened to be named Sir Henry Norris. And he happened to own Fulham Football Club.
Unlike James Norris, Henry Norris didn’t simply dote over one club while slowly ripping the other down to the point where it was fielding cardboard cutouts. Nope, Henry Norris was well aware of Woolwich Arsenal’s sad financial situation and moved to rectify it. So he tried to merge the club with Fulham! The Football League didn’t like that idea very much, though, so they blocked it. Norris’s next move was a LITERAL move. The club’s location in Woolwich was problematic, so Norris moved them to Highbury which, despite also being part of London, isn’t exactly down the street and around the corner. (I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to London, but… It’s big. VERY big.) While the move to Highbury bolstered Woolwich Arsenal’s home crowds – doubling them, in fact, plus change – that didn’t prevent the club from bottoming out in 1913. That meant they were booted back to the Second Division, where they sat until the end of World War I. In 1914, they changed their name yet again, this time to simply THE Arsenal. In 1919, the club name took its final form, dropping THE to become just plain old Arsenal Football Club, once and forever. The bigger event in 1919, though, was the club’s promotion back to the First Division. Not only were The Gunners promoted, and not only was it not supposed to happen, but I don’t even mean that in the regular sports context of “not supposed to happen.” That season, Arsenal finished in sixth. (An error in goal calculation meant they had actually finished in fifth, but that wasn’t discovered and corrected until 1975, and it doesn’t make a difference.) What happened was that the First Division decided to expand from 20 clubs to 22. To decide the last two clubs to be admitted, the league had a meeting. Logically, the two new spots would have gone to the two clubs due for relegation, which were Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur that year. Chelsea DID get one. The other was brought to a vote, and Norris’s argument that Arsenal should be promoted because of its history and long service to the sport won the voters. And so The Gunners got the call while Spurs got fucked. Ordinarily I would make a wry statement about favoritism toward the big glamor clubs, but there are a couple of facts here which are making me hold my tongue: One is that all three of those clubs are London clubs. Another is that all three of them are among the giants of the Premier League. A third is that while Arsenal got promoted basically by cheat code, they went on to prove they truly belonged there. While The Gunners have had a few scares since then, they were never relegated again, and their current 100-plus-year spell in the top division is the Premier League’s longest by around 40 years. You don’t have to feel too bad for Spurs; they did make their way back to the top flight and create a place of their own among the most accomplished clubs in English soccer. Although this incident DID help incite the major rivalry between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal, which is among the biggest and most spectacular in England.
Anyway, while Arsenal’s return to the First Division was successful, it wasn’t immediate. The club went right back to its customary spot at the middle of the table, never finishing higher than ninth, and coming one point from another relegation in 1924. Things didn’t improve by a whole lot the following season; while The Gunners did drop a place, they managed to clear the relegation zone by seven points. Manager Leslie Knighton was fired and Herbert Chapman was hired. And the incredulous Norris decided it was time to fucking SPEND for players! Chapman’s influence was more than what he achieved with the club; he also created Arsenal’s iconic red-torso-white-sleeves look and got the local Underground station to change its name to “Arsenal.” And Henry Norris’s first big signing under his new big-budget spending philosophy was Charlie Buchan, who had an impact on the sport’s rules. After Newcastle United whomped Arsenal 7-0, it was Buchan who suggested a relaxation in the offside rule, which allowed Chapman to create a new formation which pushed the centerhalf into a more defensive position while moving the fullbacks up to attack. Chapman took his time getting his side together, coaxing players like Joe Hulme, Jack Lambert, Tom Parker, and Herbie Roberts to Arsenal. In the 1927 season, Arsenal played in its first FA Cup Final, losing to Cardiff City, but the undeterred Chapman just kept signing players and set up Eddie Hapgood, David Jack, Alex James, and Cliff Bastin as the engine of his side. In the 1930 FA Cup, Arsenal had their big coming out party, beating Chapman’s old club – Huddersfield Town – 2-0 in the Final with goals from James and Lambert, thus bringing home Arsenal’s first major piece of hardware.
For the next decade, Arsenal was THE dominant club in England. In the 1931 season, The Gunners played Aston Villa neck to neck in a title race. They posted runaway scores like 7-2, 7-1, and 9-1 in several matches and won the championship for the first time. They won their second title in 1933, but Chapman came down with pneumonia in 1934 and died suddenly. The club lost a step in the immediate aftermath, putting up just 75 goals in 1934 but managing to win another title anyway. But in the offseason, one of the club’s directors, George Allison, stepped into Chapman’s old shoes and took over. He brought in a handful of new players like Jack Crayston, Wilf Copping, and Ted Drake. Arsenal’s devastating attack of the previous half-decade returned, and The Gunners won their third straight championship in 1935 with Drake posting a record 42 goals. In 1936, they hauled in another FA Cup, and capped off a huge decade with their fifth title in 1938.
1939 saw the outbreak of World War II. All first-class soccer was suspended, which was just as well because the war was, well, not kind to Highbury. The stadium was requisitioned as an ARP station, complete with barrage balloon. Also, it took a bomb during the Blitz, which destroyed the roof and set fire to some scraps that happened to be stored there. The club saw its home matches get moved to White Hart Lane – Tottenham Hotspur’s home. Yes, the club still played despite the league being suspended. What that meant was that no statistics were kept and matches were strictly regional. It also meant that clubs rarely finished full seasons and that players were frequently called on to contribute to the war effort. Most were given kind of a lip service treatment, where they served as trainers or instructors, but some took up proper arms and fought. This took a toll on The Gunners; Arsenal lost nine players to the war, more than any other club, and the length of the war meant a few others – including Bastin and Drake – had their careers shortened. Repairing Highbury took a brutal financial toll on the club as well, so once soccer started up again in 1946, Arsenal didn’t do very well. 1947 saw them finish in the 13th slot, their worst place in 17 years. Allison retired after that season. But when Tom Whittaker took over, he took them to another title right in 1948. Another FA Cup came in 1950, but the lack of turnover and roster refreshment also meant the club’s players were aging out of the sport, so long-term success wasn’t gonna happen. They had one final title in them in 1953, but that was it for close to two decades. Whittaker died suddenly in 1956, which sent their fortunes spiraling.
As Arsenal’s fortunes dropped, they stopped being able to attract decent players. Yes, they did catch the services of Welsh international Jack Kelsey, but that was about it. The Gunners found future stars like David Herd, but they all got into the habit of bolting for more successful clubs the second the opportunity came up. Former players Jack Crayston and George Swindin were brought in as managers to try to replace Whittaker, but neither one of them went anywhere. The late 50s saw The Gunners post a pair of fifth place finishes and a third place finish, and Arsenal managed to get to the FA Cup Final one more time, but that was about it. Other than that, they took their early spots at the middle of the table and stayed there for a long time.
In 1966, Arsenal fired manager Billy Wright, writing him off as just another in a failed string. To replace him, they hired Bertie Mee. While this whole routine was pretty standard, what wasn’t standard was where Mee was coming from. Yes, he had been a player for some time. But he was also the club’s physical therapist. So hiring him to manage came as a real shock to a lot of people; not the least Mee himself, who requested that he be allowed to go back to his role as the club’s physical therapist in a year if his club bosses didn’t think he was working out as the manager. Along with his assistant Dave Sexton, Mee brought a more professional approach to Arsenal that it hadn’t seen in some time. He also promoted from within; since Arsenal’s youth team had won the FA Youth Cup in 1966, Mee saw they had some players worth inviting to the First Team, and so Charlie George, John Radford, Peter Simpson, and Ray Kennedy all got called up to The Show. To show the young ‘uns how it was done, there were experienced heads Frank McLintock and Peter Storey. That squad made it to two straight League Cup Finals in 1968 and 1969, losing both. But in the 1971 season, The Gunners pushed themselves all the way. They entered the last match of the season needing a victory or a draw against Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane. Spurs played them to a scoreless draw until Ray Kennedy broke through in the 87th minute, and The Gunners held on to win the match and the championship. In the meantime, they had also reached the FA Cup Final after a fight to the finish against Stoke City in the semis, in which they fought their way out of a 2-0 hole. Facing Liverpool in the Final, The Reds put down The Gunners early in extra time, but Eddie Kelly hit the equalizer in the 101st minute before Charlie George scored the winner from the edge of the penalty area 10 minutes later. Arsenal had now won the FA Cup, the double, and a shot in the European Cup… Which was cut short in the quarterfinals by Ajax.
If you thought that double was the coming-out party for a whole new dynasty, you’d be wrong! Yeah, that wasn’t the beginning, but the culmination in an era that was soon defined by almosts. That single team that won the double was broken up by 1974, and after finishing in 17th in 1976 – one spot out of the relegation zone – Mee turned in his resignation. Terry Neill, Mee’s replacement, got The Gunners turned around 90 degrees if not the full 180 degrees. He got the club to three straight FA Cup Finals, but only won the one they played in 1979. He also brought out the talents of Liam Brady, but Brady left for Juventus in 1980. By the early 80s, a serious drinking culture had enveloped the club, and Neill lost control of the locker room and fell out with a lot of the players. That resulted in some embarrassing cup defeats: Arsenal was booted from the 1982 UEFA Cup by a part-time Belgian side called KFC Winterslag and the 1984 League Cup by a Third Division side called Walsall (which is currently in the Fourth Division, or League Two). Wanting to turn around, they reached out to a Scottish Premier League manager named Alex Ferguson, but he said no, only to emerge with Manchester United a few years later. It wasn’t until 1989 that Arsenal was able to haul in its first league title since 1971. They won it again in 1991, but they didn’t really get themselves in line until Arsene Wenger was hired to manage in 1996.
Wenger’s impact was immediate. He started signing players to Arsenal before he even took the reins officially – Patrick Vieira was signed to The Gunners strictly because Wenger said “fetch!” Then he added Nicolas Anelka and Emmanuel Petit. And in 1997, Arsenal finished third in the Premier League. In 1998, The Gunners were champions again, plus FA Cup winners, and the French Wenger became the first foreign manager to win a title in either the English Football League or the Premier League. (The First Division of the English Football League broke from the EFL in the early 90s and became its own league, the Premier League, but functionally it didn’t change anything.) But it was in 1999 that Wenger signed a fellow Frenchman who, after feeling unsettled in Italy after playing for Juventus for the previous season, became one of Arsenal’s all-time faces: Thierry Henry. Wenger had worked with Henry before, which gave Henry an important familiar figure as he settled into England and re-learned everything he thought he knew about playing his position as a striker. It took time; Henry failed to find the goal in his first eight matches. But at the end of his first season, he had posted 26 goals. And after a long time making their name on long passes, tackling, and generally trying to park a bus in front of their own goal and have one shot hit on offense, attack became Arsenal’s newfound specialty. The Gunners rode that attack to another double in 2002. Although the 2004 season didn’t result in another double, though, that was the one that became Arsenal’s grand signature. No, they didn’t run away with their point total – they posted 90, with second place Chelsea coming in a respectable second with 79. But what The Gunners DID do was walk away from every match with points. With their 26-12-0 record (and in European soccer, it’s done in wins-draws-losses, so I’m using that format), Arsenal was the first club in history to ever go undefeated. To mark the achievement, the Premier League mocked up a special gold version of its championship trophy exclusively for the club now and forever known as The Invincibles.
It would be natural, of course, to expect more from Arsene Wenger’s little dynasty. Ultimately, though, they had to settle for a string of near-misses most years, because the top of the table was usually reserved for Alex Ferguson’s powerful Manchester United dynasty. In fact, The Gunners started performing like also-rans after a second place finish in 2006. It took 10 years for them to get up to second place again, and when soccer started hitting the American mainstream, the running joke about them was about how they were spending and adjusting just enough to be the fourth-best team in the Premier League. Arsenal got almost comfortable with finding stars only to lose them. Henry was famously out by 2007, and the club definitely lost something without him. While the front office broke a few transfer records, they had talent like Theo Walcott, Olivier Giroud, and Alexis Sanchez walk in and out. Although The Gunners won the FA Cup several times during this period, they still endured a drought from 2006 to 2014 where they had nothing at all to show for anything, and the club’s bad spending and personnel habits started catching up to it. In 2017, Arsene Wenger – who was the longest-serving and arguable greatest manager in Arsenal’s history – decided his presence was no longer good for the club and retired. It didn’t make much difference for awhile, because Arsenal had already been back to the middle of the table. In 2019, Arsenal gave another new manager named Mikel Arteta a chance. He didn’t fare much better than the others at first, but here, near the end of the 2023 season, he has The Gunners close to the summit. As of now, they’re finally back in first, a respectable eight points in front of Manchester City, and league title number 14 is nearly within their grasp.
With Arsenal being as large and successful as they are, you’d think they’d have quite the roster of all-time players. And you’d be RIGHT! There are no retired numbers here – again – but The Gunners do have a list of their top 50 players on their website. While every player listed on it is undoubtedly great, the list was created by fan vote in 2008. You can probably figure out what that means: Recency. Now, anyone who got into international soccer around the time I did can’t knock the first overall pick, Thierry Henry, but the recency bias is very obvious. Yes, the earliest player on the list is Andy Ducat, who started in 1904, but the general rule the later the era, the more players listed. Only three or four or five players from before World War II are represented. The top ten are respectively Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Tony Adams, Ian Wright, Patrick Vieira, Robert Pires, David Seaman, Liam Brady, Charlie George, and Pat Jennings. If you’re interested in finding Americans who played for Arsenal, well, Arsenal is one of the biggest and best-known clubs in the world, and one of their characteristics is that they’re usually fielding an internationally diverse roster. They’ve had at least two Americans on their First Team that I’ve found, but both are still being treated like accidents. One is Danny Karbassiyoon, who was officially a Gunner from 2003 to 2005 and has no appearances to his name. He currently works as a scout for the club. Currently there’s keeper Matt Turner, who has a handful of important honors from playing for Major League Soccer’s New England Revolution. Arsenal agreed to terms with him in early 2022, but he hasn’t seen any action. If it’s just a connection you’re looking for, then it may help that Thierry Henry finished his career with the New York Red Bulls.
As for the number of prizes The Gunners have won and what KINDS of prizes, Arsenal has won a total of 48 pieces of hardware. That’s more than any other club except Manchester United (67) and Liverpool (68). It’s also an appreciable distance in front of fourth place Chelsea, which has won 34. Something to note about The Gunners’ success is that so much of it has been local. They’ve won 13 league titles and 14 FA Cups. That number of FA Cups stands out as the record number of FA Cups a single club won in England. What ALSO stands out is the fact that Arsenal has won all of TWO League Cups, in 1987 and 1993. But the League Cup is the young cup in English soccer. It’s considerably younger than both the League Championship and the FA Cup and was treated as a black sheep until recently. And Arsenal is one of the clubs that spent a lot of time putting its younger players and backups into League Cup competition so they could get experience playing big matches. Arsene Wenger himself once said that winning the League Cup wouldn’t actually end Arsenal’s trophy drought, although that callous comment invited the wrath of none other than Alex Ferguson, who said in response that the League Cup was “a pot worth winning.” The thing that ALSO stands out about Arsenal’s success is how LITTLE of it they’ve had in international competition. Let’s just use the bigs here: First, there’s the yearly match between the winners of the UEFA Champions’ League Cup (the European Cup) and the Europa Cup. Arsenal competed in that match just once, in 1994, and lost. The Gunners have only been to the Europa League Final twice, in 2000 and 2019, and lost both of them. As for the BIG one, the Champions’ League, the European Cup, Arsenal has competed in the Final once. In 2006. Against Barcelona. No points for guessing how that turned out. (If not, Arsenal lost.) Granted the European Cup is a tough get – we’re talking Stanley Cup-level tough here. Only five clubs in England have ever won it; Liverpool has won it six times, Manchester United won it three, Chelsea won it twice, Nottingham Forest (!) won it twice, and Aston Villa won it once. Between its prestige and Arsenal’s status in world soccer, you’d think The Gunners would have a few more appearances in the Final, at the very least. For fuck sake, NOTTINGHAM FOREST managed to drag that sucker back to Sherwood twice! And Nottingham Forest is a club that’s been booted down to the third tier!
You want to know what all those accolades tell me? They tell me that Arsenal is a very successful club which can bring home trophies and accolades and find talent on a very regular basis. The Gunners have heartened their supporters as often as they ripped those hearts out. Which makes it a little strange to me that Arsenal has a reputation for being heartbreakers, bridesmaids, and also-rans. I’m not sure how the club itself feels about that, but its supporters sure seem to play up the angle. During a late-aughties visit to Chicago, author Nick Hornby – the author of Fever Pitch, which is an autobiographical take on his love for Arsenal – was asked if he felt a kinship for Cubs fans because of all the suffering and heartbreak he had endured following The Gunners. It’s a disingenuous comparison if you ask me, because the club has won 13 titles and is a hair away from its 14th. If they clinch, they’ll have broken their longest title drought, a drought of… 19 years! And even during their longer droughts, the club was able to reel in the occasional FA Cup. The Chicago Cubs went 71 years between Pennants, to say nothing of the 108-year World Series Championship drought that came to define their very existence! And that’s not the only time this fallacy has happened. The Farrelly Brothers (Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary) adapted Fever Pitch into an American movie about baseball. It revolved around the Boston Red Sox, who snapped an 86-year title drought the year before the movie came out. The Sabres have existed a little over 50 years and have never won the Stanley Cup. The Vancouver Canucks, the expansion team that accompanied the Sabres into the NHL, have also never won it. And the Toronto Maple Leafs have never even reached a Stanley Cup Final since their most recent Cup in 1967. This lack of perspective is one of the reasons Arsenal didn’t truly resonate with me. The number of other examples I can think of just off the top of my head is staggering and I could probably write another 10 pages on the subject, so I’ll leave it as is for now.
Being a very big, rich, and successful team in London tends to invite a lot of attention onto whatever is big, rich, and successful in London. So Arsenal tends to have a cultural presence whether people are demanding to see more of them or not. The club itself appeared in a couple of important firsts that happened in England: A match they played against Sheffield United in January of 1927 that was played on the radio was important because it was the first match to ever air on the radio! In September of 1937, a match between Arsenal’s First Team and its Reserve Team was the first soccer match to ever air on British television! Arsenal’s match against Liverpool was a highlight in the first-ever airing of Match of the Day in 1964, and a match they played against Manchester United on Sky in January of 2010 was the first match aired on 3D TV. In fiction, Arsenal was the subject of one of the first novels ever related to soccer, a 1939 mystery called The Arsenal Stadium Mystery. It revolved around a friendly between Arsenal and an amateur side whose player gets poisoned while playing. It was made into a movie later that year, in which many players appeared as themselves and their manager at the time had a speaking part. Nick Hornby’s book Fever Pitch – possibly my favorite sports book – was about Arsenal. It was adapted for the screen in 1997 and adapted and Americanized in 2005. For my money, the British version was better. There are a lot of film references, both subtle and not so subtle – a notable one is in 1997 Best Picture nominee The Full Monty has the main characters move forward in a line and raise their hands, which was a deliberate imitation of the club’s offside trap. The love given to Arsenal by the media is returned by a wide number and variety of famous fans. Among the known fans of Arsenal listed on Wikipedia are: Elizabeth II, Jackie Chan, Kevin Costner, Wil Wheaton, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Cat Stevens, Spike Lee, Chad Johnson (“Ochocinco”), Carmelo Anthony, Joel Embiid, Fidel Castro, and even fucking Osama bin Laden. That’s an eclectic list, to say the least, and it’s just a scratch of names that popped up at me.
This is Arsenal Football Club. A large club, a very popular club, and a highly visible club for adopting fans who don’t want to risk sticking to a club that risks getting thrown out of the top flight. There are some very, very good reasons to stick with Arsenal: They get a lot of talent, they’re usually very competitive, they’re based in a popular tourist destination if you decide you want to see them live (for fuck sake, the Underground even names a station after them!) and even their fanbase has one of the coolest nicknames around: The Gooners, after the club nicknames, The Gunners! But when Arsenal is mediocre to bad, they can provide more than enough scares, they’re sometimes insufferably boring to watch, their vaunted reputation for heartbreaks is grossly overblown, and I’m not sure I would be able to trust them with any of their talent yet. You could do a lot worse than to be a Gooner, and the fact that they’re over 100 years past their latest relegation means they won’t accidentally make things tough for you.
Pros
Have an awesome brand which includes a graphic of a cool cannon on their crest; are centered right in London, so it’s a tourist-friendly location for those not willing to do travel legwork; Fever Pitch was about them; relegation might as well be a foreign concept to them; come on, wouldn’t you want to be part of a fanbase called The Gooners?
Cons
That old “boring, boring Arsenal” chant frequently has merit; do NOT expect sympathy from fans of other clubs if you decide to whine about how Arsenal “never wins anything;” run out great players who are in their prime; refuse to field their best in League Cup or international competition
Should you be a fan?
It can be done, of course; Arsenal Football Club has survived for a very long time and has more grandfathered-in fans than any team in the United States. But be sure you’re brushed up on your soccer knowledge if you don’t want other international fans to write you off – The Gunners come with one of THOSE stigmas, and it’s easy to understand why. The American Arsenal fan who picks Arsenal because they think it makes them look cool and doesn’t have a fucking clue about the sport is a pervasive stereotype that even Manchester United manages to avoid. And, unfortunately, there’s a reason it exists. (See also: FC Barcelona.)
everyteamever 