After picking up my two tickets for the Arsenal vs Manchester City lunchtime game at the Emirates Stadium’s match day office last Saturday, I followed Osama bin Laden’s example and went to the nearby Arsenal shop.
The al-Qaeda leader, who stayed in London during the 1990s, was an Arsenal fan, and bought his eldest son, Abdullah, an Ian Wright replica shirt during the 1993-1994 season. I got myself one of those nice new red Puma tracksuit tops on my maiden visit to the Gunners’ spectacular headquarters in North London.
Biographer Adam Robinson wrote in Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of Terror that Osama had attended a number of Arsenal matches in the 1990s. Back in the day there was even a Gooner chant that went, “Osama, woah-woah, Osama, woah-waoh, he’s hiding in Kabul, he loves the Arsenul”, according to The Week.
Osama was not Arsenal’s only in/famous fan. The fantastic fan-run website Arseblog lists an eclectic bunch that includes Fidel Castro, who has been a passionate fan since 1970; the late Chinese leader Zhou Enlai; French President François Hollande; the great train robber Ronnie Biggs; captain of the 1995 rugby World Cup-winning Springbok team Francois Pienaar; Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho; filmmakers Spike Lee, Michael Moore and Ken Loach; Mafia don John Gotti, the former head of the Gambinos, who receives the Arsenal magazine every month; authors Nick Hornby and Douglas Adams; actors Gillian Anderson and Kevin Costner; musicians and DJs such as Eddie Grant, Steve Earle, Skin, Tippa Irie, John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) and Gilles Peterson. And singer Sacha Distel, who told Der Spiegel: “I’m proud to be French and if someone asks me which is my favourite French football team, then I say Arsenal.”
Potential to depress
From where fellow South African Gooner fan Zubair Sayed and I were sitting up in row 3, block 116 upper tier on Saturday we did not notice any of them ahead of kick-off – we were too busy giggling like little boys at our luck in getting into this cathedral of potential: potential to thrill, but also potential to depress. That’s what our gods down there on the turf do to us, the fans.
Yet an estimated 27-million Arsenal fans around the world are back week after week, season after season, whether in front of our television sets, computer screens, or like the noisy 60?359 fellow fans here today in this magnificent and packed cathedral to hope – contrary to our intellectual, rational insights. It is universal and applies to other fans across all sorts of sports too, this blind belief in your sporting icons.
They don’t compare sport with religion for nothing.
But what makes us fans of specific clubs?
What makes us tolerate a team so aptly described by Michael Calvin in the Independent on Sunday after the two-all draw with Man City: “They would be perfect sons-in-law. You could take them to afternoon tea at the Ritz without offending the sensibilities of the grazing gentry. But will Arsenal’s bright young things win a Premier League title? Sad as it seems to the enraptured neutral, not while they remain as streetwise as a country curate.”
And how does the fervently partisan season ticket-holding fan explain his obsession with Arsenal? After several deep sips of post-match ale, at a Stoke Newington pub a 2km walk from the Emirates, fan-for-life Ben Ruse (44) explains this nearly metaphysical process: “You don’t get to choose your club – sadly, it is just given. You just have to kind of put up with them, and that’s what being a fan is all about for me, through thick and thin.
“I was born in Ambler Road, which is just around the corner from the stadium, number 73. When you’re born in that area, which is very close to the stadium, everybody is Arsenal.
“I love football, I’ve watched more games than anybody I know – I follow Arsenal home and away.”
Boots
His old mate, Zubair, and I nod respectfully. Ben is clearly in a different league. Except when it comes to being a six-a-side social footballer. “I love football, I’ve kicked more fucking footballs than Wayne Rooney. I bought Messi’s fucking boots and I still can’t kick a ball in the direction I want it to go.
“I am human proof that if you’ve got no talent it doesn’t matter how much you practise, or whose boots you buy, you’re still shit! In many ways it makes me love the game even more – it’s a talent I don’t have.”
Ben heads up media relations for the High Speed Two rail network, which aims to bring the United Kingdom’s Victorian railway infrastructure dramatically into the 21st century. “My real life is as an Arsenal fan,” he laughs and takes another sip of ale. “I spend really the majority of my time talking about, thinking about … breathing Arsenal.”
Zubair, who works for an international human rights NGO, says his relationship with Arsenal began when he spent two years in London in the late 1990s and has never stopped intensifying.
“You’re talking about religion, and as somebody who is not religious but there’s almost a longing for some sense of belonging – I love football and there is so much about it, there’s the drama and the passion, the whole theatre of genius.
“As someone who is an atheist but at times might be struggling for meaning in the world and has work that is quite intense, with civil society and human rights kind of stuff every day, you know, it is an escape, it is also a global family.”
Ben adds: “I’m not evangelical … I don’t want all the Tottenham fans to start supporting Arsenal, heaven forbid! I relish the gentle animosity that is there.”
But then there’s Chelsea FC. “Chelsea represent all about the game that I despise – I’m glad that they exist. If they didn’t exist you’d have to invent it because football is about a level of animosity, it is not only about loving, it is about hating as well. Which is great, I love that!”