Arsenal FC are so much MORE than just a football club – What does The Arsenal Represent To You?

Arsenal are, at its core, a football club. Entertainment. Sport. A capitalistic, money-making venture televised worldwide to billions of viewers, ranging from the casual to the hopelessly addicted.

A team to watch, to root for (or against); a team that wins some games, draws some, and loses others. A team in a sport where players come and go, and as Jerry Seinfeld once pointed out: “We’re rooting for clothes…. We’re screaming for laundry.”

What Arsenal represents to me has evolved in the most wonderful of ways. Most of my 34 years supporting The Arsenal were spent as a solitary endeavour; once fate took me away from Highbury in 1990 after fortuitously bringing me there in 1988 in the first place, I supported from afar, sometimes lightly and distracted by life and distance, sometimes obsessively but alone. It wasn’t until late 2013 that I discovered that even in America, there were other Arsenal supporters.

Mike when he discovered The Arsenal

First came the local supporters club, then the national supporters club, then a summer visit (finally) from The Arsenal in 2014, then an opportunity to meet and observe others through podcasting, social media, and pilgrimages to the centre of my universe, the London Borough of Islington. Through this journey, I have seen some truly amazing things – both amazingly shocking and amazingly gratifying.

I don’t know what it’s like at other clubs but generally speaking, most would agree that the most important “metric” of football fandom is the one we, as fans have the least control over – the final score. To many, of course, it is the only metric, the sole arbiter of mood, the epicenter of their Arsenal universe. After all, if the club isn’t winning, what’s the point, right?   

I’ve made a tremendous amount of decisions in my life – some very good, some “a little bit not so good,” but one of the best of the lot was to dispense with the idea of “if the club isn’t winning, what’s the point” attitude and start looking around me at what this club was REALLY about.

In 2013, as a then-40-year-old, White, Jewish, American man; husband, father of two pre-teen children, professional career-driven individual, I would’ve told you that I had a pretty diverse set of experiences, friends, viewpoints, etc. – much like in advance of my move to London at age 15 when I thought I knew all there was to know about the world (despite never having gone more than a couple hundred miles from Virginia in my life).

It never occurred to me that even at that point in my life, my social experience was quite narrow.  As I look back, I realize how narrow it was. I had no close Black friends. Pretty strange, but none of my work colleagues or neighbours happened to be black. I had no close Muslim friends. Again, none of my work colleagues or neighbors were Muslim, or if they were we never talked about it. Many of my friends and acquaintances at that time came via the synagogue, school and neighborhood circles through which our children met their friends and we became friends with their families.

I didn’t know anyone who was gay, blind, look – hopefully, by now you get the point – I didn’t realize it, but I unwittingly lived in a bit of a cocoon of people “like me” in all of the ways that would normally come to mind. Soon, I would come to the beautiful realization that there was one “category” of people that would eventually be the only one that mattered, the one that would bind me with the blessing of crashing down all of those happenstance barriers. GOONER.

No other group of people of any kind, anywhere, could possibly be as diverse and inclusive in every way as the group known as Gooners. EVERYONE is welcome. Everyone participates.

Friends of all races, religions, sexual orientations and political views would follow, fascinating conversations and increased understanding of the history and life experiences of people different than me in so many ways but similar in the most important one – Gooner.

• My very first Gooner “mate” from the pub in 2013? A black American whose family is from Ethiopia and used to watch Arsenal on VHS tapes sent to him by his cousins in Africa. We still watch games together whenever we can.  He was the one who was there for my wife and myself me in one of the most dire situations of my last 9 years of life. 
• An Arsenal America “Road Trip” to London in 2014 that led to meeting now-lifelong friends including two who attended my son’s Bar Mitzvah 2 years later.
• The summer of 2022, when I had the joyful experience of attending two weddings of amazing Gooners in London, one of them a traditional Ugandan wedding where we were welcomed with open arms and warmth.
• Just Last month, a lengthy conversation with someone from Kuwait whom I’d just met through his enrollment in a charity FIFA tournament that I was organizing – where I learned about his firsthand experiences during the Gulf War and how he takes in Arsenal today and we talked well into the middle of both his night and mine and learned about each other.

• A DM conversation with the head of the Arsenal Lebanon supporters group shortly after the tragic explosions in Beirut in 2020.
• A regular participant on our open-mic postgame shows who joins us from Palestine to share his views on the club and exchange some nice banter.
• An intensely close and mutually supportive relationship with a gay person with a very different background than mine, whom I consider one of my very best friends and cheerleaders (and vice versa).
• 3-500 people from all over the US and abroad converging in New Orleans each winter, often on a weekend where The Arsenal doesn’t even have a game (due to FA cup eliminations or scheduling quirks), sharing hugs, toasts, laughter, and much more.  
• Meeting two blind Arsenal-supporting friends I’d met on social media at Holloway Road Tube and walking with them to the Coronet to have lunch and talk about just about everything other than Arsenal – about life, their experiences, how they consume sport, life, etc.  
• A recent trio of friends, located in Spain and India, whom I’d never otherwise have met but for working together to start a new social media home for Gooners (ArsenalFC.Social)   
• Interacting through podcasts and charity campaigns with Arsenal supporters in Nigeria, Kenya, New Zealand, Sweden, Spain, India, Australia, Japan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iceland, and so many more corners of the world that I would never, ever have gotten to have known, spoken to, and shared experiences if not for the ONE singular common thread we all share.

That common thread? David Danskin’s idea, passed down to Sir Henry Norris, then to Chapman, living and breathing in Highbury; expressed through the wizardry of men like Drake, Bastin, George, Armstrong, Brady, Rice, Rocky, Wrighty, Bergkamp, Henry, women like Scott, Smith, Little, Miedema, and so many others; the influence of Chapman, Mee, Graham, Friar, Wenger, and so many others.

Sir Henry Norris vision (image courtesy of 442.)

But not just what they espoused as a sporting endeavour on the pitch, but also what they helped to foster and nurture off the pitch: The Arsenal Way. 

As I near half a century on this earth, I’ve come to realize how truly lucky I am for happening upon Arsenal Football Club all those years ago. Not only for sporting reasons – though there have been some damn amazing experiences in those times as well as some desperately frustrating times – but because this club has given me the biggest gift of all – the Gooner Family. I have learned far more about the world and the wonderful people in it in these last 9 years than the previous 40 combined, and consider myself a far happier, more content, understanding, and experienced person.

The world today has so many barriers, so many “us v. them” attitudes and divisions along political, racial, gender, orientation, religious, experiential, and other “lines.” But what The Arsenal mean to me is a world of opportunities, companionship, life education, shared experiences, and the elimination of each and every one of those barriers to where the most diverse set of individuals can in fact be the least diverse but in the most wonderful of ways – because we are all one, we are all the same, we are all Gooners.

After all, the club equality and diversity ethos and as the Boss Man Dave said last year in his book – ‘Arsenal is for Everyone’

So Here’s The Question: What Does The Arsenal Represent To You?  Let us know in the comments. 

Mike in 2019 – surrounded by old friends and new

Mike Feinberg

“Magic” Mike Feinberg fell in love with The Arsenal as a 16-year-old Yank completely out of place and out of his depth, standing on the North Bank Terraces of Highbury starting in the special season of 1988-89.  His experiences in that season changed his life forever and nearly 30 years later he is more in love with the club than ever.  Mike visits his “second home” as often as possible and connects with his childhood as often as possible through his hosting of The Gooners Podcast.  Mike is generally known as a very unpopular person with very popular friends and is best known for getting stuck in multiple stadia turnstiles around England.