20 Years, 3 Kits, One Title
I've supported a club from North London for two decades, even though I'm from New York. I've only ever bought a kit at the moments I truly believed.
I don’t know when it happened, really. It was somewhere between those early 2000s days playing FIFA, when my friend would always pick Manchester United, so I’d pick Arsenal, and the 2006 FIFA World Cup. I was mesmerized by France and Thierry Henry, the superstar from that team I’d always had an eye on.1 It was a London club, the big city, one of the few on this planet that rivals my own hometown. Later, I would come to value that Arsenal stood for a modern vision of cosmopolitan Britain. But at the time, they just had some great players.
Cesc Fàbregas was the first one for me. The kid from Catalunya who was poached from the FC Barcelona academy to come and play for us. He broke into the team at 16, but he was 19 by the time I’d watch him dominate Premier League midfields. He had Superman vision, he was a virtuoso passer of the football, but he could also carry it and combine with teammates and score big goals. He would even get into the trenches at times, putting in tackles. He’d already gone to a Champions League final with Arsenal, and now he’d lead us all the way to glory again—or so I devoutly believed.
2007/08 was the real heartbreaker, when he was at the core of a team that played the best stuff in Europe for two thirds of the season but which was ultimately derided as soft and naive. The young crew of pass-and-move savants were battered by injury after facing some extremely physical play2, then mocked for lacking the street smarts to win titles.
No matter. By 2008/09, my belief had only grown. I bought a long-sleeve jersey—the thick white stripes stretching all the way down to the wrist—with “FABREGAS - 4” on the back. We didn’t win a trophy for six years.
It was the FA Cup, a fine prize for most clubs in English football, but I’d joined up on the back of a trip to the Champions League final and an Invincible season two years prior. Surely, England’s third-biggest club could not go decades without winning the league. Then Chelsea took our place in the English game, and they eventually took Fàbregas, too. United laughed at us, Liverpool and Manchester City joined them, and we were left with Tottenham in the wilderness of the so-called Big Six. Even Spurs were good for a few years. Blimey.
That’s not to say we never competed, and we did stack those FA Cups, but I watched Arsène Wenger’s command of top-level football slip until it went off a cliff. Then Unai Emery came in, probably in an impossible position, and failed. We didn’t win a major title forever, and my spending habits at the Arsenal store reflected it. I did not purchase an Arsenal first-team kit for 18 years.
And then Mikel Arteta showed up. He won yet another FA Cup in his first season, but he was cursed to inherit those defenders and that squad.3 We continued to underperform against our alleged rivals, the ones who’d taken all the trophies off us over the years. Tottenham even took our Champions League spot after we faltered in the home stretch in 2021/22. Good grief.
And then 2022/23 happened. Arsenal exploded out of the gate, playing phenomenal stuff until Gabriel Jesus’s injury at the midseason World Cup disrupted their attacking play. Still, they persisted in challenging Manchester City for the title as Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool fell away. The academy kids were scoring late winners, the team had that special sauce, and after Eddie Nketiah’s clutch strike to shoot down United in January, I was hooked again.
I bought that red home kit with the electric collar, the one that signaled—alongside the stone-cold black away strip that partnered it—that we were back in all ways. Suddenly, we were a team to be feared in the tunnel, physical and imposing even as we played our pattern football. “ØDEGAARD - 8” was on the back of my shirt to honor our artisan in the midfield, the silky skilled one who doubled as the team’s most ferocious front-pressing defensive demon. He would soon lead Arteta’s transformed Arsenal, the new force of nature, to glory.
And then that one fell apart, too, when William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu got injured in the same game not long after I bought my kit. So did the remarkable title challenge in 2023/24, when we took City to the final day and forced them to take 91 points to beat us. Then, in 2024/25, we became the most hated team in the league. Hell, across the football world. But the haters, one hesitates to admit, had a point. We had come up short every time. We’d spent a bunch of money to get ourselves back into contention—and played some smart stuff and beaten some top European teams and competed on most fronts—but we had nothing to show for it.
Except for me: After years of watching from my sofa in New York, a million miles away, raging against the injustice of it all, I’d gone to O’Hanlon’s for a Champions League quarterfinal and watched us smash Real Madrid. There were a lot of people like me, it turned out, and though I didn’t know them from Adam, we hugged and sang and reminisced on how the hell any of us had come to live and die by this team.
Whether or not it was in response to all the vitriol we faced through the years, all the disappointments and the drudgery and the ridicule, we became a ruthlessly cynical bunch by the end of calendar year 2025. We got goals however we could, we defended like demons, and we asked our goalkeeper to become the best player in England.4 We were no longer the stylish, flee-flowing buccaneers of old, but we’d resolved—at all costs—to win.
By this point, though—2025/26—I’d once again given up buying gear.5 OK, there were always some odds and ends in there over the years, a jacket or a scarf, but never a jersey after those Fàbregas and Ødegaard debacles. Every time I bought a kit, something terrible happened. Everything fell apart. I wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
But then, as April gave way to May and we kept on winning, I decided I did believe again. One more time. The shirt was one I’d always regretted missing out on: The “bruised banana” away kit from 2019/20 with “SAKA - 77” on the back, from that season he really broke through with Emile Smith-Rowe and the academy boys began to deliver us from the darkness.
I feared the worst as soon as I closed the deal, but we kept winning, even if it was often EXCRUCIATING! 1-0 stuff. And then, suddenly, while I was at work on Tuesday—pulling out my phone as infrequently as I could to check on whether Bournemouth would just put City down for us—we’d won the damn league.
In my seat next to a window, I looked up from my phone and out at the gray-and-glass towers of Lower Manhattan and the glistening chop of the Hudson River and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. There was no one around me who’d possibly understand. They were all going about their normal American lives. I wished I was at O’Hanlon’s, but this is our fate on this side of the pond. Sometimes, you’ve got to go to work and pray.
Maybe it was always going to be relief as much as glory for this club—and for me. Thank God it’s over and things won’t bleed into Matchweek 38. Instead, we’ll be crowned at the Crystal Palace. My new kit hasn’t even arrived yet. Maybe that was the secret.
Though Zinedine Zidane became my favorite player ever. Nothing has changed since.
I’ve watched a lot of Arsenal players get their legs snapped in half. Compound fracture, tibia and fibula, right there on the TV screen.
The less said about Wenger’s taste in defenders and midfielders and goalkeepers in his later years, the better.
You can have your Bruno Fernandes.
At some point, my faith was hanging on by a thread.