On Saturday, Arsenal will face Paris Saint-Germain in the UEFA Champions League final. Both near and far from the match in Budapest, the team’s supporters—self-described “Gooners”—will be watching.
Arsenal has a massive global reach. After the North London club won the Premier League on May 19, the official league account posted videos of thousands of Arsenal fans celebrating in the streets of New York, Uganda, and Kenya.
Fellow Premier League sides Manchester United and Liverpool have had worldwide fan bases for decades, but Arsenal’s popularity has particularly spread like wildfire, even amid frustrations on the pitch.
“People do not become Arsenal fans because it’s easy,” New York City Mayor and Arsenal supporter Zohran Mamdani tells Front Office Sports. The team is notorious for blowing its league lead, including in the 2022–23 and 2023–24 seasons, which added to its title drought of more than two decades.
“It’s not easy to wait 22 years. It’s not easy to go through consecutive 8th-place finishes. It’s not easy to have led for so long and then in many ways become the butt of a joke,” he says. “And we saw that for many years. We think about it as the ‘banter era,’ you know, and all of these false dawns. And now for so many, it’s just a sense of realization.”
