LONDON — On
the night before the biggest game of
Arsenal’s season so far, the fans slipped
inside the Emirates Stadium to make sure everything was in place. Their leader
and a handful of friends had spent weeks drawing up their plans: raising money,
contacting suppliers, brainstorming themes, designing images, cutting out
stencils, and spray-painting letters.
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Late on a Friday
night, there was just one job left to do. They had to check that every seat in
Block 25 of the stadium’s Clock End contained a flag, either red or white, for
the culmination of the display.
The next day, they
saw their vision realized. As the players of Arsenal and Tottenham took the
field at the Emirates, Block 25 was transformed. “We Came, We Saw, We
Conquered”, read one banner. “North London Is Red Since 1913”, ran another, a
reference to Arsenal’s controversial relocation to this part of the city — and
Tottenham territory — a century ago. Hundreds of flags fluttered under a clear
blue sky.
The display lasted
barely more than an instant, all those hours of effort expended for a single,
fleeting moment, a reverie that broke as soon as the whistle blew. Its impact,
though, lasted substantially longer.
After the game,
Arsenal’s manager,
Mikel Arteta, described the atmosphere inside the Emirates
that afternoon as “probably the best I have seen in this stadium since I’ve
been involved with the club,” a relationship that covers more than a decade.
His captain, Martin Odegaard, made a point of thanking the fans, too. “It was
amazing to play out there,” he said.
In part, of course,
that can be attributed to the result: Arsenal had beaten Tottenham, and victory
in the North London derby is always something to be celebrated. The context
helped, too: The win ensured that Arsenal remained at the summit of the
Premier League for another week, a point ahead of Manchester City heading into this
weekend, when Liverpool visits the Emirates.
But this was not an
isolated case. Over the last year or so, it has not been uncommon for Arteta
and his players to gush over how noisy, how passionate, how ardent the Emirates
has become. Inside the club, there is a sincere belief that the raucous
atmosphere is a cause, rather than a consequence, of the team’s surge in form.
In a stadium long
derided as among the quietest in English soccer, a crowd that had come to be
seen as an advertisement for the dangers of the game’s gentrification — too
posh, effectively, to push its team — has suddenly found its voice.
That transformation can be traced not only to the
energy and impetus provided by the group that has coalesced around a handful of
founders — the Ashburton Army, inspired by the ultra-faction factions common in
European and South American soccer but still relatively rare in
England — but
also to the determination of the club itself to allow them to solve a problem
that dated back at least a generation.
After all, the
night before the biggest game of the season, as they sought to put the
finishing touches on their work, someone had to let them in.
The blame for
Arsenal’s reputation as a sedate, subdued sort of place is often placed on its
departure from its longtime home at Highbury for the grand, sweeping bowl of
the Emirates in 2006. Arsène Wenger, the manager who oversaw the relocation,
always felt that Arsenal had “left its soul at Highbury.”
It is a poetic,
faintly romantic telling of history, but it may not be an accurate one. “The
reputation started at Highbury,” said Ray Herlihy, founder of RedAction, a
group that has been working to improve the atmosphere at Arsenal for two
decades. “It was at Highbury that I got involved. That was where the Highbury
Library nickname began.” All that was lost in the move, it turned out, was the
rhyme.
Unquestionably, the
new stadium accentuated the issues. Clusters of fans who had sat together at
Highbury suddenly found themselves separated. The Emirates’ design meant there
was no obvious focal point where the noisiest, most fervent fans could gather.
Highbury had boasted the twin poles of the Clock End and the North Bank; the
Emirates had no natural equivalent.
Most damaging of
all was the divergence between the cost of tickets and the success of the team.
The Emirates, famously, was home to the most expensive season ticket in English
soccer. With younger fans priced out, the crowd started to skew older. “For a
while, I think we had the highest average age of season-ticket holder,” Herlihy
said. “And you’re not as animated at 65 as you might be at 25.”
At the same time,
Arsenal’s fortunes were waning. Wenger’s later years were marked not by title
challenges but by an annual struggle simply to qualify for the
Champions League, a decline that gave rise to a bitter, internecine debate over whether
the Frenchman had outstayed his welcome.
“There had been
years of the Wenger Out campaign,” said Remy Marsh, a founder of the Ashburton
Army (though he has, he said, subsequently “stepped away” from the group.)
“There was an undeniable toxicity.” Much of it was captured every week by the
cameras of Arsenal Fan TV, full of furious rants and factional squabbles. “It
ruined a whole generation,” Marsh said.
The Ashburton Army,
at the outset, was hardly a heavyweight organization. It was an attempt to
bring elements of the ultra-spirit to Arsenal — “the big tifo displays, the
pyrotechnics; they were always singing, always supporting,” one of the group’s
leaders said, “and I didn’t see why we couldn’t have that here” — but it was
based around a single group chat. The Army, then, had barely more than a dozen
members.
That was enough,
though, to catch the club’s eye. Arsenal was not unique among Premier League
clubs in trying to solve the riddle presented by the league’s global appeal:
how to maintain an atmosphere when its stadium was increasingly filled by
corporate guests and day-tripping tourists there to sample the experience
rather than contribute to it.
Their solution may
offer a blueprint to other teams with precisely the same problem. “We encourage
our staff to listen informally to fans,” said Vinai Venkatesham, Arsenal’s CEO.
When Marsh emailed
the club to outline what the group hoped to achieve, they were invited to meet
with the fan liaison team. The Ashburton Army wanted to remain independent, but
the club was happy not only to tolerate them but also to help.
That resolve was
only strengthened, Venkatesham said, by the coronavirus pandemic. “We had 62
games without fans,” he said. “It gave us perspective and time to evaluate
ourselves, to ask if we were listening enough, if the fans felt like they were
at the center of every decision.”
The sight of the
Emirates “standing silent” for a year, he said, reinforced the idea that “fans
were not just an ingredient for football; they were the ingredient.” We want
fans to feel close and connected to the club,” Venkatesham said. “The Emirates
Stadium is the epicenter for that, and from there, it spreads out across the
globe.”
Herlihy, a veteran
of Arsenal’s fan outreach programs, had long felt the club paid lip service to
the idea of listening to their views. “They talked a good game,” he said. “But
there was no real engagement.”
That changed,
Herlihy said, after the onset of the pandemic and the controversy over
Arsenal’s involvement in the short-lived European Super League. “You know what
they say: The streets don’t forget,” he said. “After that, there was a real
change of tone. They engaged properly with these issues.”
After two decades
of trying, the approach seems to have worked. Nobody is under any illusions: It
helps, of course, that Arteta has put together not just a bright, young team,
stocked with homegrown players, but a winning one, too. But just as they have
driven the atmosphere at the Emirates, so the atmosphere has driven them.
“The Ashburton Army
have shown the rest of the stadium how it should be done,” Herlihy said. His
seat, at the opposite end of the stadium, affords him a perfect view of the
group in action: 90 minutes of “noise and movement,” every single one of them
dressed not in club colors, but in the black uniform of any self-respecting
ultra.
“They’re doing what we all did years ago and what we thought
you couldn’t do anymore,” he said. “They’re going to the football with their
mates, and they’re having fun. And it’s more fun to have fun at football.”
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