The point is that absolutely no other human behaviour can gather these kinds of crowds – David Goldblatt
I've been struggling to think of areas to focus my writing lately. Subscribers to this newsletter will know that I mostly write about the Arsenal Women's team, and frankly, since the Conti Cup final, there hasn't been a great deal to write about to that end. Arsenal Women’s season effectively ended at Molineux on March 31 when Arsenal lifted the Conti Cup. Of course, I have written about the men's team before on this newsletter before, and there is certainly no shortage of things to write about on that side of the club with Mikel Arteta's side in the thick of a Premier League title run-in.
I started writing this article towards the end of the week that followed Arsenal's London derby wins against Chelsea and Tottenham. By that point, the delicious tears of Chelsea and Tottenham fans had been digested by Arsenal fans thanks to the abundance of content in the online and print media. As enjoyable as it would be to eulogise about Kai Havertz, or reflect on how Tottenham do in fact get battered everywhere they go, I wanted to use the more personal touch offered by a newsletter to write an article about people, where football serves as the backdrop.
At the moment, and especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, a shadow of solitude has loomed over society. Last year, it was reported that over 3 million people in the UK suffer from chronic loneliness. Even in situations where people aren't afflicted by loneliness per-se, Western capitalist society is inherently individualistic, and a natural consequence of this is that social barriers are being reinforced rather than knocked down. I'm not going to pretend I haven’t felt a regular sense of isolation in my life in recent times. This is why football is so precious to me, it is an antidote to a society of millions minding their own business.
While writing this piece, I read an interesting article from the New York Times entitled "How Social Isolation is Killing Us", which referenced research suggesting that misinterpreting social cues can exacerbate a sense of loneliness:
“New research suggests that loneliness is not necessarily the result of poor social skills or lack of social support, but can be caused in part by unusual sensitivity to social cues. Lonely people are more likely to perceive ambiguous social cues negatively and enter a self-preservation mindset"
Part of the beauty of being a football fan is that it shatters these social cues. There is no ambiguity when it comes to hugging a random and stranger because Reiss Nelson has twatted one top bins in the 96th minute.
In truth, I could have picked any of the 32 Arsenal games across the men's and women's teams that I have attended this season as a pop-sociological case study on football fan, but what made the North London Derby unique was the experience of being part of a mass collective without actually attending the match. As I do not hold the 30,000 away credits required [Citation Needed] to purchase a ticket in the away end, I had to settle for the second best place to watch the match: The Twelve Pins pub – just across the road from Finsbury Park underground station. The upshot of this was being able to watch the match in Gooner-friendly surroundings and not having to run the N17 gauntlet.
Given that I would be watching the match on home territory, I considered it to be perfectly safe to wear Arsenal colours; it only dawned on me as sat on the Victoria Line wearing red and getting deeper and deeper into North London that I was just a couple of stops away from entering the bull ring that was Seven Sisters station, fortunately I was able reach the sanctuary of Finsbury Park with nothing more than a few passive aggressive stares. In a strange way, I even appreciated those moments of non-verbal interaction with the supporters of North London's second best football club – the tacit acknowledgment that even on opposite sides of an intense rivalry, we shared the mutual feeling of fucking bricking it ahead of kick-off.
Watching in the match in a pub crowd is always a fun time. For a start, while UK laws do not allow for drinking in view of the pitch, but drinking in view of a screen is fine. It also brings into acute focus some of the idiosyncrasies of football fans, booing at a player on the pitch in front of you is one thing, booing at a tv screen is one of those moments of simultaneous embarrassment and endearment that make you question how, as a grown person, you have got to this point in your life. Another thing that turned the typical matchday dynamic on its head was entering the pub an hour before kick-off as others were leaving to make the short hop up to Seven Sisters Road.
Once I'd arrived at the Pins, I met with a couple of friends, both of whom I had come to know through Twitter (no one actually calls it 'X', by the way, and I certainly won't be doing so any time soon). A few years ago, there probably would have been eyebrows raised at the idea meeting in real life with 'internet friends' but one of the undoubted successes of social media is that it can bring together like minded people in both online and real life spaces. To be honest, the term 'internet friends' is redundant in online world, they're just friends. You wouldn't get a happily married couple who met via a dating my app calling their other half their '[insert your favourite dating app] spouse'.
The place was packed out; only football can fill up a pub at one PM on a Sunday without a roast dinner in sight. There is a basic beauty in mass gatherings of people, be it football fans on a matchday, tourists flocking to popular landmark, or masses of religious followers attending a call to prayer. As mentioned previously, I was watching the game with friends, but football provides one of those rare situations in life where striking up a conversation with a stranger is normalised. Everyone inside that pub was there for the same reason, and everyone inside that pub would have had:
A hot take on Mikel Arteta's unchanged starting XI
Differing opinions as to whether Manchester City would be more likely to drop points to Nottingham Forest (17th in the table), Fulham (on the beach), or Tottenham (bad at football)
Something not very nice to say about Ange Postecoglu's Body Mass Index
Any pre-match tension hanging over N5 dissipated pretty quickly thanks to Postecoglu deciding that coaching set-pieces was beneath him and Arsenal duly going in front with just 15 minutes on the clock, as Pierre Emile Højberg headed into his own net from a Bukayo Saka corner. When the breakaway second goal hit the back of the net, I lost myself in such a great ocean of bodies of friends and strangers alike. In that moment, I could just as well have been in the away end, albeit one with especially sticky floors. It's in these moments – which I'm sure any football fan can relate to, that you truly feel part of something incomprehensibly greater than yourself.
Who knows what life the sixty-something-year-old bald bloke who embraced me in that moment has led, does he have a family? Does he live alone? Does he use football as a means of unwinding from a highly stressful and unrewarding job? Is he happily retired? What are his beliefs and principles? All of those questions are unanswered, and our paths will likely never cross again, but one thing that was abundantly clear in that moment was that we shared a love for the football club we support, and as a result, the lives of strangers made an impermanent but memorable mark on each other in that one fleeting moment.
Despite appearances to the contrary I do in fact have hobbies and interests outside of football, but there is nothing else that invokes such tribalism within me and nothing else that I can passionately debate for hours on end without running out of things to say. The beauty of being a football fans is that fellow fans can reciprocate this. Even a few Neck Oils deep (my petty disdain towards Tottenham Hotspur doesn't quite extend to not drinking a beer that's brewed in their own stadium), I could enjoy intellectually stimulating conversation with my friends about how Declan Rice receives the football, our out of possession structure, and our mutual dislike of Arsenal's number 5.
Second half mistakes from David Raya and Declan Rice ensured that the second half did not become the cakewalk that might have been expected. The Ying and Yang between stomach churning nerves and pure relief comes with the territory of being emotionally invested in a sports team, and both of those sensations were turned up to 100 in the final knockings of the match. Had I been watching the game alone, on TV, I would have considered turning it off for the duration of the six gruelling minutes of injury time, but the panic button of temporary disengagement wasn't a viable option in a pub full of Arsenal fans. My reaction to the whistle mirrored that of Mikel Arteta's inside the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, no jumping around in delirium, just a few seconds embracing friends as Arteta did with his coaching staff, followed by a puffing out of the cheeks. And breathe.
I didn’t stick around to watch Chris Wood and Nottingham Forest spurn numerous big chances against Manchester City. Like a lot of Arsenal fans, I have come to accept that beating our London rivals is better enjoyed in isolation than in the context of going up against a robotically inevitable juggernaut in a title chase. Walking through Angel after the match, I made eye-contact with a fellow Gooner. We nodded at one another in a moment of unspoken mutual recognition of the fact we'd both just been put through the wringer and made it out on other side.
Later on that afternoon, a cab driver wound down his window and asked me what the final score was (quite how he'd managed to go a couple of hours avoiding the final score is an as of yet unsolved mystery). I duly told him the good news before we spent a moment discussing Arsenal's title chances.
At 1800 words I fear I am in danger of labouring the point here, but in one Sunday afternoon I felt more connected with the world around me than I had done in entire days prior. I didn't know the majority of people I interacted with that day, but for the briefest of moments our paths crossed, all because of twenty-two men kicking a ball around a pitch.