Arsenal as a Second Language

How a London football club became my family’s heirloom, my mother’s reluctant prayer, and my last tether to home.

Photo by Nelson Ndongala on Unsplash

I have always loved football, what Americans, with their cheerful indifference to the rest of the world, insist on calling soccer, as if renaming it might make it theirs. But football is not a sport, not in the way they mean it. It is a kind of haunting. A ghost that follows you from Lagos to London to St. Louis, whispering in a language only you and yours can hear. It is the stubborn ache of memory, refusing to loosen its grip on you no matter how far you roam.

I am an Arsenal fan. I say this the way one might say, I am a man who still dreams in his mother’s tongue. It is not a hobby or a passing fancy. It is something stitched into the soft, unguarded parts of me, in the same place where childhood prayers and bad advice from uncles and cousins live.

If you are Nigerian or West African, you know. You know how a club’s name is not just a team but a family heirloom, passed down like a father’s wristwatch or the secret to your grandmother’s jollof rice. You know how, in those old days, before smartphones, before VPNs, before the hollow luxury of streaming, we gathered in front of crackling TVs in rooms thick with sweat and hope, shouting at the screen as if our voices could bend the ball into the net. In those days, you supported a team because of your father’s obsession with Kanu Nwankwo, or because Jay-Jay Okocha once made the defenders dance like men caught in a rainstorm. Or maybe because, when you were small, you saw the way the men in your neighborhood clutched their heads when Nigeria lost a game against Cameroon, as if mourning a death in the family.

And yet, if you looked closer, those allegiances weren’t as fixed as we liked to pretend. In those days, you switched teams when your favorite player moved. Football fandom was fluid, tribal, whimsical, and deeply personal. Nobody wrote think-pieces about loyalty or accused you of betrayal for following the club where your hero now wore the armband. It wasn’t about the club, not really. It was about belonging. In a country where governments came and went, where promises crumbled like old walls in the rain, football was the one place where you could pick a side and feel as though your side mattered.

It was a time when the shout of “Up Gunners!” or “Up Devils!” or “Up Blues!” and the response of “for life!” or “forever!” could change the trajectory of a sad afternoon. Then there was the Super Eagles. Oh, those beautiful, maddening Super Eagles, now elegantly and derisively known as Super Chickens. That was something else entirely. Club loyalties were tribal, but the national team was a religion. I remember the way the whole country would freeze when Nigeria played. The streets would empty, the markets would be quiet, even the churches would cut their services short, the pastor turning the sacred altar into a viewing center. My father would transform into a shouting, gesticulating prophet of doom and miracles. “See this foolish goalkeeper!” he would roar, as if the man on the screen could hear him. And my mother — God bless her — who cared nothing for football, would still be dragged into the living room by my brother and me, forced to sit through ninety minutes of tension. Though sometimes, when she thought we weren’t looking, I’d catch her leaning forward during penalties, her lips moving silently. Even her indifference was a kind of performance. “Mummy, pray for them!” we would beg, as if her whispered “God, help them” could somehow tip the scales in our favor. As if the other team’s mothers weren’t praying too.

But for all its joy, football could also turn men into tyrants. I would be remiss not to mention how awful many of us could be when our teams lost. The way we would unleash our anger on siblings and spouses, as if the game’s failure were a personal betrayal. I will forever be grateful to my parents for leading us aright. In our house, the exuberance or despair ended with the final whistle. Lapsed appetites would return, and the debates about whether the coach was trash or the players were stupid never quite made it beyond the heat of the moment.

It occurs to me now that these games were more than just games. They were rituals, ceremonies of collective belief. And yet, like many ceremonies, they carried their own exclusions. Even when the Super Falcons — the Nigerian women’s team — played, my mother’s place in those moments was not as fan but as spiritual auxiliary. She was there to bless the endeavor, not to participate in its joys or sorrows. Or so we assumed. Years later, she’d confess she secretly loved the drama, the way men’s voices cracked under pressure, how the crowd on TV sounded like a hymn. But back then, no one thought to ask her. The pitch, both literal and metaphorical, belonged to the men. Football was the language of uncles and brothers, of fathers and sons.

Yet there were my sisters, who were as passionate as we were. It helped that my older sister was a sports champion in her own right, having represented our state several times in both squash and volleyball. She’d scoff at the men’s post-match analysis, correcting their tactics with the authority of someone who’d actually played. Yet when the games were on, the remote (control) was never in her hand. The men of our neighborhood would pat her head and say, ‘Smart girl,’ as if her expertise was adorable rather than earned. But whenever I remember those years, the image that comes to mind is of the men and the way they staked claims on joy in a country that rationed it so cruelly.

But damn, I remember those early years of supporting Arsenal as beautiful suffering. Especially the years after the Invincibles — after 49 games unbeaten in the Premier League. It was heartbreak dressed in red and white, a religion of almosts and not-quites. It is insane that Arsenal, even today, will never be able to shake these allegations — this reputation for glorious failure. Chelsea was for the boys who liked their victories loud and brash, who wore their new money like cologne. Manchester United was for the uncles who still missed the British Empire, who spoke of Cantona as if he were a prophet and Alex Fergusson like he was God. Liverpool was for poets and fools. The rest? Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur bloody nothings.

I did not choose Arsenal. It was given to me like a name, like a birthmark. A Thierry Henry flick. A Dennis Bergkamp feint. A Kanu run. My father’s friend slamming his hand on the table, shouting “Wetin be this?!” when the referee blew against us. Arsenal was a Kanu Nwankwo heritage. In my house, Kanu was the other sibling we only saw on television, my father’s favorite child born out of wedlock. In those flickering images, we saw the possibility of escape, of a boy from Owerri commanding stadiums in Milan and Highbury. I held similar dreams, one not facilitated by football but something else.

Now, in America, where football is something children play between baseball and basketball, where the word soccer is a shrug, I carry this love like a secret. When I meet another Nigerian in the frozen foods aisle at a grocery store and one of us says “Gunners?” and the other groans “Ah, no be this season o,” it is not just banter. It is a handshake in the dark. A way of saying: I, too, remember.

But even the football I carry now is not the football I left behind. The Arsenal of my childhood is not the Arsenal of streaming services, of transfer rumors by David Ornstein and Fabrizio Romano, of Saudi and American billionaires buying clubs like trinkets. The matches are crisper now, the commentary smoother, but the soul of it feels far away. There is VAR now and footballers using social media to apologize for on the pitch decisions. The sacred inconvenience of chasing radio frequencies or bribing a neighbor to tap their DSTV signal is gone. Everything is accessible, and yet some essential thing has slipped through the cracks.

Americans do not understand. They cannot fathom why a loss in London ruins your afternoon in Missouri. They do not know what it means to wake at dawn, to hunch over a pixelated screen, to feel your heart lurch when Saka cuts inside. They do not know how a team sheet can smell like home—like roasted plantain and Milo, like the sweat of a hundred bodies packed into a viewing center. They do not know that away from Nigeria, these things are not hobbies. They are survival strategies.

And maybe, if I am honest, even I am not sure anymore whether what I miss is the football or the world that came with it. The world of my father’s laughter, my mother’s reluctant prayers, the neighbor’s radio crackling in the courtyard. The world where hope was both a joke and a duty. The world where, for ninety minutes, a nation battered by politics and poverty could pretend, if only briefly, that we were the masters of something.

It is absurd, this love. It is irrational. It is holy.

So when the man at the bus stop hears me cursing at my phone on a Saturday afternoon and says, “Arsenal dey lose abi?” — I laugh. Not because it is funny, but because, in this foreign land, he has spoken a word that means home. We both pretend, in that moment, that the Arsenal we loved still exists. That Nigeria still pauses when the Super Eagles play. That home, however scattered, can be summoned by the right name.

And perhaps that is the point. Football, for us, was never just a game. It was a way of holding on. To each other, to the past, to the idea that somewhere, in some other time zone, people still remember the same things you do. That somewhere, someone else is also shouting at the screen, also praying under their breath, also feeling that old, familiar ache in their chest when the final whistle blows.

It is ridiculous. It is sacred. It is ours.

And maybe — just maybe — it never happened quite the way I remember. Maybe the past, like football, reshapes itself in the retelling. But what else can a disillusioned man believe in, if not the sanctity of a memory shared?

An essay from my forthcoming collection “Exodus” (to be published by Cavan Kerry Press in Spring 2027) recently appeared on Pleiades Issue 45.1 titled “Walking Downtown.” Click here to get yourself a copy.