Rushang Patel

I’ve tried pretending it’s just rivalry. It isn’t.

There’s something about Arsenal Football Club that presses on people in a specific way. Not just opponents. Neutrals too. You can see it in the replies. In the quote tweets. In the way a harmless celebration clip turns into a 3,000-comment courtroom drama where someone from Manchester is genuinely furious about offside.

It’s disproportionate.

And if I’m honest, I think I finally understand why. It took me a while because I kept looking for the wrong thing. I kept looking for something we’d done. Turns out the crime is something we are.

We Talk Like We’re Inevitable

That’s the real crime.

Arsenal fans don’t speak like hopeful underdogs. We speak like historians correcting a temporary error. There’s a baseline assumption in everything we say — that the natural state of football involves Arsenal near the top of it, and whatever is currently happening is an anomaly, a weather event, a clerical mistake that will shortly be resolved.

We don’t say, “Maybe this is our year.” We say, “Order is being restored.”

This was maddening during the Wenger out years, when we were finishing fifth and genuinely debating whether Mustafi was a top-four centre-back. We were still using the language of a club between dynasties rather than a club in genuine trouble. Other supporters noticed. They found it hilarious. They still find it hilarious — except now we’re actually pushing for titles, which makes the confidence less funny and more aggravating.

Even during the banter era, we carried ourselves like a sleeping aristocracy. That irritates people. Confidence without recent dominance feels illegal in football culture. You’re only allowed to swagger if you’ve just lifted something heavy and silver.

We swagger on principle.

We Romanticize the Game

Other clubs celebrate winning. We celebrate patterns of play.

We will replay a 17-pass sequence — the Saka to Martinelli to Ødegaard triangle, the one that went absolutely nowhere and ended with a goal kick — and call it football heritage. We treat build-up play the way music critics treat a b-side that the mainstream missed. We argue about half-spaces at 1:30am. We post Opta maps. We say things like positional structure without even slightly lowering our voice.

To us, that’s love of the craft.

To everyone else, it’s a grown adult explaining wine to someone who just wanted a drink.

It sounds like we think we understand football at a higher level. Sometimes we’re right, and that almost makes it worse. Nobody wants to be condescended to correctly. You can be wrong and annoying, that’s forgettable. But being right while also being annoying — that sticks. That’s the kind of thing people remember at 2-0 down.

The Near-Miss Aura

Here’s where it gets psychological.

Consistent winners become villains. Consistent losers become irrelevant. Consistent almost-winners become obsession material — because almost-winners have a story that keeps going, a wound that never quite closes, a next chapter that people can’t stop wanting to read even when they’re rooting against it.

Arsenal live in the almost.

Think about 2022-23. We led the league by eight points in March. Eight points. And then we didn’t. The way that unravelled — not in a single catastrophic night but slowly, agonisingly, across weeks of tightening results and post-match press conferences where Arteta kept saying the right things with his jaw slightly too tight — felt almost scripted. It was the kind of collapse that gets its own documentary. People who don’t care about Arsenal were watching that run-in like a season finale.

We rise beautifully. We collapse dramatically. We rebuild with cinematic pacing. The storyline is always tense, always unresolved, always one good month away from either vindication or another spectacular implosion. People watch us the way they watch a show where they’re not sure if they want the protagonist to succeed. And when the plot twists? The memes write themselves. They’ve had plenty of practice.

The pleasure rivals take in our slip-ups isn’t random. It’s narrative payoff. We are the ones who created the tension. We have nobody to blame for the catharsis but ourselves.

We’re Loud Online

There’s no escaping this one.

Arsenal Twitter is not a community. It’s a weather system with a persecution complex and a Substack.

A refereeing decision becomes a thesis. A post-match interview becomes philosophy. A title race becomes destiny versus a corrupt establishment that has never, not once, wanted to see Arsenal succeed. When we lose, it is suspicious. When we win, it is merely the universe correcting itself. When VAR goes against us — and VAR does go against us, genuinely, the data is there — it becomes confirmation of something we already believed.

We don’t do quiet suffering. We do forensic breakdowns. We do threads. We do parallel timelines where the linesman’s flag stays down and everything is different. We are not people who watch football and feel feelings. We are people who watch football and produce content.

And because our online presence is enormous, the loudest five percent represent all of us in the public imagination. The screenshots travel. The worst takes go viral. The normal fans — the ones watching quietly, occasionally saying oh good goal, doing the washing up at half-time — stay completely invisible. Nobody screenshots reasonable.

Scale magnifies perception. And we have scale.

We Don’t Fit the Clean Villain Box

Every big club gets hated, but the reason has to make sense or the hatred can’t sustain itself.

City are hated for dominance — for making the league feel like an inevitability, a foregone conclusion, a very expensive formality. United are hated for history — for the decades of success people feel they’ve never quite been made to answer for. Chelsea are hated for money — for the Roman Abramovich years, for the sense that trophies were simply purchased and delivered like furniture.

These are clean hatreds. They have a clear source. You can point at the thing.

Arsenal? We’re hated for posture.

We talk about tradition, about aesthetics, about the identity of the club, about the Arsenal way — things that sound noble until they start to sound like we’re filing a formal objection to reality. We hold ourselves to standards that can read as moral superiority. We lose and still manage to imply that we lost more thoughtfully than other clubs win. When you combine that with not having actually sealed the deal recently, the whole performance reads as either profound conviction or spectacular self-delusion.

The maddening part — and I say this as someone inside the tent — is that we’re not entirely sure which one it is either.

Envy Without Admission

Here’s the part nobody says out loud.

Arsenal fans believe deeply. Not casually, not ironically, not in the mild way you support a team without really wanting to examine what that means. Deeply. Embarrassingly. The kind of belief that survives mid-table finishes and makes people on the internet question your grip on reality. The kind that keeps producing the next generation of fans who come in expecting greatness and somehow leave more convinced than they arrived.

There is something unsettling about watching a group hold onto that faith through years of open mockery, and then slowly — slowly enough that you almost missed it — start to see it justified. It forces a choice in observers. You can laugh again, which is easy, which costs nothing, which keeps the dynamic comfortable. Or you can admit that they might be building something real, which requires updating your understanding of what’s happening, which requires a kind of intellectual honesty most football rivalries don’t incentivise.

Mockery is cheaper. Mockery scales. Mockery requires no revision.

Hatred is often just envy that found a socially acceptable outfit. And the most revealing thing about the hatred Arsenal attracts right now is that it’s louder than it was five years ago, when we were finishing eighth. You’d think less success would mean more ridicule. But it doesn’t work that way. The closer the belief gets to being vindicated, the more urgent it becomes to make sure everyone still thinks it’s ridiculous.

Are We the Most Hated?

In this moment? It feels like it.

Not because we’re evil. Not because we buy titles or bend rules or play without a kind of recognisable joy. But because we’re hovering close enough to power to make people nervous — and we’ve been hovering long enough that the nervousness has curdled into something more committed.

Football hate is proximity-based. The closer you get to lifting something, the louder the resistance becomes. It’s a strange kind of recognition, if you squint at it right.

Indifference would worry me more. Truly. When people track your fan accounts and clip your celebrations and bookmark your bad takes and build whole segments of their personality around waiting for you to slip — you are not irrelevant. You are not a joke. You are a threat wearing the costume of a joke, which is a much more interesting thing to be.

They don’t hate Arsenal.

They hate the possibility that the belief was never delusional. That it was just early.

And they hate that they can’t stop watching to find out.