If Arsenal win the Champions League final later today, expect euphoria across Africa. Judging by the scenes after last week’s Premier League title win – their first in 22 years – the celebrations will be immense. Boisterous fans flooded city centres in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kampala and Lagos. In Nigeria’s Zamfara state, people celebrated in the streets despite rising insecurity as a result of Boko Haram’s terrorism.
For outsiders, the obvious question is: how did a club from north London become so deeply woven into African popular culture?
The most dramatic scenes may come in Kenya, where last week tens of thousands of people – some estimates put the number as high as a million – poured on to streets and highways in a sea of red Arsenal shirts, a sight never witnessed before. Fans climbed lamp-posts, waved flags, sang club songs (including versions composed in local languages) and brought traffic to a standstill. In one widely shared clip, a supporter described the title as a victory that had “overcome the hatred of the entire world”. Jubilant fans also made celebratory pilgrimage to the grave of the late Kenyan opposition leader, prime minister and keen Arsenal supporter Raila Odinga.
But Kenya was hardly unique. YouTube and TikTok are filled with videos of fans across Ethiopia turning the capital, Addis Ababa, into a site of car parades, chanting crowds and young men weaving in and out of traffic celebration. In another, a grandmother in an Arsenal shirt is celebrating alongside her grandsons. Manchester United fans – of which there are very man in the country – could only watch.
In Uganda, thousands gathered in Nsambya, an Arsenal stronghold in Kampala, for an all-night concert called “vimbisa Arsenal” after watching the match on giant screens. One fan livestreamed the event for supporters unable to attend. Elsewhere, worshippers heading to church or mosque wore Arsenal-themed tunics while thanking God for the victory. And no one in Africa was surprised by the spontaneous energy.
One reason lies in the spread of Premier League broadcasting across the continent in the 1990s. After the league’s 1992 launch, clubs such as Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea built African fanbases. But the decisive shift came in 2000, when the South African satellite network DStv acquired Premier League rights and began showing live matches across sub-Saharan Africa through its SuperSport channels. Suddenly, these matches were available weekly in homes, bars and viewing centres from Kenya to Nigeria and Ethiopia.
These football bars became ritual gathering places. Fanclubs emerged everywhere, complete with elections, annual meetings and elaborate celebrations. Without necessarily intending to, SuperSport and DStv were fostering a kind of non-political Pan-Africanism built around shared spectatorship. Yet even as African and African-descended players starred for English clubs, this new football public had not fully found its symbolic home.
That changed with Arsène Wenger. When the legendary manager joined Arsenal from the Japanese league in 1996, African players were still rare in English football. Wenger transformed that landscape. By the time he left in 2018, Arsenal had become a symbol of both African football’s rise in the Premier League and London’s African diaspora.
In 1957, Arsenal signed a white South African, Danie le Roux. He played for the club in the 1957-58 season. Wenger’s first African signing was the Liberian striker Christopher Wreh, whose success under Wenger at Monaco reinforced his belief in African talent. Wreh was a cousin of George Weah, who also played for Wenger at Monaco and after a glittering career became president of Liberia. More than two dozen African-born players represented the club under Wenger, including stars such as Lauren, Patrick Vieira, Kolo Touré and Nwankwo Kanu. That identification helped cement Arsenal’s image as open, cosmopolitan, anti-racist and forward-looking – values many supporters feel are in short supply in their own political systems.
Football celebrations also provide a kind of political release. In countries where politics mostly feels like elite horse-trading and elections are reduced to vote-buying, these spontaneous occupations of public space feel organic and genuinely collective. The streets belong, briefly, to ordinary people.
It is true that authoritarian figures such as Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, are Arsenal supporters, and that the club’s sponsorship relationship with Rwanda has complicated its image. But that does little to diminish the popular energy Arsenal evokes as a symbol of continental and diasporic Black pride.
The internet has amplified this culture even further. Just as the streets became spaces for collective expression, social media became the preferred outlet for the political and cultural voice of young Africans. It is striking that Black British and African diaspora supporters dominate the most influential Arsenal fan media spaces.
On YouTube, personalities who feature on the Arsenal Fan TV channel are now recognisable celebrities across Africa. Kelechi, a Nigerian migrant scientist and Arsenal fan, sings over Afropop songs before launching into match analysis. He and other AFTV personalities now tour African countries, where their watchalongs resemble national events. Young Africans inevitably followed suit, launching their own fan-TV channels, mirroring the energy and humour of their counterparts in London.
This week I called my cousin Leon in Cape Town. A civil servant who grew up in a township north of the city, he began supporting Arsenal in 1999 because of his older brother, precisely when Wenger’s teams became visibly more African. Though his favourite player was the white Dutch forward Dennis Bergkamp, there were also Kanu and later Emmanuel Adebayor. For him, Arsenal was never just a football club: it was style and flair, but also, as a South African growing up under apartheid, it offered something approximating “non-racialism” – the goal of the liberation struggle.
If Arsenal win tonight, that feeling will erupt once again on to the streets of Africa – a joy accumulated over decades through television, migration, fandom and memory.
