Zadie Smith once wrote that \u201cthe square mile around Arsenal\u2019s stadium could be a suitable surrogate for the whole wide world\u201d. Perhaps you only really glimpse this on a match day, when the jerk chicken grills and paella pans fire up and belch delicious smoke across the rows of terraced houses, when the locals in weathered replica shirts brush shoulders with tourists bearing selfie sticks, when a small group of dedicated volunteers at a kiosk by the Ken Friar Bridge accepts non-perishable donations for the Islington food bank.<\/p>\n
And you shall scoff, and you shall sneer, because there is a north London of the popular imagination, and Islington in particular, which has become a surrogate for something else entirely. A slur, an insult, a byword for privilege and entitlement and metropolitan effeteness, the place of Blair and Corbyn and Starmer and a shrink on every street corner. North London is elite, north London is out of touch, north London looks down on the rest of you while eating plates of \u00a316 pasta.<\/p>\n
In this telling the idea of Arsenal surrendering a nine-point lead in the Premier League title race feels richly poetic: just and right and perhaps even moral. The neutrals have swung firmly behind Manchester City, who assumed the lead with a 1-0 win over Burnley<\/a> on Wednesday night. After all, Pep Guardiola\u2019s team play fair, play football in the way it is supposed to be played, brook no underlying ethical or geopolitical objections. Manchester, as we know, is a city entirely devoid of liberal sensibilities or progressive sentiment. Every title race needs a hero and a heel, and while these two clubs may be inseparable in terms of points or goal difference, while many have no strong feelings about who should win, there appears to be a tightening consensus over who should lose.<\/p>\n And let\u2019s be real here: objectively speaking, there is a genuine comic potential in the prospect of Arsenal blowing the title in a season where it has essentially laid waste to every footballing principle it may once have possessed in the pursuit of ultimate victory. Under Mikel Arteta this is an Arsenal team that has leaned almost religiously into the doctrine of restriction and restraint, patience and physicality. You will forgo the bodily pleasures of this life in order to know the eternal grace of the next. This is a bargain to which many of their own fans have willingly submitted. But of course winning ugly only really makes sense if you actually win.<\/p>\n \u201cQuite a lot of us bought into that, and so there\u2019s a kind of anger,\u201d says Laura Kirk-Francis, an Arsenal season ticket-holder and content creator. \u201cSo there\u2019s a kind of anger. You\u2019ve lied to me. I feel lied to. You said you were going to do it. The end was in sight. Now it\u2019s a bit more precarious.\u201d<\/p>\n I moved to north London two years ago. From our house near Finsbury Park, just around the corner from the Emirates, you can hear the stadium\u2019s screeches and groans even with the windows bolted shut.<\/p>\n At school drop-off on Monday morning, the day after the 2-1 defeat by City<\/a>, there seemed to be more children than usual crying uncontrollably at the door, imprisoned by emotions they could not fully articulate. A long-standing member of the teaching staff confides that he wants Arteta out and Andoni Iraola in. \u201cHe\u2019s taken us as far as he can,\u201d he insists. Somehow the tribulations of a football club emanate in waves around its radius, inflecting the daily lives of its local area in a way agnostics have trouble truly grasping.<\/p>\n Fans fill their bellies amid butterflies in stomachs around the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Composite: Tom Jenkins\/Guardian Design; Getty Images<\/p>\n It\u2019s not life and death, of course. We are constantly told that terms like \u201cdisaster\u201d and \u201ctragedy\u201d are wholly inappropriate in a sporting context, perhaps even an offensive trivialisation of real privation. From an ethical standpoint, the question of whether a football team finishes first or second in the league table scarcely registers on the scale of human suffering. But if you\u2019re a fan of any stripe, try and summon the very worst feeling football has given you. Did it not feel like a kind of catastrophe, a desolation, an emptiness of the soul comparable to hearing about some distant, shattering atrocity on the other side of the world?<\/p>\n \u201cPanic on the streets of London,\u201d read a banner in the City end on Sunday afternoon. No, a nine-point lead in the Premier League<\/a> table is not life, and losing it is not death. But the evil genius of sport is that sometimes, your body can\u2019t tell the difference.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is what we all wanted,\u201d says Andrew Mangan of the Arseblog podcast. \u201cWhen we were finishing eighth, when we didn\u2019t have European football, when we were watching Ars\u00e8ne Wenger teams get turned over, when we were watching Unai Emery teams concede 35 shots against Watford \u2026 we\u2019d have bitten your hand off for a scenario like this. And however much frustration there might be in the last few weeks, the only thing is to embrace that, and hope it goes the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n No club wins all the time. Pretty much every fanbase in the world, with the possible exception of Real Madrid or Bayern Munich, has a rich reservoir of pain and disappointment upon which to draw. Is Arsenal really any different in this respect? Perhaps only in the sense of its location, as a locus of cultural and media influence. Fever Pitch could have been written about any in the club in the world, but of course Nick Hornby was an Arsenal fan living in north London. Every club has an online presence, but few other clubs on the planet generate a comparable volume of self-analysis, the heft and the means to project their institutional angst to a global audience.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is the kind of club that gets people very obsessed, whether they\u2019re fans or not,\u201d says Mangan, who started his site in 2002 when it was basically one of the first blogs dedicated to a single club. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to look beyond the dawning of the internet era, the first big mobilisation of fans. Arsenal fans were among the first to establish a big online presence. That has an impact. Maybe it\u2019s part of why there\u2019s pushback, or the reputation that some Arsenal fans have online.\u201d<\/p>\n Calm before potential storms at the Emirates Stadium this week. Composite: Tom Jenkins\/Guardian Design; Getty Images<\/p>\n And of course there is a performative element to all this, whether in the fans in the lower West Stand who seem to spend the whole game screaming at the press box, or the hordes of creators and YouTube personalities who rely on Arsenal for an outlet.<\/p>\n They will be there again when they play Newcastle at the Emirates on Saturday evening. \u201cThrough my content I try and find a bit of humour in the situation,\u201d says Kirk-Francis. \u201cOne, it\u2019s my coping mechanism. And two, if you take a step back, it is insane going through this level of visceral grief over something you have no control over. And ultimately will have a massive impact on your life. Sometimes it\u2019s fantastic. Other times, it\u2019s pretty tough.\u201d<\/p>\n A few miles away, in a very different part of north London, there is a very different sort of panic brewing. If Arsenal\u2019s angst stems from a fear they finish second, fans of Tottenham are engaged in a more existential crisis: not simply over whether their club will stay in the Premier League, but whether there is even still a club in there worth supporting, worth calling their own.<\/p>\n Spurs fans feel that sinking feeling as two points slipped away late on in the 2-2 draw against Brighton. Composite: Tom Jenkins\/Guardian Design; Getty Images<\/p>\n