Watching Arsenal (while dodging Iran’s arsenal) |
This isn’t my usual fare. Readers of my blogs and op-eds over the years know my usual topics – Israel, politics, antisemitism, etc. This is both more personal, and on a completely different topic: football (“soccer” for North American readers.) Not so much about the game itself but rather what it has meant for me this year, that my team, Arsenal, won the English Premier League for the first time in 22 years.
If you’re not familiar with English football, or with Arsenal, it’s one of the best supported clubs in the world, with literally millions of fans taking to the streets to celebrate the championship win, not just in the vicinity of the stadium in North London but around the world, as far afield as Kenya and Vietnam. Here in Israel, where there is a widely followed domestic league, genuinely fervent support for foreign teams is less common, but there is an indigenous Arsenal Supporters Club, and even a Hebrew-language Arsenal podcast. (And I recently learned of an Israeli Arsenal fan – Israeli-born, not a British ex-pat like me – who lives in a small community in the north of the country and has had an Arsenal flag flying from the roof of his house for the past week. His wife told me he’s supported Arsenal since 1989. For any Arsenal fans reading this, that will make perfect sense.)
Being a committed fan of a sports team is to live part of your life in an alternate reality, where something that makes no difference in the real world, genuinely feels of enormous consequence. Football, because of its global reach and the devotion of so many of its fans (there’s a reason the word “fan” is derived from “fanatic”…), has a particular ability to create this alternate world; so much so that it has frequently impacted politics and society in several countries. (At least........