Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu/Getty Images
Zohran Mamdani is a popular and likeable mayor who is also extremely polarizing. The people who really detest the guy tend to be either rich or very supportive of Israel. To that group of haters he is in danger of adding a largely unnoticed but not insignificant subset of New Yorkers who are being driven absolutely mad by his constant boosting of Arsenal football club.
There he was with Spike Lee at the Arsenal bar FancyFree in Fort Greene celebrating the club’s recent victory in the English Premier League — its first in 22 years. There he was in an Arsenal kurta at prayers for Eid, offending both the Islamophobes at the New York Post and self-respecting soccer fans everywhere. There he was in The Athletic, delivering a saccharine ode to the club he has misguidedly supported since boyhood. And there he was on social media, rooting for his team to win the UEFA Champions League final today against Paris Saint Germain.
To be fair, Mamdani occasionally flashed his signature charm while taking this seemingly endless victory lap. “My relationship with my club began the same way it does for most football fans: before I was old enough to understand what I was getting myself into,” he wrote in The Athletic. But for the most part he’s just been dialing up every non-Arsenal fan’s Arsenal hatred, which reached its peak before the UCL final. What happened to governing for all New Yorkers?
So it was immensely gratifying to see Arsenal go down to PSG in penalties. The game started in the worst possible way: a freak early goal by Kai Havertz on the counter, which invariably meant Arsenal would hunker down and suck the life out of the match. PSG normally play like a gang of feral ninjas, with attackers flying into the box in incessant waves, but for most of the game they smashed against the walls of Arsenal’s defense. Arsenal even managed to stymie the wild man of European soccer, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, who plays like some unholy combination of Maradona and a wolf. But not for too long: in the second half Kvaratskhelia played a tricky give-and-go in a tight spot in the penalty box, leading an Arsenal defender to hack him from behind. Penalty to PSG, and the score was 1-1.
The shootout was maximally painful for Arsenal, which lost on the final shot of the game, a sky-high miss from their otherwise most dependable player, the Brazilian Gabriel Magalhães. For a moment, I felt really bad for the Gooners, as they unfortunately call themselves. But as the cries of “Ah-senal! Ah-senal!” died on the Brooklyn streets, I started to feel pretty good.
I’ve actually been surprised by the depths of my antipathy toward Arsenal. It’s been so long since they’ve been a contender that I’ve spent much of my adult life feeling a bit sorry for them. But when I was young, there were really only two top clubs in England, Manchester United and Arsenal, and if you supported United, as I proudly did and do, then you loathed Arsenal with a passion. All those feelings came rushing back in their triumphant title season, amplified by unseemly crowing by certain journalists I follow on social media and the fact that this Arsenal team is especially hateable.
The Arsenal of my youth, I grudgingly admit, played with flowing brilliance, all one-touch passes and deft flicks and impossible pirouettes — the Arsenal of Bergkamp and Henry and Kanu. The current Arsenal play a grinding, defense-oriented game that turns nearly every match, including the UCL final, into an ugly slugfest. Their style is epitomized by their star striker, the stolid, dead-eyed Viktor Gyokeres, and the indefatigable midfielder Declan Rice, who gallops tirelessly up and down the field like an enraged centaur. Arsenal do not score much from open play, where soccer is at its improvisational best, but rather from corner kicks and other set pieces, where soccer is at its most centrally planned. This is the soccer of numbers and probabilities and brute logic, of the algorithm and artificial intelligence, drained of its humanity.
Which makes it doubly tragic that Mamdani — the rare politician with a human touch — is an Arsenal supporter. But as Osgood Fielding once said, nobody’s perfect. Enjoy drinking those Arsenal tears, Mr. Mayor. I know I will.
