Arsenal won the Premier League title this week for the first time in twenty-two years. Across North London, people poured into the streets celebrating. Fans climbed statues, lit flares, hugged strangers, sang songs, cried, and generally behaved with the calm restraint one expects after two decades of emotional repression and annual sporting disappointment. I’ve watched the video of the Arsenal team celebrating at least twenty times.
Meanwhile, I was in my office in San Francisco refreshing social media, texting friends, and feeling both euphoric and strangely homesick for a place that is not remotely my home. Admittedly, my love of Arsenal isn’t completely logical. I have no genetic connection to North London. I became an Arsenal fan in 2014 via a surprisingly methodical decision process. After the World Cup that summer, I realized how much I enjoyed watching soccer and wanted to watch it more often than every four years. But sports without emotional investment has never really worked for me. I’ve never understood how people casually watch games without caring who wins. The emotional attachment is the whole point. So I needed a team.
The MLS wasn’t (isn’t) good, so I turned to the international leagues, and since I speak English, the Premier League felt more accessible than La Liga or Bundesliga. At the time, I was working for OpenTable and traveling to London fairly often, so I decided I wanted a London club because I figured someday I might actually see them play in person. I also wanted a team unlikely to be relegated because I was new to the sport and emotionally unprepared for immediate catastrophe. Hence, no Queens Park Rangers.
That left Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, and West Ham. Chelsea was ruled out immediately because rooting for them in 2014 felt like becoming a Yankees fan but with more Russian billionaires and scarves. Some English friends described West Ham as “a little dodgy.” So eventually it came down to Arsenal and Tottenham.
And the deciding factor, fittingly enough, was a book.Years earlier I had read Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. Most people know the title because it became a movie starring Jimmy Fallon about the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004, but the original book was about Arsenal. More specifically, it was about the exquisite psychological damage that comes from loving Arsenal. Hornby somehow made sports fandom feel literary and meaningful instead of just a highly organized form of public anxiety. The suffering itself became part of the romance. Looking back, this should probably have registered as a warning sign. Instead, I chose Arsenal. Which meant I arrived at almost exactly the wrong time.
They finished 3rd in the first season I followed them and 2nd a year later. But those were followed by 5th and then 6th, and their long-time manager, Arsene Wenger resigned. He was followed by Unai Emery who lasted only a year and a half. With Arsenal sitting in 8th place in November 2019, Emery was let go.
I believe the club has lost direction.”
– Mikel Arteta, December 2019
By the time Mikel Arteta took over as manager a month later, Arsenal was widely viewed as a mess. They had finished 5th, 6th and 5th the three years prior and had failed to qualify for Champions League. The atmosphere around the club had become toxic. Fans were furious. Ownership was distrusted. The roster was unbalanced. Arsenal had gone from one of Europe’s model clubs to a punchline. There were actual debates about whether they could even get back into the Champions League, much less compete for a title.
And yet Arteta kept talking about process, standards, culture, patience, and belief. At the beginning, almost nobody wanted to hear it. But slowly, painstakingly, Arsenal improved. Young players developed. The team became more disciplined. Tougher. More coherent. There was a plan now, even if it wasn’t producing trophies yet. After finishing 8th in each of Arteta’s first two seasons at the helm, they finished the 2021-22 campaign in 5th.
The problem was that once Arsenal finally became good again, they became almost unbearably close. The next three seasons felt increasingly cruel. Arsenal finished second three years in a row, twice to Manchester City and once to Liverpool. Twice they led the league deep into the season before collapsing under the pressure and getting labeled “bottlers,” which is English soccer slang for people who psychologically disintegrate in public.
This season felt destined to end the same way. Arsenal sat atop the table for most of the year before losing at home to Bournemouth in April, a defeat that felt painfully familiar. After the loss, Arteta said: “Today we have to suffer. It’s painful. It’s a terrible feeling. But tomorrow is a different day.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The following week they lost to Manchester City and fell to second place, and for a moment it seemed like the same script was playing out for the fourth consecutive season.
This time, however, it turned out tomorrow was a different day. After the defeat at Man City, Declan Rice was caught on camera rallying his teammates and saying “its not done.” Arsenal fans immediately immortalized those three words and created an entire TikTok chant in his honor. And instead of folding, Arsenal steadied themselves. Arsenal won out while City stumbled. And fittingly enough, City’s fatal blow eventually came against the same Bournemouth team that had seemingly shattered Arsenal’s hopes weeks earlier.
Twenty-two years later, Arsenal were champions again.
Happiness and Suffering are linked to the time you’ve had to wait.”
– Arsene Wenger, Arsenal Manager 1996-2018
That long stretch between failure and fulfillment is part of what made me think about Empire Falls, the Pulitzer Prize winner from 2002. Written by Richard Russo, the novel takes place in a declining mill town in Maine where most of the characters are quietly trapped between the lives they imagined for themselves and the lives they actually ended up living.
The story centers on Miles Roby, the manager of the Empire Grill diner, a fundamentally decent man whose life has gradually narrowed without him fully noticing. He’s divorced, financially stuck, emotionally exhausted, and still psychologically tethered to the powerful local family that has shaped the town for generations. Around him, Russo builds an entire community of people carrying disappointment in different forms: failed ambitions, broken marriages, unrealized potential, old grudges, fading dreams.
Which may sound bleak, and occasionally it is. But what makes Empire Falls work is Russo’s warmth. He understands that disappointment and humor often occupy the exact same space in adult life. His characters are flawed, frustrated, stubborn, and occasionally ridiculous, but he treats them with extraordinary compassion.
More importantly, Empire Falls understands the emotional complexity of endurance. The novel is filled with people who continue showing up despite years of evidence suggesting things are unlikely to improve dramatically. They keep going to work. Raising children. Taking care of one another. Trying again. Carrying history forward. Russo understands that resilience rarely looks heroic while you are living it. Most of the time it just looks ordinary.
Which, as it turns out, is also true of Arsenal fandom.
Remember who you are, what you are, and who you represent.”
One of the strange things about Arsenal finally winning the Premier League after twenty-two years is realizing how much life unfolded during the waiting.
When Arsenal last won the league, Sam was 4, Lily was 2, and Macy wouldn’t be born for another six years. Oddly enough, I wrote my first Pulitzer Schmulitzer post in March 2014, a mere five months before choosing Arsenal as my team. Looking back through those essays now, I can almost track the emotional timeline of the past decade-plus in real time: aging, grief, memory, ambition, parenthood, loss, reinvention, love and the gradual realization that time speeds up when you aren’t paying attention.
That’s what long sports droughts eventually become. They stop feeling like gaps between championships and start functioning more like emotional timelines for your own life. Sports seasons repeat themselves, but fans don’t.
Empire Falls is obsessed with the ways identity, history, and community quietly shape people over time. Miles Roby desperately wants to believe he still has agency over his future, but he slowly realizes how deeply his life has been shaped by the town around him, by family history, loyalty, inertia, and choices made long before he fully understood their consequences.
Sports fandom works similarly. At first it feels like entertainment, but eventually it becomes part of the architecture of your life. Somewhere along the way Arsenal stopped being a team I watched and became woven into the same emotional timeline as those essays and the years surrounding them.
Russo’s novel quietly argues that dignity comes not from avoiding disappointment but from continuing despite it. His characters keep moving forward through heartbreak, embarrassment, monotony, regret, and failure because that’s what life actually asks most people to do.
And maybe that’s why Arsenal finally winning the Premier League felt emotional in a way I wasn’t entirely expecting. Even though I didn’t personally endure the full twenty-two year drought, twelve years is still long enough for a football club to quietly weave itself into the fabric of your life. Somewhere in the middle of all those years and all those Pulitzer Schmulitzer essays, Arsenal finally won the league again.
And somehow, after all the waiting, it meant even more because of it.
PULITZER SCHMULITZER! 