Updated May 29, 2026 at 9:58 AM EDT
LONDON — It's a big weekend for Arsenal F.C. fans.
The London soccer team is celebrating its first-place finish in England's top division, the Premier League. It's the first trophy in 22 years for the Gunners, founded in 1886 by workers at a Royal Arsenal munitions factory.
Police expect more than 500,000 fans at a victory parade Sunday in North London.
But before that, the Gunners are vying for their first trophy in Europe's top club competition, the Champions League. They face Paris Saint-Germain F.C. on Saturday night in Budapest.
Arsenal has only made it to a Champions League final once, in 2006, and lost. So if they win Saturday, the parade the next day may be even bigger than expected.
"It's gonna be chaos, it's gonna be carnage!" says Rhys Butler, bartender at the Gunners Pub — an Arsenal fan pub near Emirates Stadium, the team's home field. "A lot of tears and a lot of these manly men hugging each other, people standing on cars and stuff. A lot of passion!"
The pub is lined with Arsenal memorabilia and serves a special brew of Gunners lager, in Gunners pint glasses, to customers in Gunners jerseys.
Global celebrations for Arsenal
England's Premier League has no equivalent of the World Series or Super Bowl. There's no championship match. Teams earn points — 3 for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss — and the team with the most points, at the end of the season, gets to hoist the league trophy.
So Arsenal wasn't even playing on May 19, when a tie in a match between Manchester City and AFC Bournemouth meant the overall math ensured the Gunners' victory — and North London erupted into a sea of red Arsenal jerseys.
There have been similar celebrations from Brooklyn to Nairobi to South Sudan. In Uganda, a new Arsenal-themed afrobeats song has gone viral.
In Nigerian churches, fans hoisted aloft replica trophies at thanksgiving prayer services. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani wore an Arsenal tunic to Eid prayers in the Bronx.
Fellow fans include Mick Jagger, Prince Harry, Spike Lee, Rihanna and Anne Hathaway — who's shared videos of herself singing Arsenal fan songs.
"Arsenal have really caught on among Gen Z, and particularly amongst Black fans," says Roger Bennett, founder and CEO of the Men in Blazers media network. "They've forged an incredibly compelling human brand."
Arsenal was one of the first teams with a multiracial lineup, recruiting some of the most iconic Black players, including England's Ian Wright and France's Thierry Henry.
But for the past 22 years, Bennett says their story has been like a Greek tragedy — seemingly always coming in second.
Arsenal's long dry spell
Arsenal is one of England's most successful clubs, behind Manchester United and Liverpool. It has won the country's top trophy 14 times, four of those (including this season) have been since the creation of the Premier League. However, the last victory was a generation ago.
"If this was ancient Greek times, we'd write the Odyssey about this Arsenal journey!" Bennett says. "You know, 22 years of dreaming for this title — through suffering, torture, torment — just an agonizing gauntlet of dashed hopes."
A 1992 memoir about that torment, Fever Pitch, was made into two movies: A 1997 British version starring Colin Firth as a long-suffering Arsenal fan, and a 2005 American version with Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore, in which the then long-suffering Boston Red Sox stand in for Arsenal's woes. (Both of those teams ended up winning in 2004.)
The author of that memoir, Nick Hornby, was one of the thousands of Londoners who ran out into the streets to celebrate last week, when it became clear that Arsenal had won.
"There was a sense of disbelief, actually! It's very possible to go decades without seeing your team win," Hornby says. "There was no social media the last time they won the league, so we're all joy-scrolling — every goal, from every angle."
But there's one more thing he'd like to see.
"It's something I've never seen in my life, a Champions League win, and you start to think about whether you ever will. I'm nearly 70," Hornby says.
On Saturday night, when Arsenal faces PSG in Europe's top competition, Hornby will be in the stands. He never misses a game and is traveling to Budapest with his family.
"I think [the Gunners] are about to enter a golden age," he says.
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