There are football loyalties — almost all of them, in fact — that begin in the same unremarkable way. A visiting uncle, a childhood afternoon, a match you didn’t choose but somehow never stopped watching. And just like that, something sticks. An imprint is formed early, almost like one of those basic behavioural patterns in animals during their first stages of life.
That, more or less, is how it happened for Zohran Mamdani, the high-profile socialist mayor of New York. Alongside his civic duties — and his familiarity with the city’s major sporting franchises across the NBA and MLB — he has always made no secret of another allegiance: he is a committed Arsenal supporter.
It began, he recalls, when he was a child watching Nwankwo Kanu score. That first memory, once formed, tends not to leave.
Now Mamdani returns to that story in a long open letter published in The Athletic, marking Arsenal’s long-awaited Premier League title after 22 years.
What emerges is the idea that geography offers no real protection from football’s emotional pull. Being American, separated from the game’s European heartlands by an ocean, does not guarantee detachment. Like so many Arsenal supporters around the world, Mamdani describes a sense of release after years of accumulation — of near-misses, ridicule, and painful collapses — finally resolved in a moment of collective catharsis.
He writes of something liberating in the triumph, one that feels even greater precisely because it arrives after so much frustration. If he and others endured it, it was only “for love of the club”.
That love, in his case, was formed early: during the Arsène Wenger years and the iconic teams that shaped his imagination at the turn of the millennium — Bergkamp, Wiltord, Henry, Vieira. Wenger’s long reign. And Sol Campbell’s goal in the 2006 Champions League final, which briefly made an entire fanbase believe Europe was within reach — before Barcelona struck back, and “hearing Henrik Larsson’s name still hurts to this day,” he writes.
Mamdani also reflects on Football Manager, where he inevitably built an Arsenal empire of his own — managing it, as he puts it with irony, “in a socialist way even then”.
Those were still years in which it was easy to dream. Then came the decline. The void. And, eventually, the rebuilding under Mikel Arteta.
Looking ahead to a new Champions League final, twenty years on, Mamdani reduces it to a simple mantra: “Trust the process.”
But beyond the sporting cycles, there is a deeper thread running through his attachment to the club: Arsenal’s early, almost instinctive multicultural identity — its openness, its global reach long before those ideas became fashionable. Mamdani himself, born in Uganda, says he has always felt a particular affinity with that dimension of the club.
Because Arsenal, in his words, has always represented something larger than football.
And no trophy drought, however long, can take that away.