I began going to Arsenal in 1992. My obsession with soccer blossomed in a short time, I used to be from an enormous soccer household and it was very a lot in my blood. Like a variety of neurodivergent folks (I’m dyspraxic which qualifies me as neurodiverse; however I don’t expertise it as profoundly as many with ASDs do) I’ve tended to construct up sturdy fascinations with issues.
There aren’t a variety of issues I’m mildly curious about, I’m an all or nothing man in terms of my hobbies and pastimes. Simply as rapidly as my obsession with soccer started to develop, my obsession with writing grew too. Consistent with my neurodivergence, at college I discovered there weren’t many topics I used to be common at.
I used to be both among the best within the class or one of many worst. As an adolescent my artwork homework was so dangerous that each Monday morning earlier than double artwork, my classmates would line up with big grins on their faces so they may see- and chuckle at- how dangerous my artwork homework was. I argued bitterly with my artwork trainer who insisted I wasn’t making an attempt. I used to be. My mind simply couldn’t work out drawing and nonetheless can’t.
English nevertheless, I excelled at. I liked writing and so it didn’t take me very lengthy to determine that writing about soccer was what I needed to do with my life. I saved journals about Arsenal for years and years and years. Actually, I solely stopped holding handwritten journals of Arsenal video games once I began scripting this column in February 2011 when a) I had much less time for it and b) it felt redundant now I used to be publishing my ideas about Arsenal on an enormous platform.
My gateway drug when it got here to soccer writing was the match day programme. To me, this was a sacred doc and greater than only a memento of the Highbury match day. On this interval (*excessive Grandpa Simpson voice*) within the pre-digital period, the match day programme was actually the one Arsenal particular content material out there.
No official web site, no web or social media, no podcasts. Newspapers and radio lined soccer in a generalist trend however membership particular content material didn’t exist in every other type (except you needed to pay £1.99 a minute on Membership Name- youthful readers can Google that). The programme was the primary, possibly even solely, means that the supervisor and the captain communicated with supporters.
Common interviews with gamers didn’t occur in every other medium. Once more, like most neurodivergent youngsters, I additionally actually loved the extra quantitative treasures inside these pages. Simply as you see as we speak, the again of the programme contained crew line-ups, substitutions and attendances in a neatly tabulated trend. I’d attempt to memorise attendances after which take a look at myself on them on the subsequent dwelling recreation.
My curiosity within the ladies’s crew is immediately attributable to the match day programme. As a result of I learn it from cowl to cowl, I learn the updates in regards to the youth and women groups in the direction of the again too. There was no footage out there of the ladies’s crew, so these match reviews and images have been my solely hyperlinks; however I absorbed them.
Once I went to my first ladies’s match in April 1996, Naz Ball scored the winner towards Arsenal Girls for Wembley Girls. Ball performed for Arsenal and scored ceaselessly, I knew this as a result of I noticed her image within the programme so usually. From these small acorns my curiosity within the crew grew.
The programme earned a lot of different distinctions over time, it was the place away ticket data was revealed earlier than that moved to the official web site. It was additionally the primary place that you’d see the brand new equipment for subsequent season. I all the time remembered the competitors within the Junior Gunners part referred to as ‘Face within the crowd’, they might print a crowd shot from the Household Enclosure with a pink ring round somebody’s face. If that somebody was you, you bought two free tickets to an upcoming dwelling match.
When academy gamers broke right into a matchday squad, there could be a way of familiarity as a result of I had seen their image and browse their identify within the academy part of the programme. Across the time I began going to Highbury, names reminiscent of Adrian Clarke (marvel what occurred to him?), Mark Flatts, Gavin McGowan and Matthew Rose felt acquainted to me although I had but to see them kick a ball.
Later, when squad numbers have been launched from the 1993-94 season, I’d attempt to memorise these for different groups from the again of the programme. Within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, a month-to-month Arsenal journal was launched that was written and printed by the identical folks and I held it in comparable esteem. Once more, this was actually the one Arsenal particular content material out there on the time and I assume it planted the seed that I may write about my membership for a dwelling at some point.
As I superior into my teenage years and needed extra unbiased content material, I turned way more conscious of the thriving fanzine scene. The Gooner fanzine was the primary place I ever had an article revealed in print (August 2006) and I wrote for them for a few years thereafter. The hours I spent studying the Gooner unfold my wings and helped me to suppose extra independently and critically- that interplay of settlement and disagreement actually helped me to push my important considering.
That stated, within the 1992-93 season, probably as a response to the fanzine motion, the membership truly gave over pages within the official programme for correspondence and have been surprisingly free and straightforward, editorially talking. For these of you in a position to see the picture legibly, try this missive from Des Ferguson vis a vis the dearth of ethnic range on the well-known North Financial institution mural. That may by no means be revealed as we speak.
This part additionally printed missives from followers complaining about Sky’s new fangled Monday Evening Soccer, some accusing the FA of specific bias towards Arsenal and Ian Wright particularly and a number of other questioning the usual of refereeing within the Premier League. Once more, these are all issues you’ll learn on the web every day in 2025 however it’s tough to think about the membership voluntarily publishing them in an official outlet.
The need for this kind of content material has not modified over time, after all, solely the supply of it. Digitisation has been the midwife to an explosion of content material, each by journalists and followers, that places into the shade even the punk rock impressed fanzine revolution of the Nineteen Eighties.
For me, the match day programme was a gateway drug that scratched any variety of itches. It nourished me with artistic content material, interviews, statistics and, for one season, good outdated unhinged fan rants. It’s no exaggeration to say that my life would have been very totally different with out it.
