Arsenal’s global community shows what social cohesion can still look like

Sport is often dismissed as just entertainment or escapism, and rarely considered a serious political phenomenon. Yet, throughout history and across continents, sport has achieved what constitutions, policy frameworks and political speeches often struggle to do, which is to bring people together.

It has fostered a sense of belonging across the fault lines of race, class, generation and geography. Some of us are old enough to recall when the Ivory Coast team, led by the legendary Didier Drogba, brokered a ceasefire in a civil war in 2005 after they qualified for the World Cup for the first time in their history. Now, Arsenal Football Club’s 22-year journey to winning the Premier League title offers us an instructive lens through which to examine one of the most pressing challenges of our time: the erosion of social cohesion.

When the final whistle blew, something extraordinary happened – not just on the pitch, but also in living rooms in Johannesburg, Kampala, Lagos, London and every corner of the world where there are Arsenal supporters. The celebrations reverberated in pubs across the world, and overflowed into the streets.

They were as loud in North London as they were in the streets of Nairobi in Kenya. Pure joy and euphoria! People who had never seen anything like it erupted in celebration. Grandparents who had endured and waited for two decades. Parents who had passed on their faith without being able to promise a return. And children, like Zai and Roi (our Arsenal nephews on Instagram), who perhaps do not yet fully understand the significance of what they witnessed, but who will grow up knowing that they were there when it happened. For the first time in 22 years, stubborn, inherited (and sometimes inexplicable) loyalty has paid off.

On the surface, Arsenal Football Club’s 2025/26 Premier League title is a sporting story. Beneath that, however, it is a remarkable study of social cohesion and belonging, of the human capacity for loyalty to something greater than oneself even when no reward is in sight. Those 22 years of waiting produced something far more durable than a trophy. They produced a community.

The inheritance of loyalty

In his writings on identity in late modernity, the sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that, in an era of rapid social change, individuals increasingly seek what he termed “ontological security” – a sense of continuity and reliability in their social world.

The institutions, rituals and communities that provide this continuity become woven into personal identity, and for millions of Arsenal supporters, the club is precisely that kind of constant. Supporting Arsenal is an identity handed down, a story one joins midway through with no guarantee of a satisfying ending.

For most, the phrase “I support Arsenal for a living” captures a phenomenon that remains one of the most underexamined dimensions of fan culture – inherited loyalty. What makes the Arsenal story remarkable is that this inheritance was transmitted faithfully through 22 years of near-misses, false dawns and heartbreak. Loyalty was reproduced in the absence of silverware, the very thing that is supposed to justify it.

Closer to home: what Bafana Bafana taught us

South Africans need look no further than their own history to understand the power of sport as a vehicle for social cohesion. We have lived it, and the memory still moves us. Thirty years ago, in February 1996, a young democracy that had endured decades of sporting isolation under apartheid stood at Soccer City and watched Neil Tovey lift the Africa Cup of Nations trophy. For a country that had been kept out of international football for almost the entirety of the apartheid era, the symbolism was almost unbearable.

Doctor Khumalo’s elegance in midfield, Mark Fish’s commanding presence at the back, Lucas Radebe’s quiet authority. They were the first generation of South Africans permitted to wear the national jersey in continental competition, and they won it at the first time of asking. Nelson Mandela presented the trophy in a Bafana Bafana jersey, echoing the gesture he had made at Ellis Park only months earlier.

That moment carried us further than we knew. The 1998 World Cup in France brought us our first appearance on football’s grandest stage, and we went again in 2002. Hopes were high. Talk of African footballing power felt entirely warranted. And then, slowly, the dawn we had been promised receded.

Qualification campaigns ended in disappointment. Generations of talent came and went. The drought was interrupted only briefly in 2010, when we hosted the World Cup, and the country experienced something close to that 1996 feeling again, vuvuzelas and all, even as Bafana Bafana bowed out in the group stage.

Thirty years on from Tovey, Khumalo, Fish and Radebe, Bafana Bafana are still waiting for their new dawn. It may not arrive in 2026 either, and we should be honest about that. However, what the long wait has revealed is that the loyalty and community Arsenal supporters have shown across 22 years exists here too, among South Africans, in ways we sometimes forget to name.

We saw it in 1996. We saw it again with the Springboks in 1995, 2019 and 2023, when the country poured into the streets to celebrate a victory that, for a moment, suspended every contradiction we live with. Sport does not resolve our differences. It suspends them long enough for us to remember that we share something greater than the daily divisions we fixate upon.

Social cohesion

In his critique of market-driven societies, Michael Sandel warns against the “skyboxification” of public life, the tendency for shared spaces and experiences to be replaced by privatised, individualised ones. He argues that democracy and social cohesion depend on people from diverse backgrounds coming together in shared spaces and around shared interests.

At its best, sport is one of the few remaining activities where this happens naturally. Bafana Bafana in 1996, the Springboks in 1995, 2019 and 2023, Arsenal in 2026. All were proof that sport can build bridges wide enough for entire communities to cross together.

The most striking thing about the Arsenal community is not its size, but its diversity. Radically cross-generational, the community refuses to be confined by geography, age or circumstance. You find it thriving in stadiums and living rooms alike, in WhatsApp groups where fans debate formations at midnight, and on Instagram, where young boys like Zai and Roi wear their jerseys with the uninhibited pride of people who have found their tribe before they can even explain why.

The scenes of global unity around Arsenal winning the league are far more symbolic than the end of a trophy drought. They remind us, once again, of the unadulterated power of sport.

United in shared victory

They remind us, as Bafana Bafana did in 1996 and the Springboks did in 1995, 2019 and 2023, that at its very best, sport is not about the scoreline but about what we can become when we are united in shared victory. In our happiest moments, the differences we ordinarily fixate upon fall away entirely.

Sport reminds us that we are better than we appear to be, and that we are capable of love. As the celebrations of Arsenal’s victory linger, we look forward to the start of the World Cup with the fervent hope that our African sons will bring us continental joy and accentuate, once more, the uniting power of sport. DM