Fabian TranschelSo #ArsenalFC win the Premier League? 🎆 🏆 🎇
While I'm not as diehard as e.g. Nick Hornby, let me tell you the story how I got to root for the #gunners all by chance:
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It was 1999 in suburbian Lower Saxony when I was in seventh grade where we had a trainee English teacher who'd mix up all the didactics by... talking about football and yellow press (yes really!) all the time.
The idea was to cover the Premier League on a weekly basis and thus having a more organic topic to discourse on than compared to "Timmy was sitting on his potty" (it was the 90's after all).
So the way I became a gunner supporter was LITERALLY by pulling tickets - 20 pupils for 20 teams.
While I was neither particularly into Football NOR the English tongue, I was obviously smart enough that I was in luck - Arsenal were not only defending champion, they had one of the greatest teams in history that - while not exactly successful (more on that later) - rightfully were compared to e.g. Ajax in the 70's or Milan in the early 90's or the Barca of 2001: think Bergkamp, Viera, Anelka... they were not playing Tiki Taka, but the closest you could do in England at the time.
They would do things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IicmCu47pMo
Bergkamp's wonder goal against Newcastle United.
Suffice to say, I went from bored to hooked to... Hornby-style disappointed, because they finished eternal second again.
And while the English lessons changed for the worse, the Gunners stayed with me for some odd reason and EVEN THOUGH they signed Jens Lehmann (😜 ) and got some German coverage, which was nice and oddly amusing at the same time.
When Arsene Wenger left, the game became more English again and I didn't really enjoy rooting for a team that didn't care for la juego bonito, but good 'ol kick and rush.
The years were long. So Emirates' money was making sure they didn't become an average team (they still *were* the squad Hornby roots for after all!), Barca and Bayern became the focus of my attention.
And everything changed when they showed some courage. #Arteta was signed not out of conviction, but (very similarly to how Vincent #Kompany ended at #Bayern) because he connects the #Guardiola school with English virtues.
Arsenal did what they were known for some two decades ago: Taking promising, but unfinished players with a manager that vows to make them better. Looking at Odegaard, Havertz to just name a few, they stopped signing the top shelf and instead developed players again - as they developed a philosophy again.
Now, Arteta is not Guardiola and Arsenal are not City or otherwise the competition wouldn't have been actually entertaining.
They don't play mindless possession and their set pieces are not necessarily peak beauty (as effective as they are) - THIS is the one moment in two decades or so where rooting for Arsenal is paying off.
Go Gunners!
(Also, seems I actually managed to catch every instance of autocomplete trying to turn "Hornby" into "Horny" 🤡 )