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 number 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 robust fascinations with issues.
There aren’t a number of issues I’m mildly keen on, I’m an all or nothing man in relation to 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, in school I discovered there weren’t many topics I used to be common at.
I used to be both top-of-the-line within the class or one of many worst. As a young person 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 might see- and giggle at- how dangerous my artwork homework was. I argued bitterly with my artwork instructor 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 nonetheless, I excelled at. I cherished 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. In reality, I solely stopped protecting handwritten journals of Arsenal video games once I began penning 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 obtainable.
No official web site, no web or social media, no podcasts. Newspapers and radio lined soccer in a generalist vogue however membership particular content material didn’t exist in some other kind (until you needed to pay £1.99 a minute on Membership Name- youthful readers can Google that). The programme was the primary, possibly even solely, method that the supervisor and the captain communicated with supporters.
Common interviews with gamers didn’t occur in some other medium. Once more, like most neurodivergent kids, I additionally actually loved the extra quantitative treasures inside these pages. Simply as you see at this time, the again of the programme contained crew line-ups, substitutions and attendances in a neatly tabulated vogue. I might attempt to memorise attendances after which check myself on them on the subsequent dwelling sport.
My curiosity within the ladies’s crew is straight attributable to the match day programme. As a result of I learn it from cowl to cowl, I learn the updates concerning the youth and girls groups in the direction of the again too. There was no footage obtainable of the ladies’s crew, so these match stories and photographs had been my solely hyperlinks; however I absorbed them.
After I went to my first ladies’s match in April 1996, Naz Ball scored the winner towards Arsenal Women for Wembley Women. Ball performed for Arsenal and scored steadily, I knew this as a result of I noticed her image within the programme so typically. From these small acorns my curiosity within the crew grew.
The programme earned a variety of different distinctions over time, it was the place away ticket info was printed 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 at all times remembered the competitors within the Junior Gunners part referred to as ‘Face within the crowd’, they’d print a crowd shot from the Household Enclosure with a crimson 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 skim their identify within the academy part of the programme. Across the time I began going to Highbury, names resembling Adrian Clarke (marvel what occurred to him?), Mark Flatts, Gavin McGowan and Matthew Rose felt acquainted to me though I had but to see them kick a ball.
Later, when squad numbers had been launched from the 1993-94 season, I might attempt to memorise these for different groups from the again of the programme. Within the mid-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 obtainable on the time and I suppose it planted the seed that I may write about my membership for a dwelling in the future.
As I superior into my teenage years and needed extra unbiased content material, I grew to become way more conscious of the thriving fanzine scene. The Gooner fanzine was the primary place I ever had an article printed 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 assume extra independently and critically- that interplay of settlement and disagreement actually helped me to push my vital pondering.
That stated, within the 1992-93 season, probably as a response to the fanzine motion, the membership really gave over pages within the official programme for correspondence and had been surprisingly free and straightforward, editorially talking. For these of you in a position to see the picture legibly, take a look at this missive from Des Ferguson vis a vis the shortage of ethnic range on the well-known North Financial institution mural. That might by no means be printed at this time.
This part additionally printed missives from followers complaining about Sky’s new fangled Monday Night time Soccer, some accusing the FA of specific bias towards Arsenal and Ian Wright specifically 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 each day in 2025 nevertheless it’s troublesome to think about the membership voluntarily publishing them in an official outlet.
The need for this type of content material has not modified over time, in fact, 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 inventive 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 completely different with out it.
