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In the images that emerged from the Arsenal Men’s crowning moment, Clive Chijioke Nwonka finds a potent reflection of society
\n\n\n\nIn August 2024 my book Black Arsenal was published. It explores the contribution of Black identities – past and present – to the London football club’s culture. To me, the book is a way of understanding the deep historical connection between Arsenal and Black identity and cultural expression both within the UK and abroad. More broadly, as cultural theory, it is a means of reflecting on individual and shared Black cultural experiences, histories and narratives of everyday multiculture and conviviality. In March of this year, I was asked again to think about the roles that football and art play in shaping society and identity as part of a panel discussion, ‘The beautiful game: football, art and nostalgia’, at London’s Royal Academy (RA). The event was partly inspired by a painting by Rose Wylie (then the subject of a solo show at the RA) featuring footballers in action and titled Yellow Strip (2006), but, more generally, offered the chance to debate how football has inspired the imaginations of visual artists across decades.
\n\n\n\nDuring my talk, I directed the audience’s attention to two artworks that seemed, for me, to capture the unconsidered complexities of football art understood as representative of the aspirations of life more generally. The first was a recently completed mural of the Black Arsenal player Eberechi Eze upon the walls of an underpass on the approach to Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium in Islington. Visual art’s attempts to respond to the crisis of identity are often underpinned by the fatigued adage that football culture is a simple and undifferentiated reflection of society, a perspective that is also deployed as a mitigating veneer for the racism that is also a part of football culture and as a passive absorber of the ills of society writ large. So, when art seeks to make an intervention into the field of football culture through the subliminal reworking of iconic Black identity, we find a striking paradox. Football art is both ethereal in its visual language and conceptual groundings but coarse in its desire to superimpose a vision of life upon an audience that is extracted from an unstable football culture that actively encourages its fanbases to love Black players but is able simultaneously to hate Black people. Football art as a conscious reimagining of contemporary existence is the point at which art often fails to outflank the realities of race, where Black people (as people rather than as just players) remain embedded in a social and cultural technology within which they serve as forms to be consumed within an arena that remains capricious and arbitrary.
\n\n\n\nIn drawing attention to these vicissitudes over art and its investments in football as life, I’m recalling the Irish writer and playwright Oscar Wilde and his 1889 essay ‘The Decay of Lying’, specifically its central premise that ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’. Here, and as the axis upon which he developed the concept of anti-mimesis, Wilde complicated the idea that art captures and reproduces a visible reality, instead advancing the argument that humans are drawn to creative mediums as the guiding framework for social experience, behaviour and feeling. The central tenets of Wilde’s philosophy – that there is an innate and instinctive compulsion to imitate among humans that finds expression through art; that artworks offer the only template through which we can fully appreciate the essence of identities, ways of living and cultural practices – suggest that a life organised through art is a natural (in the sense of instinctive), if arcane experience.
\n\n\n\nThe idea that the beauty of art instructs our modes of living by creating an imagined reality that brings structure and organisation to the fluctuations of life provides us with an interesting nuancing of, if not a counterpoint to, Wilde’s general thesis that life on its own has a limited meaning independent of art (which frames its beauty). And football art presents a novel bidirectionality to the art/life dyad when concerned with the issue of racism and the ideal of a social interraciality and multiculturalism, a theme that artistic works have often struggled to address through any reliable visual schema, particularly within the strict example of art as social practice.
\n\n\n\nThe second artwork I referenced was a mural titled Found a Place Where We Belong (2023), a collection of illustrations by the artist Reuben Dangoor of 721 Arsenal fans across time, generations, notoriety and identity. It covers the outer side of the Emirates Stadium. The artwork served as a facsimile of the natural interraciality contained not just within the stadium on matchday, but also across the Holloway Road, where it is the main vessel that unifies the plural identities of North London and beyond.
\n\n\n\nMoreover, the mural corresponds to news footage, viral videos and photographs of the tens of thousands of people who met for an impromptu gathering around the Emirates Stadium on the evening of 19 May 2026 to celebrate Arsenal’s league title triumph (which had been achieved when their rivals for the trophy failed to win). It also offers a counterreality to the narrative of life in the UK presented during the local elections of 7 May 2026 and the anti-immigration rhetoric that proceeded it and has come to permeate our political and social discourse. That narrative had found further form in the shape of the anti-immigrant ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march through London on 16 May, a mass gathering that signalled the visceral reinvigorating of racism. Days later, following Arsenal’s triumph, the image of a collective fanbase of plural identities gathered to welcome the team into the stadium was a demonstration of hope and communalism (this in itself a product of the distinctive serendipity that football culture allows), and a reminder, if ever one was needed, that there was something much more significant still to be fought for in our precarious social-political life.
\n\n\n\nThe images of 19 May will have a permanence beyond the season’s close. These images of the evening – photographic, moving and illustrative – will surely be the latest contribution to the array of archival entries that render Arsenal as a powerful signifier of both Black diasporic identity and multiracial London. Black Arsenal remains an organic and subjective cultural experience, an unexpected but vital visual archive of London’s everyday cultural identity, carrying out the unexpected work of horizontalising Oscar Wilde’s ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’ dialectic. Emirates Stadium, Islington, 19 May 2026 is an image of reality and life that vindicates rather than replicates art, a representation of a representation, just like the mural above it that brings into actuality the existence and experience of difference, all dyed into the diurnal fabric of a club culture that carries with it the potential for, and a much-needed image of, an eroding but resistant national identity.
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