I was 13 years old when I started watching football. Not because someone introduced me to it, not because it was the popular thing to do in school, but because I stumbled on to a match one night and saw a team in red and white that played with such grace it almost felt unfair.

That team was Arsenal. The year was 2002. And just like that, without any warning, I had handed over a piece of myself to 11 men in North London who would spend the next two decades making me question every life decision I had ever made.

Let me tell you something about being an Arsenal fan in Karachi in those early years.

People had heard of Arsenal, yes, but it was a distant kind of awareness, the sort you have about something that exists without really mattering to anyone around you. Manchester United filled schoolyards. Real Madrid and Barcelona had supporters everywhere you looked. Arsenal had a reputation, a history, but almost no one in your circle actually followed them.

Arsenal won the English Premier League this year after 22 years. One Gooner from Karachi recounts why he supported the club for better or worse for so many years and explains what this victory means to him…

And on top of that, the English Premier League has never had a proper broadcast in Pakistan. Not back then, and not today. There is no channel you can turn to, no simple way to just switch on the television and find your team. There was a dark room, a television set, a very unreliable internet connection, and the quiet determination to follow this club regardless.

I spent years pestering relatives visiting from London to bring back Arsenal jerseys in their suitcases. Shirts, scarves, whatever they could find. The club was thousands of miles away but it lived in this house, on these shelves, in this wardrobe.

Weekends were manageable, evening kick-offs that landed at a reasonable hour in Karachi. But the Champions League was a different kind of devotion. Midweek matches starting at midnight or one in the morning, work or school in a few hours, and you sitting there in the dark, willing 11 men across the world to hold on.

There were the beautiful years first. Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp and Patrick Vieira. The Invincibles season, 2003 to 2004, when Arsenal went the entire Premier League campaign without losing a single game. I thought this was just how Arsenal was. I had no idea I had witnessed the peak, and that from there the road would get long and winding and occasionally humiliating.

Manager Arsene Wenger stayed for years after that, loyal to a fault, working on a fraction of what the big clubs were spending. The move from Highbury to the Emirates carried real ambition but the finances never quite matched the vision.

Good players came and went. Cesc Fabregas left. Robin van Persie left. Every summer there was hope and every February there was quiet resignation. The FA Cup came twice and we celebrated like it was the league title because in those years, honestly, it was all we had. Then came Unai Emery. I will not dwell on this. I think all of us who lived through it would prefer not to.

And then came Mikel Arteta. There was something fitting about it that many fans felt immediately. He had been here before, not just as a manager but as a player, as club captain under Wenger, the armband on his sleeve. He knew what Arsenal was supposed to feel like.

Those first two seasons were still difficult. Arsenal finished eighth two years running and the calls for his removal were loud and persistent. People outside the fanbase wrote him off. Some inside did too. But the players believed in him. Slowly you could see something forming, a clear identity, a way of playing with purpose that had been missing for years.

Young players were arriving and being developed with real care. One of them was Bukayo Saka, a kid from London who grew into something special and is now unquestionably our most important player, the one opponents plan around, the one we build from.

The next three seasons nearly broke us. Three consecutive runner-up finishes. Three times finishing second, once by two points. Manchester City always in the way, always just enough. Pep Guardiola, arguably the finest football mind of his generation, running one of the most expensively assembled squads in the history of the sport, backed by ownership with resources that simply could not be matched through conventional means.

Arsenal were not losing to an ordinary rival. They were losing to a machine built to make losing impossible. And still, rival fans called us bottlers. Arsenal are a nearly club, they said. Why do you even bother, they asked. I had only one answer. I believed. I loved this club. Not rationally, not sensibly, but completely.

Then this season arrived. The team looked different, not just in quality but in character. For the first time, in what felt like forever, there was real depth, a proper bench, the sense that one injury would not unravel everything. Arsenal won 25 league games. David Raya kept 19 clean sheets and won the Golden Glove for the third consecutive year. They led the league for two hundred days.

And then, on a Tuesday night in Karachi, just before midnight, Manchester City dropped points at Bournemouth and it was done. Arsenal were Premier League champions for the first time in 22 years. After the near misses, after the mockery, after every season that ended with your head in your hands, it was simply done.

I sat alone with it for a while, though not entirely alone. My wife was there, the person who has watched me live and suffer through this for years, every bad result, every near miss. She did not say anything. She just sat quietly and let me have the moment, which is its own kind of love. The stillness of the room and the weight of what had just happened settling over me.

Twenty two years of this club in my chest, the shirts in the wardrobe, the relatives from London carrying jerseys across continents, the midnight kick-offs, all of it arriving at this single point. I thanked God. I sat there and I thanked God and I let myself feel it properly.

Yes, we lost the Champions League final in Budapest on penalties. Kai Havertz put us ahead early, Paris Saint-Germain’s Ousmane Dembele levelled from the spot, and Arsenal were denied what looked like a clear penalty at the other end shortly after. Gabriel Magalhaes missed the last kick of the shoot-out and PSG retained their title. It hurts. But we went through the entire campaign without losing a single match in 90 minutes, scored first in the final, and were so close. That is a team that belongs at the highest level. The European Cup will come.

To anyone outside this world it might all sound excessive, the level of feeling attached to an English football club by someone sitting in Karachi who the club’s players will never meet and whose city they likely could not place on a map. But that is what football does. It crosses everything. Time zones, languages, circumstance, geography. It finds you and it keeps you.

Arsenal found me in 2002 and it has kept me through every bad result and every mocking comment and every season that ended in quiet disappointment.

Twenty two years. Champions of England. It was worth every single one of them.

The writer is a marketing and communications
professional. X: @adaffan

Published in Dawn, EOS, June 7th, 2026