I started going to Arsenal in 1992. My obsession with football blossomed very quickly, I was from a big football family and it was very much in my blood. Like a lot of neurodivergent people (I am dyspraxic which qualifies me as neurodiverse; but I don’t experience it as profoundly as many with ASDs do) I have tended to build up strong fascinations with things.
There aren’t a lot of things I am mildly interested in, I am an all or nothing guy when it comes to my hobbies and pastimes. Just as quickly as my obsession with football began to develop, my obsession with writing grew too. In keeping with my neurodivergence, at school I found there weren’t many subjects I was average at.
I was either one of the best in the class or one of the worst. As a teenager my art homework was so bad that every Monday morning before double art, my classmates would line up with huge grins on their faces so they could see- and laugh at- how bad my art homework was. I argued bitterly with my art teacher who insisted I wasn’t trying. I was. My brain just could not figure out drawing and still can’t.
English however, I excelled at. I loved writing and so it didn’t take me very long to figure out that writing about football was what I wanted to do with my life. I kept journals about Arsenal for years and years and years. In fact, I only stopped keeping handwritten journals of Arsenal games when I started writing this column in February 2011 when a) I had less time for it and b) it felt redundant now I was publishing my thoughts about Arsenal on a big platform.
My gateway drug when it came to football writing was the match day programme. To me, this was a sacred document and more than just a souvenir of the Highbury match day. In this period (*extreme Grandpa Simpson voice*) in the pre-digital era, the match day programme was really the only Arsenal specific content available.
No official website, no internet or social media, no podcasts. Newspapers and radio covered football in a generalist fashion but club specific content didn’t exist in any other form (unless you wanted to pay £1.99 a minute on Club Call- younger readers can Google that). The programme was the main, maybe even only, way that the manager and the captain communicated with supporters.
Regular interviews with players did not happen in any other medium. Again, like most neurodivergent children, I also really enjoyed the more quantitative treasures within those pages. Just as you see today, the back of the programme contained team line-ups, substitutions and attendances in a neatly tabulated fashion. I would try to memorise attendances and then test myself on them at the next home game.
My interest in the women’s team is directly attributable to the match day programme. Because I read it from cover to cover, I read the updates about the youth and ladies teams towards the back too. There was no footage available of the women’s team, so these match reports and photos were my only links; but I absorbed them.
When I went to my first women’s match in April 1996, Naz Ball scored the winner against Arsenal Ladies for Wembley Ladies. Ball played for Arsenal and scored frequently, I knew this because I saw her picture in the programme so often. From those small acorns my interest in the team grew.
The programme earned a number of other distinctions over the years, it was where away ticket information was published before that moved to the official website. It was also the first place that you would see the new kit for next season. I always remembered the competition in the Junior Gunners section called ‘Face in the crowd’, they would print a crowd shot from the Family Enclosure with a red ring around someone’s face. If that someone was you, you got two free tickets to an upcoming home match.
When academy players broke into a matchday squad, there would be a sense of familiarity because I had seen their picture and read their name in the academy section of the programme. Around the time I started going to Highbury, names such as Adrian Clarke (wonder what happened to him?), Mark Flatts, Gavin McGowan and Matthew Rose felt familiar to me even though I had yet to see them kick a ball.
Later, when squad numbers were introduced from the 1993-94 season, I would try to memorise those for other teams from the back of the programme. In the mid-1990s, a monthly Arsenal magazine was launched that was written and printed by the same people and I held it in similar esteem. Again, this was really the only Arsenal specific content available at the time and I guess it planted the seed that I could write about my club for a living one day.
As I advanced into my teenage years and wanted more independent content, I became far more aware of the thriving fanzine scene. The Gooner fanzine was the first place I ever had an article published in print (August 2006) and I wrote for them for many years thereafter. The hours I spent reading the Gooner spread my wings and helped me to think more independently and critically- that interaction of agreement and disagreement really helped me to push my critical thinking.
That said, in the 1992-93 season, possibly as a response to the fanzine movement, the club actually gave over pages in the official programme for correspondence and were surprisingly free and easy, editorially speaking. For those of you able to see the image legibly, check out this missive from Des Ferguson vis a vis the lack of ethnic diversity on the famous North Bank mural. That would never be published today.
This section also printed missives from fans complaining about Sky’s new fangled Monday Night Football, some accusing the FA of explicit bias against Arsenal and Ian Wright in particular and several questioning the standard of refereeing in the Premier League. Again, these are all things you will read on the internet on a daily basis in 2025 but it’s difficult to imagine the club voluntarily publishing them in an official outlet.
The desire for this sort of content has not changed over the years, of course, only the delivery of it. Digitisation has been the midwife to an explosion of content, both by journalists and fans, that puts into the shade even the punk rock inspired fanzine revolution of the 1980s.
For me, the match day programme was a gateway drug that scratched any number of itches. It nourished me with creative content, interviews, statistics and, for one season, good old unhinged fan rants. It’s no exaggeration to say that my life would have been very different without it.