How Arsenal Women built the most vibrant fan culture in English football ...Middle East

When it comes to Arsenal Women and their burgeoning support, much has been said and written about attendances.

The Women’s Super League (WSL) attendance record has been broken eight times since the league’s formation in 2011 and seven of those games have involved Arsenal, all of the top four WSL attendances of all time happened at Emirates Stadium, and their 2024-25 average home attendance (28,808) is higher than the average home gate for four Premier League teams.

A lot of this is down to smart marketing of tickets, drawing on the success of the England Lionesses at Euro 2022 (four members of that squad played for Arsenal).

Women’s games have fostered an atmosphere of inclusion, both organically in the stands and with the club’s willingness to showcase its long history of support for the women’s team.

The 2006-07 quadruple-winning women’s team are given parity with the men’s “Invincible” team who completed a league season unbeaten in 2003-04 on the stadium’s external facade.

Arsenal’s long history of prioritising their women’s team gives them an edge over their immediate competition.

Just as interesting as the size of the crowds is the distinct fan culture supporters have created, and the swiftness with which they have created it.

Arsenal Women match days at the Emirates are a different crowd from men’s games. It’s still just about male dominated but nowhere near to the extent that men’s games are. There are far more families and far more young women.

The club themselves recently welcomed The Gay Times to the stadium to write a feature article on how welcoming, even how fashionable, Arsenal Women matches at the Emirates Stadium had become for gay women in particular.

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Clearly, there is an audience of fans who enjoy football but are either priced out of watching the men’s team, or else who don’t enjoy the more testosterone-fuelled atmosphere.

Rachel Major is a long-term match-going fan of the Lionesses and Arsenal Women, and she says she found women’s games more socially attuned to female fans.

“I have been to a couple of men’s games but have never felt that if I went on my own, I would have someone to talk to,” she says.

“Women are more likely to add someone to their friend group for a couple of hours than men, I’ve found, and it takes away the fear of being alone at a game.”

For a long time, not having friends to go to games with was a big obstacle for fans of women’s football. In men’s football, you are far more likely to have family or friends interested in going to games with, and social bonds are far more easily formed.

Women’s football has historically been a far more niche pursuit, simply finding someone else to go to games with is much harder.

This is where Arsenal’s supporters’ groups, like the Arsenal Women Supporters Club and other organic supporters’ groups like Red and White, have been quick to mobilise and create a social fabric around matches.

They arrange pre-match meetups at home and away games, fan walks to the ground and generally encourage people who might be coming to games alone or are first timers to join them. This has created a strong social scene around games and forged friendships that were previously very difficult to create around women’s football.

It has also created a buzz around matches that more and more fans want to be part of. Major says the club have been quick to notice and facilitate this too: “They celebrate large attendances, showing fans on their social media channels. The way the players and staff talk about how important the fans are makes every fan feel like they are appreciated and wanted.”

Arsenal supporter Max Radwan, who regularly attends men’s and women’s matches, says the social aspect around games has been critical and has also helped to compose a burgeoning player songbook to boost the atmosphere.

A few years ago, individual player chants at women’s games were unheard of, as was any sort of singing or chanting in truth.

“This felt fresh and different to what had come before at women’s games,” Radwans says. “I typically just went on my own prior to this.

“I was struck by the fact that most of the Arsenal players on the pitch had their own chant.”

This also comes across on television and makes fans watching at home more inclined to become part of this movement themselves.

Radwan says Arsenal Women’s history makes them easy for fans to back and burnishes them with a sense of an existing folklore largely absent elsewhere in the sport.

“The lyrics for the AWFC version of the Allez, Allez, Allez chant acknowledge Arsenal’s past glories such as winning 15 league titles, and being the ‘only [club] in the land’ to be crowned champions of Europe, in reference to 2007.

“I think it is easy as a supporter to buy into a club with such a rich and proud history in the women’s game.”

There are distinctions between the culture and atmosphere at the club’s smaller historic home of Meadow Park in Boreham Wood and the Emirates. Max says of the Meadow Park experience: “With everyone crammed onto a terraced stand close to the pitch, the North Bank at Meadow Park is an intimate setting that is conducive to creating a great atmosphere.

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“Naturally this grass-roots feel borrows aspects of non-league fan culture (to the extent that our fans even do the “you’re shit, ahhhhh!” chant) cannot be fully recreated at the Emirates.”

Meanwhile, Major, who has attended Arsenal Women games since 2006, says the Emirates is a preferable environment for female fans in particular.

“I think Meadow Park is a great place. The match itself there is a great experience but the travelling to the game, getting home, especially feeling unsafe in the dark and long queues at the food outlet, toilets and bar is not a great experience.”

Ultimately, Arsenal Women’s support have built a culture that takes just enough of the “good bits” from men’s football – the sense of community, the chanting, the playful swearing delivered without the puce faced zeal – and repackaged, maybe even reclaimed it in a more inclusive, more sociable setting.

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