No North London is NOT red! All London is red.

 

 

 

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By Walter Broeckx

Here I am sitting at my home in Flanders, Belgium, again after an amazing weekend in London.

I went to the screening in the Emirates on Saturday evening… I will not go into too much detail about it as I didn’t and don’t want to get my season spoiled by crooked Uefa and their referees. Either he was incompetent/biased/bent/bought and probably all four at once. I expect him to be given a top job in Uefa in the coming seasons. Just wait for it.

For me, the amazing reaction was after the CL final. Almost everybody just shrugged their shoulders: they knew what they had witnessed and knew it was impossible to beat a state-sponsored team being helped by the ref.  And so we went out of the stadium, where to be honest, the arrangements were not really good; there were simply too many barricades stopping the flow of the supporters.  But all proceeded in the same spirit as I had: We none of us let our good mood be defined by one match.

So, there was no violence and no riots. We just drank a bit, sang our songs such as “We know who we are, we know who we are, champions of England, we know who we are…”.  In short, we took it on the chin. The title was ours, and nothing could change that.

My wife and I went back to the hotel close to The Tower of London. All the trains were filled with red shirts… nobody could understand the not-given penalty for the foul on Madueke.. but F@ck off Uefa, we will come back and show you who we are in the years to come.

The next morning my wife and I were unsure about going to the parade or not.  Understandably, my wife was a bit unsure, as she doesn’t like really big crowds, so we decided to go to Camden Market, and then we would see how things would go.

But then when we left the hotel and went to Tower Hill underground station, the first thing I noticed was…. Arsenal fans in front, behind, left and right of us…. Everywhere in the street we saw Arsenal supporters in good spirits making their way to the stations to get in the direction of the parade route.

For those in the know, from our hotel, we would pass Angel underground station on our way to Camden.  But when we tried to get on the underground towards Camden, we had to push ourselves on the train and we stood there, squeezed up against everyone else, on a hot train, not able to move around. A completely red train… at Angel underground station the train emptied…. And when the train left the station we could hear the singing of the supporters… amazing…

When we came to Camden, it was as if we entered Arsenal territory…. Somewhere between a third to a half of the people there were in Arsenal shirts… Then my wife said, “Oh well with all those people in such a good mood, we should try to go there…”

But when we came at Camden station, the notice was that Angel station was closed.   So I decided to get out at Kings Cross and then walk further to Angel station and then to the parade route. When we stepped out of the station at Kings Cross … I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Thousands, thousands and many more thousands of Arsenal supporters came out of the stations in wave after wave…. And all went in the direction of Angel as we did…. It was one massive red wave marching on… Singing, laughing, having fun… no bad feelings, just pure joy….

So after a long walk, we found ourselves finally in a street some 150 meters away from the road where the parade was going to pass…. That was the closest we could get!  But we could see a grandmother waving a banner from her window, saying she had been a Gooner for 94 years and got a lot of cheers from the supporters. Behind us the street filled up more and more, and in the end it looked as if some 300 meters of road was completely full with people.

We waited and waited and waited and then in one minute the buses passed us by in the distance… I managed to film it somehow but that was all we could see. But the whole street was cheering as if we just scored a goal…

When they had passed, we waited for an hour before we would try to leave the street and get back in the direction of Angel underground. By then, ten thousand people had passed us by.  We then went to the Islington Green corner a few hundred meters before the Angel station. We realised we couldn’t get on the train and waited again for an hour.

During all that time from both Upper Street and Essex Road, the masses kept on coming in the direction of Angel….we thought it would stop at some point…. But it never did…. So after around 90 minutes, we decided to make the walk back to our hotel near the Tower. Lots of other supporters had apparently reached the same conclusion and also decided to leave the area on foot.

At every corner we turned. I thought we would stop seeing Arsenal shirts on the streets… how wrong was I…. 90% of the people on the streets going in the direction of the Thames were in Arsenal colours…. And it didn’t stop at all….

So my conclusion of that day (and I didn’t even go close to the Emirates on the parade day): not only is North London red. No on May 31, 2026 the whole of London was red. And when I was in bed in the middle of the night, I still heard quite a few people chanting that they knew who we are…champions of Engeland, that’s what we are.

And all that without riots and street violence like in the town of the winners…. You can’t buy class not even with all the money from Qatar.

PS: I like to thank all the people on Untold for the support they have given our club in sometimes difficult circumstances, and how they still kept believing. We got what we wanted for this season… I wouldn’t be surprised if next season will give us even more joy…. And if we get another parade…I don’t know if we will be coming, but if we come, we will be much better prepared.

PPS: Special thanks to Tony for Untold and to Andrew for helping us out in London in the way he did. Thank you, and enjoy the summer. We will be back next season.

Footnote from Tony: in the early days of Untold, Walter, himself a referee, was a regular contributor to this website, giving us all insights not only on supporting the team from another country, but also on referee issues and the way PGMO refs handled Arsenal games.  He thus did a huge amount to get Untold established as an informative website that really did provide information that other websites either could not or would not touch.   We are all eternally grateful to him for his support in those early years of the site and, of course, for his continuing commitment to Arsenal – and this website.