One-Nil to the Arsenal

A goofy Shakira remix, a nervy penalty kick, and 60,000 fans turning banter into legend—welcome to the world of football chants.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:09Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars, and I'm here with Emmett Fitzgerald, a 99PI producer, climate reporter, and as I've recently learned, a psychotic Arsenal fan.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  It's true. I've been mildly obsessed with the English Football Club Arsenal for basically my entire adult life. To be clear, I have zero connection to North London where the team is based, but for reasons I can barely remember now, 14-year-old me chose Arsenal, and I've been living with the consequences ever since. I wake up at like 6:30 in the morning basically every weekend to watch them play in Pacific Standard Time.

• 1:52Roman Mars?

  That's lunatic behavior, but okay. It's nice to have a hobby.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just my lot in life. But anyway, today is a big day because I have an Arsenal story for you. It starts with the match last season. Arsenal were beating Bournemouth 2-0, and in the 52nd minute, Arsenal won a penalty.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Now, normally, in a situation like this, they would let their star player, this guy named Bukayo Saka, take the penalty kick. But on this day, a lanky German named Kai Havertz stepped up.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  They've given the ball to Kai Havertz to give him. So what's the significance of Kai Havertz and him taking the ball in this moment?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  So Kai Havertz had recently joined Arsenal from their London rivals Chelsea, and he cost a lot of money. He was a 60 million pound transfer.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  But so far that season, he had still not scored a goal. And the football media was starting to chatter about how all that money had been a waste. So, you know, Havertz is looking a little bit nervous as he approached the ball. But he smashed the penalty into the bottom left-hand corner.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  No problem. Kai Havertz announced himself as an Arsenal player. And the Gunners lead by three goals today.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Now, this was not a particularly important goal in the season. It wasn't really even an important goal in the game. You know, it was like already over. But it was an important goal for Kai Havertz. And as he wheeled away into the corner to celebrate this, this, you know, first goal with the Arsenal fans, a song starts ringing around the stadium.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Do you, do you, does that mean anything to you to recognize that?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  It means, it means nothing to me.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  So that, that is, that if you did not, if you did not pick up on it, that is Shakira's 2010 hit, "Waka Waka."

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. So I do recognize that as the World Cup song, the, the, the World Cup in South Africa.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. But instead of the usual Shakira verse, the Arsenal fans sang a brand new set of lyrics celebrating Kai Havertz and basically saying, who's a waste of money now?

• 4:28Speaker 03

  60 million down the drain. Kai Havertz scores again. A reference to the price tag that was paid for Kai Havertz and that was heavily criticised. And he does keep scoring.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  This is James McNicholas.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  I'm a sports writer. I work for The Athletic, where principally I cover Arsenal in the Premier League.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  And James says that on that day at Bournemouth, a new song was born. And now, basically, every time that Kai Havertz scores a goal, the fans start singing their version of this Shakira classic.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  I've got to say, I've got an 18-month-old son, and that's certainly his favourite chant. Whenever that song comes on, or whenever I'm singing that around the house, he really enjoys that. So I do have a particular soft spot for that one.

• 5:13Roman Mars?

  And when he says "that one", what he's implying here is that there are a lot of songs, like the Waka Waka Kai Havertz song, out there.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  There are so many songs like this in the English Premier League. There's no way I could possibly name them all. But just to give you a quick taste of a couple of my favourites. Arsenal used to have this handsome French striker named Olivier Giroud. And the fans would sing his name to the tune of "Hey Jude", as in, "Na na na na, Giroud."

• 5:45Speaker 01

  One of my favourites of all time comes from West Ham, who had this song for their striker, Bobby Zamora, that was lovingly making fun of the fact that a lot of his shots tended to sail way above the goal. It was sung to the tune of "That's a moray", except it went, "When you're sat in Rosed and the ball hits your head, that's Zamora."

• 6:08Roman Mars?

  That's fantastic.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  That is truly just the tip of the iceberg. If you have your TV unmuted while you watch an English Premier League game, you're treated to a near constant chorus of songs like these.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  I think it's partly what makes the Premier League so special. You know, these are songs with melodies borrowed from pop songs or folk songs and reworked lyrics, sometimes quite complex lyrics, which will be either to kind of eulogize their own players, lionize their own players, or are often quite derogatory about other players and other teams. But the imagination and sense of humour of the British football fan knows few bounds.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And you know, this obviously isn't unique to English soccer. Football fans all over the world sing during matches. And even American sports fans have some simple chants that they break out now and then.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  But I think English soccer singing has become almost like a folk art form. The songs have complicated melodies and clever lyrics, and each team has an entirely unique songbook that seemingly every fan in the stadium knows by heart. And I have to say, watching on TV from California, I've always been both mesmerized and confused by this whole phenomenon. Like, every time I watched an Arsenal game, it felt like there was a new song that didn't even exist the previous match. And somehow, 40,000 fans just seemed to know exactly how and when to sing it. And so I went on a journey into the history of football fan culture and pop music to try

• 7:46Speaker 01

  and figure out how all this actually works and who is even writing these songs that are perpetually bouncing around in my head.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Okay, so where do you begin with this? Let's start with the football writer Andy Lahn.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  I have always been fascinated by football crowds or soccer crowds and just the noise that they make.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Andy is the author of We Lose Every Week: A History of Football Chanting. And he says that part of why he wanted to write the book in the first place is that singing soccer fans tend to get a pretty bad rap.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  I knew that a lot of the discourse around soccer fandom focused on hooliganism. A lot of the kind of times that football chanting made the news, it was for racism or for homophobia or for some really like dark, abusive, horrible stuff.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Andy says that that part of football culture is unfortunately very real, but he also knew from a lifetime of experience inside football grounds that it wasn't the full story.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Because I knew that chanting and singing and that kind of communal experience was much more than hooliganism. It was a way to express kind of civic pride and identity and something that you kind of really believed in. And I didn't think that that story was widely enough known.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  In his book, Andy traces the origins of football chants back to his own hometown of Norwich in the late 19th century. And back then, most cities had a bunch of different football clubs that were mostly connected to local employers. So, for example, if you've ever wondered where Arsenal got its name, the team was originally made up of workers from a munitions factory. Oh, I actually didn't know that. That makes sense. And in Norwich, where Andy was from, there were like six or seven different teams.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  So there was a team that was made up of employees from the Kayleigh's Chocolate Factory. There was a team made up of teachers. There was a team made up of people from the local church. And they would play against each other in a kind of hyper-local league.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  In the 1890s, a local Norwich man wrote a song called "On the Ball City", celebrating the fact that Norwich had so many football teams. And then a few years later, when those teams eventually merged to create Norwich City FC, they basically started singing that song as like an anthem for the new combined team.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  And it just became a tradition that kind of caught on. And that was in 1902. Now in 2025, it's still being sung like every game, four or five times in a game.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so most people consider On the Ball City to be the first football song. But soon, fans of other teams followed suit and started singing songs meant to celebrate local pride. So, for example, supporters of Portsmouth Football Club, which is nicknamed Pompey, started singing a song called Play Up Pompey.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Which is a chant that's very simple. It's a bit more like a kind of a US chant in terms of simply just play up Pompey, Pompey, play up, play up Pompey. But the way they sing it chimed perfectly with the town hall bells that was next to the stadium. So it's that duh duh duh duh, duh duh duh duh.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  So you mentioned the first one sort of premiered around 1902. You know, where are we at this point where they start spreading around to other clubs? Yeah, I mean, kind of the early part of the 20th century. It was, it was this like, it was a phenomenon, but you know, the different teams would have them. They were often sung at the beginnings of games, like before anything even happened. It was kind of like, the players are walking out onto the field, like, let's sing the song from our town that celebrates local pride. But I would say that like, if we're gonna call football songwriting a folk art form, as I did in the intro, I would say that like, that didn't really kick into gear until the 1960s. And it all went down in Liverpool.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  And what essentially happened was, Silla Black and the Beatles were kind of the first musical acts that became world famous. And they were very, very famously from Liverpool.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And meanwhile, Liverpool also had one of the best football teams in the league, really in Europe, Liverpool FC. And it kind of, you know, it just kind of made sense that these two things would collide.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  So the Liverpool crowd used their songs as a vehicle for kind of pride and self-identity because here are these people who are a global success, the first kind of global superstars that certainly England has produced, and they're from Liverpool and they sound like us.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And so Liverpool fans just started singing Beatles songs verbatim during home matches at their famously loud stadium, which is called Anfield. Here is a clip from 1964 of the raucous Anfield crowd singing "She Loves You" by The Beatles.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  But the most iconic Liverpool song from this era isn't actually a Beatles song. It's called "You'll Never Walk Alone." Do you know that song?

• 13:35Roman Mars?

  I know it, but I really only know it in this context. I don't know where it originates from.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Well, it was originally written for a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but the song was made famous by a Liverpool rock band called Jerry and the Pacemakers.

• 14:03Roman Mars?

  It's not exactly a jock jam, you know what I'm saying?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Okay, yes, but listen to the Liverpool crowd sing it.

• 14:25Roman Mars?

  Oh, it's so good. You would never predict that for that song, but it actually comes off so well.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. And that has become Liverpool's anthem that's known all around the world. Like, if you tell someone you're a Liverpool fan, they'll start singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" at you in, like, an airport.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it wasn't long before other clubs started taking notice of what was going on in Liverpool. Teams, you know, from all over the country would come to Anfield. And when their fans arrived, you know, not only is this team, this Liverpool team, one of the best teams we've ever played against, but there are rows and rows of these crazy Liverpool fans just, like, singing Beatles songs at the top of their lungs.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  And fans kind of took that inspiration like these guys are singing pop songs and they're really loud and it's a really fun environment and their team are winning. We can do that at home.

• 15:17Roman Mars?

  I mean, that's all fine and good, but not every town has a Beatles in their back pocket.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. I mean, like, good luck. Good luck singing all the world famous songs from all the bands in Wolverhampton or Bournemouth or Norwich for that matter.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  We don't necessarily have an artist that is from Norwich who is world famous. So what can we do? Well, we can maybe change the words of the song. So we can have the same tune. Everyone knows this tune. No one needs to learn the tune. Everyone knows this tune. We can just sing it, but we can change it and make it our own words.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  So this is the moment when fans start making their own football specific remixes, taking well-known pop melodies and writing their own lyrics to suit their particular city or their football club.

• 16:07Roman Mars?

  So the song itself isn't from a particular city, but now it has new lyrics that might be about how great Norwich is or whatever.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Right, right. Or how good their team is on the pitch. You know, for example, in the case of Arsenal, the fans wrote a classic song celebrating how tough the team's defense was.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  One which sort of came out of the late 80s, early 90s is 1-0 to the Arsenal, which I believe is to the tune of Go West by the Pet Shop Boys. And that became kind of the quintessential Arsenal chant. And the reason I love it is because 1-0, I mean, I'm sure your American listeners will turn up their noses at a scoreline as dour as that. That's the problem with soccer, right? Not enough goals.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  And back in the 90s, Arsenal was getting criticized, you know, for essentially for being boring to watch because they won so many of their games 1-0.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  And Arsenal fans, being what they are, you know, they turned that into a positive and they dug their heels in and were proud of that identity. They were going to be the meanest, nastiest, toughest to break down team in the league and celebrate every one of those 1-0 to the Arsenal wins. And they did that through songs.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can we get a few bars? You sing on a podcast before.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Uh, okay, I will give you a, I'll give you a blast. So obviously it's one nil to the Arsenal, one nil to the Arsenal, one nil.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Listen, lyrically, it's not the most complex, but you could see why it caught on.

• 17:45Roman Mars?

  I mean, it's still a far sight better than just defense. Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And, and you know, simplicity was key back then. There was, you know, there's, there's no internet, no social media. These songs needed to go viral in the real world. And you can kind of imagine how this might play out. Like if you were a diehard fan in the stadium, you would basically need to sing your new song loudly enough and clearly enough that the drunk guys next to you would pick it up and then hope that they sang it loudly enough and clearly enough that the drunk fans next to them caught on.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  They don't hand out a song sheet or anything, you know, there's not a hymn book, right? You have to go away and ask your mates, what do they actually sing? What are the words there? Or just come back enough times that you slowly pick it up.

• 18:30Roman Mars?

  I mean, given that, it's kind of amazing that any songs got learned at all.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. But over time, this, this kind of clever pop music songwriting really spread all throughout football. And because these songs were sung during the game itself, it made the relationship between the crowd and what was happening on the field so much more dynamic.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is that kind of symbioticism between the crowd and the players. And sometimes they feed each other, you know, it might be that the team is struggling. It might be that they need picking up and maybe an anthemic song could be what lifts them, what rouses them.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Or when a team scored, the fans might start singing a song devoted specifically to the player who got the goal. So for example, in the late nineties, early 2000s, Arsenal had this legendary midfielder named Patrick Vieira. Uh, he was French, but he was born in Senegal.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  And he had a chant to the tune of, I believe the song's called Valare, um, which was, uh, I'll sing it for you. It went, Vieira, whoa, Vieira, whoa. He comes from Senegal. He plays for Arsenal.

• 19:51Roman Mars?

  That's amazing. But I take it not every player warrants a special song.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no. It's something, it's something that, you know, it's something that you have to earn.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  The moment where you get your own song from your fans is like when you've arrived, you know? And I think it takes some time, you know, the stadium lyricists have to go away, squirrel away and come up with something and then it's got to catch on. But that, it must be a wonderful moment for a player and it's something players often talk about. You know, I heard the fans singing my name for the first time.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  One thing that has consistently baffled me about the chants that I hear on TV every weekend is the fact that these songs just seem to pop out of thin air. One week, a song doesn't exist and the next, tens of thousands of people are screaming it in unison. So after the break, I will talk with one of the songwriting supporters who make that magic happen.

• 20:47Roman Mars?

  All right. Stay tuned.

• 20:56Roman Mars?

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• 22:31Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop off, the first sweater weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions. Crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider.

• 23:07Roman Mars?

  Okay, we are back with Emmett to try to understand the origins of soccer songs.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  So, since I started reporting this piece, I've wanted to try and figure out who was actually writing all of these songs that seem to spring forth from the chaos of the crowd like magic. And that search led me to an Arsenal fan named Dan Gunning.

• 23:28Speaker 05

  It started because as a group, we wanted to try and improve the atmosphere. It's circular, right? The fans sing more, it helps the players, the players win. Players win, the fans sing more, it goes round and round.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Dan is a season ticket holder in this very famous part of the stadium called the North Bank. And, you know, he's a regular at Arsenal games. And, you know, it must be said that Arsenal have never been known for being a particularly rowdy crowd. They're not Liverpool. But when fans were let back into the stadium after COVID, Arsenal was playing really well and there was this concerted effort to try and improve the atmosphere inside the ground, try and really create, you know, a vibe inside that stadium. Dan and his friends were a part of that and they decided to take it upon themselves to write some fresh songs for some of the team's newest players.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  We start to get some noise from fans saying, you know, well, this person needs a song or that person needs a song.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Specifically, Dan thought that the team really desperately needed a song for their new captain, who is a Norwegian midfielder named Martin Odegaard. Odegaard is this incredibly skilled, kind of baby-faced Scandinavian who wears the number eight jersey.

• 24:43Speaker 05

  Was basically just sitting there in bed and was watching darts on YouTube and the dart song was in my head.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Wait, so he's saying watching darts like watching people throw darts on YouTube? Is that what he's watching? Yeah, yeah, he did. You know, darts is like a popular spectator sport and they televise it in the UK. And the theme song for the main darts television program is by a band called Planet Funk. It's called Chase the Sun.

• 25:17Speaker 05

  And I put in the group chat and said, what do you guys think about a football song for this?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And his North London friends were universally into it.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  It was a very astute choice because that song has a particular resonance in North London, I would say even because every year there's the big darts competition here at Alexandra Palace, which is only about 20 minutes from the stadium. And so it was a song people knew really well, which I think probably accelerated the rate at which people embraced it.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  So Dan comes up with some Martin Odegaard's specific lyrics to match that darts tune. He was, he was actually, he was, I tried to get him to sing it, but he was, he was too embarrassed to sing it for me on the radio, but James helped me out.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  I think it's been, been dreaming all day about our number eight, Martin Odegaard. When he's on the ball, and I swear, I don't know.

• 26:09Speaker 05

  Swear.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Okay, when he's on the ball, he's fucking magical. Martin Odegaard, like, that's, that's a mouthful, right? That's a lot. That's a lot for an inebriated football fan to remember.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  But in today's day and age, songwriters like Dan have a tool at their disposal, which is the power of social media. And in this case, Dan basically just posted a video on Twitter with his new lyrics rolling over the audio track of the Darts song. He went to bed and woke up the next morning and his phone had blown up.

• 26:41Speaker 05

  I'm thinking, God, what's happened? Yeah, I opened Twitter and just liked, retweets, posts, comments everywhere.

• 26:49Speaker 05

  And obviously the same from the lads in the group chats messaging saying like, it's gone absolutely mad. It's gone everywhere.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  The next day was a home game against Everton. And, and Dan, you know, followed his usual pre-match routine and went to the pub for a drink. And at the bar, a bunch of friends started singing the Martin Odegaard song. A lot, a lot of people recognized it from Twitter and, and you know, it starts to catch on.

• 27:13Roman Mars?

  So this is before it's even reinforced in a match. It's just out in the bar.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Right, right. And so Dan left the bar and the song kept spreading from there. On the walk into the stadium, he heard more people singing it. But the big question was whether he and his friends could get the song going during an actual match, like in the stadium. And for that to happen, you need a spark.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  I always say it takes sort of one idiot to stand out for the rest to sing. So it was another one of my friends quite a few rows back and all I could hear was him singing the song. His, uh, his name's Kieran Barry and I could just hear him shouting the song everywhere.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Over time, more and more fans joined him and pretty soon, this new song was echoing around the stadium.

• 27:56Speaker 05

  People just started singing it and then as Odegaard came over at the end of the game, people were singing it to him and it just went louder and louder.

• 28:11Roman Mars?

  It's so great. It's so great to see him recognize what they're doing. You know what I mean? Because in this video, you know, Odegaard is like watching them and clapping along and stuff. So great.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I mean, imagine you're like at your workplace and there's thousands of people who love you and really badly want you to be doing a good job. And they're just like singing this devotional song that they created especially for you.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Listen, it must be a very special feeling to have 60,000 people singing your name and saluting you for what you do.

• 28:40Roman Mars?

  Yeah, but it also must be a pretty amazing feeling for the songwriters to see this take off, you know?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely. And I brought I brought this up with Dan a lot and he's very, he is very kind of bashful and humble about it. But, um, you know, it's wild to me. Like, I would hesitate to guess the number of people who know the words to that song, like globally at this point. But it is a lot. Like, just the other day, I went to watch a game at a bar in San Francisco and Martin Odegaard scored. And this entire bar in San Francisco and California started singing the song that Dan wrote a couple, you know, a year or so ago.

• 29:12Roman Mars?

  It's a worldwide, global number one hit.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. He went platinum. But you know, a thing that a thing that has struck me throughout this is just how unprecious Dan and his friends are about their songwriting. They they see their role, I think, is just to churn out lots of ideas and sort of see what sticks. They they know that most of the ideas that they come up with won't go anywhere, but that's just part of the process.

• 29:34Roman Mars?

  It's kind of fun to imagine the ones that don't take off where somebody does stand up and try to start it and then nothing happens.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that happens literally all the time.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  There was one to the tune of a song called Zombie by the Cranberries.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Oh, of course.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Arsenal defender called Gabrielle. Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I think it was his nickname is Gabby.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Gabby.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  And you would think, right? That's got all the ingredients to make a success. But apparently, it just resulted in one guy just, um, basically just screaming the word Gabby over and over again in a football stadium until he was eventually ignored or possibly even taken away by stewards who were concerned for his well-being.

• 30:19Roman Mars?

  That would be mortifying.

• 30:22Roman Mars?

  But I could totally imagine it perfectly.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  I'm sure he was fine. Gabriel did eventually get a song, though. And weirdly, Dan and his friends were involved in this one, too. Basically, a few seasons ago, a fan had tried to get a Gabriel song going to the standard tune. And it didn't really take. But the lyrics got tweaked a little bit by different people over the years. And then in 2024, Gabriel was just, he was having this incredible season. And Dan and his friends decided, like, we really need to make this song happen. Now, this guy deserves a song. And they posted a video of their crew singing, singing this Gabriel song on the train on the way back from an away match. And this time, it just went everywhere.

• 31:27Roman Mars?

  And so is this, is this song part of the canon? Would you hear this in a bar in San Francisco?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. You hear it, you hear it all the time.

• 31:36Roman Mars?

  I mean, it really underscores how collective this whole process is. I mean, the person who comes up with an idea is just the very first step. And it really is the wisdom of a crowd that ultimately determines what makes it into the songbook.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that's exactly right. And I think that, you know, that collective mentality is just a really important part of European football. Being, being a fan really means contributing to the culture around your club. You're not just consuming this entertainment product. You have a job to do.

• 32:10Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  And I think that's why you often hear fans referred to as supporters.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  It's very interesting. I mean, Arsenal themselves always talk about supporters rather than fans. They want their supporters to be actively engaged. They want them to be, you know, making that noise, firing up that choir.

• 32:27Speaker 05

  We get there an hour and a quarter earlier than kickoff every single game. And if I'm not there on time an hour and a quarter before, I get people messaging saying, where are you? Why are you not here? And it's only-

• 32:38Speaker 01

  You're late to work. You're late to work.

• 32:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. It can feel like that. And it's only with the intention of making fans sing and get the atmosphere going louder. And ultimately trying to have as a fan, as a supporter, an influence on the players on the pitch. That's the only thing we can do to influence them is to make noise and try and try and, you know, inspire them and cheer them on.

• 33:10Roman Mars?

  So before we go, like, how is Arsenal doing this season?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  It's been up and down. They're, as we record this, they're in second place in the league, which is great. But there's a feeling that they could have done even better. And they've had to cope with some really, really tough injuries throughout the season, including Taki Havertz.

• 33:28Roman Mars?

  Yeah. So you've not heard the Waka Waka song in a long time?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. There's been no Waka Waka for weeks now. And for a little while, the atmosphere at the stadium really has felt kind of quiet. But about a week before this episode came out, Arsenal had this massive home game against Real Madrid in the quarterfinals of the Champions League. Real Madrid were the defending champions and probably the favorites to win the tournament again. But Arsenal managed to win that game three to zero and then beat Madrid again to advance to the semifinals.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  And I don't think you can give the supporters all of the credit, but I will say, even through the TV, you could tell the crowd inside that stadium was as loud as it's ever been.

• 34:47Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald and edited by Kelly Prime, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, George Langford and APM. Fact checking by Graham Heisha. Special thanks this week to Ben Bennett. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laishma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server.

• 35:31Roman Mars?

  There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 35:48Speaker 06

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