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When Zohran Mamdani made an appearance on The Adam Friedland Show last week, the newly elected mayor of New York was expecting the typical nimble rundown of politics, jokes and conversational detours. What he wasn’t expecting was Ian Wright suddenly filling a phone screen with a congratulatory video. The former England and Arsenal striker saluted him on “what you’ve achieved”, urged him to channel that “winning energy” into the job ahead before signing off with a nod to the Arsenal manager, Mikel Arteta. Mamdani cheesed guilelessly as it played before finally blurting out: “I love this man.”
For a moment, the incoming mayor of the most powerful city in the United States was simply another geeked-out Arsenal obsessive left weak by one of his childhood heroes. And in that moment lies something revealing about how football fandom in the US has changed. This was not a politician deploying a sports reference for relatability; it was a display of genuine allegiance that’s planted at the intersection of two different stories about how Americans have come to love the global game.
What Mamdani’s reaction captured, in miniature, is the broader moment US soccer now finds itself in. Stateside interest has quietly climbed to unprecedented levels: Premier League audiences have grown for more than a decade; every big club now has thriving US supporters’ groups; and football has entered the cultural bloodstream through celebrity-ownership projects such as Ryan Reynolds and Wrexham (and its various rip-offs), through athletes drifting into national politics (Cristiano Ronaldo turning a White House visit into a surreal photo-op) and through the long on-ramp to next summer’s big, beautiful World Cup on home soil. The game is no longer niche, no longer coastal, no longer the preserve of immigrant communities or brunch-hour Europhiles.
Mamdani’s politics add another note. His petition against Fifa’s dynamic pricing for 2026 World Cup tickets – which he called an “affront to the game” on the Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast – reflects a view of football as community infrastructure rather than luxury entertainment. It treats the sport as something that belongs to working-class people and immigrant families, not the unfolding late-capitalist hellscape of ticketing algorithms and resale platforms. That stance is both global and deeply local; both socialist and recognisably football-supporter logic.
Mamdani’s affinity with Arsenal lands with added weight because it reveals what the sport already means in the US: a cross-class, multi-ethnic, diasporic, online, joyful cultural force. For a couple of decades now, Arsenal in particular have occupied a curiously prominent place in the imaginations of American progressives. During the Arsène Wenger years, the club became a kind of cultural shorthand for the liberal intelligentsia. They played “European” football at a time when the term connoted sophistication: Henry gliding, Pires drifting, Wenger lecturing about diet and psychology. On the east coast, when matches were finally moved from pay-per-view to the broader availability of Fox Soccer channel, 7am kick-offs became ritualised social markers. For many, supporting Arsenal was less a sporting choice than a signal of curated worldliness.
But this is only one strand of the US’s football story, and not the one Mamdani comes from. He was born and raised in Kampala and Cape Town before his family relocated when he was seven to Morningside Heights in Upper Manhattan, as the great Wenger teams of the early 00s further informed his sporting consciousness. His Arsenal was the Arsenal of Kanu, Lauren, Kolo Touré, Eboué and Song – a club whose African spine made it beloved across the continent long before it became fashionable in Brooklyn. When he says that Arsenal might be the most popular club in Uganda, he’s expressing a deeper truth about the Premier League’s longstanding place in African diasporic culture.
And Arsenal itself increasingly leans in to this heritage. Last season’s alternative kit, designed by the Sierra Leone-born Foday Dumbuya, explicitly honoured its African fanbase. It followed the Jamaica-themed pre-match strip launched at Notting Hill carnival, part of a broader cultural moment that has long intertwined Arsenal with Black British identity and, increasingly, with the US-based Black creative community, where culture-shapers such as Spike Lee and Jay-Z have embraced the club’s diaspora-rich sensibility. The Arsenal that influenced Mamdani is the same Arsenal that helped define modern British multiculturalism, which helps explain why his reaction to Wright resonated so widely.
These two versions of fandom – the curated and the inherited – have long existed along parallel tracks in a country of 340 million souls. What feels new is the way these stories are converging. Mamdani’s reaction united them perfectly: the diasporic Arsenal of his childhood colliding with the online Arsenal of US millennials and gen Z. The Premier League’s rise in the US – via NBC’s deft marketing and commercial strategy, social media, Instagram fan accounts and matchday rituals – has flattened the cultural landscape. A Somali teenager in Minneapolis, a Mexican-American kid in Phoenix and a 38-year-old Brooklyn journalist all speak the same meme-literate Gooner dialect now. And a whole lot more of them are wearing Messi’s Inter Miami shirt. The effect is a US football culture that is finally shared. No longer the province of any one demographic, but a hybrid of diaspora, youth culture, TikTok, brunch spots and streetwear.
When the mayor-elect of New York fanboys over a message from Ian Wright, it’s tempting to treat it as charming ephemera. But it is also a small window into the country’s evolving sporting psyche – a signpost that the global game has taken root here through diaspora, culture, politics and play. In a country still figuring out what its football identity even is, Mamdani’s reaction offered up a clue: it won’t be imported or inherited whole, but fashioned out of all the places Americans come from and the paths the game has taken to reach them.
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Bryan Armen Graham is the deputy sport editor of Guardian US
