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It's official. We the Arsenal supporters are apparently the most hated fanbase in the Premier League. This is according to a ranking published by British Gambler, using Brandwatch social listening data across hundreds of thousands of posts over six months. This hasn't come as a shock to us Gooners, because it matches the sentiments of the media, the pundits, and rival fans. We came in at 43% negative sentiment., which is the joint highest in the division. The study's own spokesperson, Alex Kostin, explained it by pointing to the title race, refereeing debates, and the size of our fanbase.

In other words, we are hated because we are relevant, because we are fighting for everything. When decisions go against us unfairly, enough people care to make noise about it. I don’t think that is a problem, because that is a description of a club that matters.

Manchester City recorded 25% negative sentiment in the same study, while Manchester United came in at 26%. Let us not forget that City are fighting 115 alleged financial rule breaches, the most serious charges ever brought against a Premier League club. Yet their fanbase generates half the negative sentiment directed at us. The media that spent three years asking whether Arsenal had the bottle for a title race has somehow never found the same energy to ask whether City's titles mean anything while that case sits unresolved.

We are top of the Premier League with 64 points and a goal difference of plus 36, we have topped the Champions League phase with a perfect record, we are in the League Cup final, and the last 16 of the FA Cup. We have done all of this without a financial doping scandal, without a managerial circus, without drama manufactured off the pitch. And yet, we are nearly twice as hated as the club currently in a courtroom. Isn’t that contrast interesting?

I have been a fan long enough to see this sentiment evolve. Cast your mind back to the early 2000s when Roman Abramovich arrived at Chelsea and turned on the money tap in a way English football had never seen. Overnight, the landscape shifted. Chelsea were buying everyone. They even came for one of our players illegally. In January 2005, Jose Mourinho and Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon sat in a hotel room with Ashley Cole and his agent to discuss a move, without Arsenal's knowledge or consent. Cole and Mourinho were fined £75,000 each, while Chelsea were fined £300,000 and given a suspended three-point deduction. Nobody in the media treated it as the scandal it was. Chelsea shrugged it off, kept spending, and won the title anyway.

David Dein, the man who built modern Arsenal alongside Arsene Wenger, has since spoken with painful clarity about what that era actually felt like from the inside. "We didn't have the same muscle," he told the Daily Mail in 2022. "We had wealthy people, but not billionaires. We didn't have enough money to finance the new stadium and finance the team. We were trying to dance at two weddings." That is the context the media never gave us. Arsenal moved to the Emirates in 2006 at a total project cost of around £390 million, with no public subsidy whatsoever. The repayments were brutal and they shaped every transfer window for a decade.

Dein again, on what it meant in practice: "We lost Ashley Cole over five grand a week. There was a lot of friction because of the cost of the stadium and we had to ration the salaries. Arsene used every bit of skill in his body to find cheap players." And still Wenger delivered Champions League football every single year. Thierry Henry left. Cesc Fabregas left. Robin van Persie left. Patrick Vieira had already gone. The squad was rebuilt on ingenuity and necessity rather than financial muscle, and we qualified for the Champions League in 20 consecutive seasons. What did the media give us for that? Mockery. Fourth place became a punchline.

"Arsene Wenger's trophy is a top four finish," they said, as if sustaining Champions League football while repaying a £390 million stadium with no billionaire backer was something to be embarrassed about. If put in a similar situation, media darlings Mourinho and Pep Guardiola would have abandoned ships like rats.

They said we played beautiful football but asked whether we could do it on a cold Tuesday night at Stoke. They said we wilted against physical sides. The pundits who should have been acknowledging one of the great managerial achievements in Premier League history used us instead as a byword for fragility. We were not fragile. We were underfunded and still competing. There is a difference, which the media never acknowledged. Now, under Mikel Arteta, we are the most physically imposing side in the Premier League. The best team in the league by any serious measure. When teams sat deep and tried to shut us out, we found the answer through set pieces. This is the most deliberately ignored tactical evolution of the Arteta era, because acknowledging it would require pundits to admit they misjudged this squad completely.

The rivals and the media who spent years mocking us now genuinely fear us. They know this team has a solution for every question posed against it. That is why the hatred has changed in quality. Before, it was dismissive. Now it is anxious. The pundits who are supposed to be neutral openly want this team to fail. They cannot read from the old script anymore. Arsenal as loveable nearly-men; technically gifted but mentally brittle. Arsenal as permanent residents of the almost. That script is dead and they just cannot take it.

The study also found that Fulham registered just 20% negative sentiment and are the most liked fan base in the league. They are a fine club and two of our ex-players play for them now. But they are not in the title race and not competing in Europe either. They are not making anyone uncomfortable. The correlation between being liked and being unthreatening is so clean in this data that it does the argument for me.

We are not trying to be liked. We are trying to win things and those two things, it turns out, are mutually exclusive at the top of English football. I made my peace with that a long time ago. Here’s the thing: the accounts that shared this study with glee thought they were delivering bad news. Instead, they confirmed something that us Gooners knew all along. We are a visible and engaged fanbase rooting for our beloved club that is fighting on four fronts while the football world watches with a mixture of fury and reluctant attention.

I say this without hesitation: I would rather be here, hated and top of the league, than anywhere else with anyone's approval. They hate us because we are here, and we are here because we deserve to be. Arsenal fans are the most hated in the Premier League. It is the most honest thing the data has said about this club in years.