If you walk just 5 minutes from the Emirates there are some terribly impoverished areas and Islington as a whole has a 43% child poverty rate (well above the national average). It's also a Labour stronghold, Islington North being Jeremy Corbyn's constituency since 1983.
So Marcus Rashford is also 'feeding their kids' and they should know an awful lot better than to be singing from the Tory songbook but then you wonder how many match-going Arsenal fans actually live in the area. Like most of the London clubs they get an awful lot of their support from the Home Counties - people travelling in from Hertfordshire, Surrey or the wealthier parts of Essex. It's the same at Tottenham, the area's demographic does a complete 180 on match days because the fans paying £60 for a ticket certainly aren't from the surrounding area.
That said, it doesn't seem to matter anyway, football fans enjoy singing about poverty no matter the area they live in or their own personal income. It's a shame because Arsenal fans are usually sounder than most but they're clearly lacking the imagination to come up with anything about their own team. I'm sure I saw a post on here the other day about European fans and how refreshing it is when another set of support turns up at Anfield and just adores their own club. I couldn't imagine going to another ground and spending 90 minutes singing about the opposition, beyond the offensive songs, why do they care so much about the noise level at Anfield? I get that it's all part of the 'banter' but God is it boring and does nothing to actually help their own players.
Football fandom, by and large, should be about supporting your own team but it's just become an opportunity to goad other fans. I don't get it and I thank God every day that I'm a Liverpool fan and we wouldn't dream of going to another ground and singing "this is a library" instead of singing about our own club. You look at the images from Madrid of Jamie Webster on stage singing to 50,000 Liverpool fans - song after song about Shankly, Paisley, Dalglish, Van Dijk, Salah, Klopp, the Anfield atmosphere, conquering Europe, the fields of Anfield Road - and you wonder what most other English clubs would do in that situation. Would they wheel someone out to play "your support is fucking shit" on a piano? It's laughable.
It never ceases to amaze my just how stupid an awful lot of football fans actually are. Now I hate generalising because I know how damaging that is, but we see the proof of this every single week from hordes of football followers both in stadiums and online. We are talking truly moronic behaviour here, mostly from supposedly mature (in age at least) adults. It's bizarre. It's as though as soon as they put their 'football fan head' on, they forget to slot in the brain.
Arsenal were an embarrassment to themselves last night, yet they are far from even being the worst. I was cringing for them at times. A club as big and as famous as them, in a cup semi-final, yet singing about Hillsborough (yes, ''victims'' is a Hillsborough song you twats), about poverty and also raiding the under 5s book of comedy for the 'library' 'fire drill' songs and the 'Your support...' thing too.
Funny enough, I bet the library and the fire drill chants were funny on the very first occasions they were used a few decades ago. Probably a really spontaneous quip that genuinely suited that moment in time. Thing is, it's now like a once funny quip that was told 40 years ago, but the same comic wheels it out at every subsequent gig he does even though it's been done a million times before and it's now out of context and is not in the slightest bit funny. In fact, the audience know it's coming and take a sweep on the exact timing of when it will make an appearance and lead to groans of derision. Even worse, it's as though every 'comedian' in the country has now adopted the very same 'jokes' and tells them at every gig they do and present them as though it's the first time they've been aired, before chuckling to themselves and congratulating themselves on their 'humour'. Honestly, it's beyond embarrassing.
They are like the twat who tells you ''You've missed a bit'' as you are painting your house. He thinks he's hilarious and he's the first and only one who has said it. Fact is, he's the tenth twat that afternoon.
One day we might get a quality away end coming to Anfield from elsewhere in this country, but I won't hold my breath.
Like you, I thank my lucky stars every day that I'm a Red. Otherwise, I think I'd have to follow a European side rather than associate with the dire quality of fanbases in this country.