The Women’s Super League (WSL) attendance record has been broken eight times since the league’s formation in 2011 and seven of those games have involved Arsenal, all of the top four WSL attendances of all time happened at Emirates Stadium, and their 2024-25 average home attendance (28,808) is higher than the average home gate for four Premier League teams.
Women’s games have fostered an atmosphere of inclusion, both organically in the stands and with the club’s willingness to showcase its long history of support for the women’s team.
The mural outside the Emirates Stadium (Photo: Getty)
Arsenal’s long history of prioritising their women’s team gives them an edge over their immediate competition.
Arsenal Women match days at the Emirates are a different crowd from men’s games. It’s still just about male dominated but nowhere near to the extent that men’s games are. There are far more families and far more young women.
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Clearly, there is an audience of fans who enjoy football but are either priced out of watching the men’s team, or else who don’t enjoy the more testosterone-fuelled atmosphere.
“I have been to a couple of men’s games but have never felt that if I went on my own, I would have someone to talk to,” she says.
For a long time, not having friends to go to games with was a big obstacle for fans of women’s football. In men’s football, you are far more likely to have family or friends interested in going to games with, and social bonds are far more easily formed.
This is where Arsenal’s supporters’ groups, like the Arsenal Women Supporters Club and other organic supporters’ groups like Red and White, have been quick to mobilise and create a social fabric around matches.
Arsenal Women fans have fostered a culture around matches (Photo: supplied)
It has also created a buzz around matches that more and more fans want to be part of. Major says the club have been quick to notice and facilitate this too: “They celebrate large attendances, showing fans on their social media channels. The way the players and staff talk about how important the fans are makes every fan feel like they are appreciated and wanted.”
A few years ago, individual player chants at women’s games were unheard of, as was any sort of singing or chanting in truth.
“I was struck by the fact that most of the Arsenal players on the pitch had their own chant.”
Arsenal Women fans feel wanted and part of a community (Photo: supplied)
Radwan says Arsenal Women’s history makes them easy for fans to back and burnishes them with a sense of an existing folklore largely absent elsewhere in the sport.
“I think it is easy as a supporter to buy into a club with such a rich and proud history in the women’s game.”
There are distinctions between the culture and atmosphere at the club’s smaller historic home of Meadow Park in Boreham Wood and the Emirates. Max says of the Meadow Park experience: “With everyone crammed onto a terraced stand close to the pitch, the North Bank at Meadow Park is an intimate setting that is conducive to creating a great atmosphere.
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Meanwhile, Major, who has attended Arsenal Women games since 2006, says the Emirates is a preferable environment for female fans in particular.
Ultimately, Arsenal Women’s support have built a culture that takes just enough of the “good bits” from men’s football – the sense of community, the chanting, the playful swearing delivered without the puce faced zeal – and repackaged, maybe even reclaimed it in a more inclusive, more sociable setting.
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