On Sunday evening outside St Pancras station, the rare combination of Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur both playing home games at the same time really came into its own. Small clusters of supporters, congregated outside pubs or heading for trains to take them north of London and away from the 2025-26 season, broke out into broadly friendly discussion.
The primary ammunition was from Arsenal fans lamenting their Tottenham counterparts for celebrating staying in the Premier League. “Have some shame” was the theme of their catcalls. You actually cheered your team winning a must-win match that will have lasting consequences for the club’s future. Weirdos!
This is fan banter 101, the pure white noise of tribalism that is easy to ignore unless you are a tourist waiting for the Eurostar home and wondering what on earth is going on. But celebration policing creep is real and, this season, the arrest rate is high.
After Arsenal beat Atletico Madrid to reach their first Champions League final for 20 years, Wayne Rooney scolded Mikel Arteta and the players: “I think the celebrations are a little bit too much. Celebrate when you win!” John Terry subsequently did the same thing, although to be fair that counts as one of the least unpleasant things Terry has said.
Last month, Nottingham Forest got the same treatment after beating Aston Villa in the home leg of their Europa League semi-final. Rangers and Celtic have both been accused of over-celebrating this season. Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool would get it. Piers Morgan once told Manchester United off for celebrating winning the Carabao Cup, but then he is a man prepared to wet himself for attention.
All of this is nonsense, but the “wait until you win something” is particularly foolish because, as you can see above, the goalposts change so much. Do not celebrate that goal because you might not win the match. Do not celebrate that win because you might lose next week or you should be ashamed because you lost last week. Do not celebrate a semi-final win because if you lose the final we will use cod psychoanalysis and make this the reason. Do not celebrate staying up because you could have finished higher up the league.
The natural endpoint here is to ignore the entire season. Then, on the final afternoon, we are each provided with a small piece of paper that has the finishing position of our team written upon it. If the team won the title, we are allowed to celebrate. If not, better luck next year.
Or, and you are going to have to take a leap of faith here: celebrate whatever makes you happy in a manner that gives you joy as long as it does not impact upon the enjoyment of anyone else. This is hardly groundbreaking stuff, but it does seem to have escaped the logic of too many people.
Sport’s brilliance is that the feelings it generates contain a purity that depends upon the whole thing not actually mattering. What makes you happy might leave someone else a little more cold. Winning a semi-final can mean nothing at all if you’re used to it – it can also provoke sheer ecstasy if you’re not.
Success is fleeting and it makes no promises about when it will stroll into town again. So make the most of it. You will be far more annoyed at not celebrating and regretting the missed opportunity than celebrating and being disappointed in the end. Because we always get disappointed in the end.
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Kevin Garside: West Ham’s future has never felt bleaker Daniel Storey: Arsenal are the perfect champions for this deeply weird seasonThat is the point that matters. We often use the line that football is escapism, but most of the time it emphatically is not. It takes up time, money and effort and those requirements are increasing all the time as match-going supporters get pushed to the bottom of the priority list. Also, sorry to remind you but: have you seen what’s going on in the real world?
As Pep Guardiola stood on the pitch for the final time as Manchester City manager, he urged those watching on to seize the magic of the moment: “Don’t wait to win the Premier League to be happy, don’t wait to win the Champions League to be happy. Enjoy the process.”
Amen. There is always another mountain to climb and always something waiting to push you back down to the bottom. So let’s try to keep football as a place without emotional gatekeeping. Dance and shout and scream and hug each other like nobody is watching. It does not matter what you are celebrating – it matters how it makes you feel.
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