London and New York have long been recognised as powerhouses of the Western world. They are cities built on trade, culture and industry. But, over the past few weeks, the parallels have extended to the awakening of their respective sporting giants.
Last month in London, Arsenal ended a 22-season wait to become Premier League champions again.
Just weeks later, the New York Knicks are a win away from their first NBA title in 53 years, having not reached the finals since 1999.
Both have endured long droughts. Both may enjoy them being broken this summer. But the similarities between them actually go deeper.
The crossover between those who follow both Arsenal and the Knicks has been growing for some time. Well-known fans of the two teams include New York filmmaker Spike Lee, New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani and actress Anne Hathaway.
Arsenal legend Thierry Henry may be a self-proclaimed fan of the north London club, and now has a street named after him in New York for the duration of the 2026 World Cup finals after his time in MLS with the city’s Red Bulls franchise, but he actually follows the Knicks’ opponents in these finals: the San Antonio Spurs.
It may be hard for Arsenal fans to compute their record goalscorer wearing Spurs merchandise, because of their local rivalry with Tottenham Hotspur, but the Frenchman’s allegiance to the Texan team stems from his great friendship with their former point guard Tony Parker, who was born in Belgium but grew up in and represented France.
While Henry will be hoping his dreams of a Premier League and NBA double can stay alive on Saturday night, when the Knicks play Game 5 of the best-of-seven series in San Antonio, it was someone who once idolised the Arsenal great who put himself and his team-mates one win away from making that dream a reality: OG Anunoby.
The scorer of the Knicks’ Game 4-winning shot on Wednesday was born in the Harlesden district of north-west London to an Arsenal supporting father. While he had a short spell “liking” Manchester United, his colours were nailed back onto the Arsenal mast by November 2021, when he was playing in the NBA for the Toronto Raptors.
OG Anunoby of the Toronto Raptors will be hoping for an @Arsenal win today 👀
Hear more from the @Raptors star: https://t.co/sNK4hT671C pic.twitter.com/jl5Y3MY3aL
— NBA UK (@NBAUK) November 20, 2021
“It’s poetic that OG hit that shot as an Arsenal fan,” Arsenal and Knicks supporter Adrian Cacho, 28, tells The Athletic. “It adds to the magic we’ve been witnessing from both teams this year. To go through the Dark Ages with both teams and progress in a similar timeline has put me in a state of euphoria — it’s been beautiful to see.”
Born and raised in the Bronx, one of New York’s five boroughs, Cacho’s support of the Knicks was second nature. When it came to choosing Arsenal 10 years ago, there was a draw just too strong to resist.
“Having supported the Knicks and seen the ebbs and flows, I saw a lot of parallels with Arsenal,” he says. “What sparked my support of Arsenal was the sense of not wanting to jump on a bandwagon. This was pre-Arteta, so it’s been great to see the team build over time.”
Both teams have experienced plenty of false dawns.
Arsenal endured ridicule towards the end of manager Arsene Wenger’s 22 years in charge around a decade ago, and went through years slowly building under 2019 appointment Mikel Arteta until they were considered potential title challengers again. The Knicks have had years medalling in the suffrage Olympics, but for those of a certain age, the Linsanity period — when a largely-unknown player named Jeremy Lin unexpectedly spearheaded a huge upturn in form over a nine-week period in the 2011-12 season before getting injured — stands out as one of their formative moments of learning to expect disappointment.
“After that, it was a serial sequence of humiliations for years, but you felt good to hang on,” Alfie Crooks, 28, tells The Athletic. “It’s not like the team was bottoming out. But like with Arsenal selling players after the stadium move, you felt proud to stick by the team when even the players weren’t.”
A young Alfie Crooks (left) wearing his Arsenal shirt with pride alongside his brother (Photo courtesy of Alfie Crooks)
Crooks is arguably better placed than most to understand the similarities between these two clubs.
He grew up in Highbury, near the club’s former home stadium of that name, in a family of Arsenal season-ticket holders and moved to New York aged 13.
“The clubs are both very representative of their cities,” he says. “They’re two of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, and that has always stood out to me.
“For Arsenal, Michael Thomas, David Rocastle, Ian Wright, Paul Davis and Kevin Campbell were local trailblazers who won us titles — and those are stories I was well versed in from a young age. You also hear about The Herd, who were one of the only hooligan ‘firms’ who were putting the far-right at bay, which feels good to identify with.
“The Knicks are similar as, the last time they won the championship, hip-hop was being invented right down the street. Walt Frazier was also captain of the team, and he was a real New York style icon.”
Ian Wright scores against Nottingham Forest in February 1993 (Mike Hewitt/Allsport)
“That’s also why I love both teams so much,” Cacho adds. “In the Knicks team now, you have Jose Alvarado, who’s Puerto Rican and from New York, and Karl Anthony Towns is Dominican, from New Jersey, and grew up supporting the Knicks. The way the team has been moulded, it is very much New York’s team.”
That aspect is integral to how their supporters feel about them.
After that Game 4 win on Wednesday, Alvarado’s post-match interview was clipped up on X to highlight his New York accent, receiving 1.3million views and 34,000 likes. Later that night in a press conference, Alvarado himself said: “Two kids from here (himself and Towns)… I’m not going to sugarcoat this, I was about to cry.”
For a stronger taste of what this means, here is a clip of the 28-year-old on the 7pm In Brooklyn podcast, hosted by former Knicks star Carmelo Anthony, earlier this year:
The best part: he’s really just like us https://t.co/ME8ApftqWz pic.twitter.com/tJXuXG31vT
— 7PM in Brooklyn (@7PMinBrooklyn) June 11, 2026
From an Arsenal perspective, they share similar experiences with Bukayo Saka’s story emerging from their youth academy, through the dark days of mid-table mediocrity, to finally winning the Premier League again.
Eberechi Eze’s story is arguably more of a fairytale, having been released by their academy aged 13 in 2011, only to be signed again at the start of this season and go on to score key goals in their title win. Myles Lewis-Skelly, 19, was only in that same academy a couple of years ago, but his celebratory declaration that, “They called us bottlers, and now we’re holding the bottles (of champagne)” hit a similar note.
Coincidentally, the seeds of both teams’ success were sewn in 2019.
That was the year Arsenal appointed Arteta, while the Knicks losing out on signing stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving was viewed as one slap in the face too many.
The 2021-22 campaign then signalled a change in gears for Arsenal’s transfer strategy, with an influx of young prospects and former Manchester City players added to the team to make them title challengers. The Knicks’ addition of Jalen Brunson and his former Villanova college team-mates Josh Hart, Donte DiVincenzo and Mikal Bridges from 2022 onwards similarly sparked an improvement in their performances.
It was the arrival of Towns in a 2024 trade that made Crooks believe for the first time that the Knicks “had a true puncher’s chance of winning something”.
Signing Karl-Anthony Towns took the Knicks to another level (Al Bello/Getty Images)
Arsenal’s footprint in the United States has grown in recent years, not just because they have become title contenders but because of their consistent presence in the country. Post-pandemic, three out of their four pre-season tours have been to America.
In New York, Brooklyn’s FancyFree bar, tagged as ‘Arsenal & Knicks HQ’ on its Instagram page, was established in 2021. It has made the Arsenal fandom feel more palpable in the city and hosted Mamdani, Lee and Ted Lasso actor Jason Sudeikis for Arsenal’s coronation match as champions against Crystal Palace three weeks ago.
That was a day of celebration, but a game earlier last month proved much more stressful.
“The run-in pressure was very different to these finals,” Crooks says. “The West Ham game (which Arsenal won 1-0 late on, after a dash of VAR drama) was on (American) Mother’s Day, and my mum really wanted to go to FancyFree. When Callum Wilson scored West Ham’s disallowed equaliser, it was a world-collapsing feeling that brought an intense pressure.
“With the Knicks, there’s a pressure building to celebrate, but where British people have a natural pessimism, New Yorkers have a profound lack of fear.”
Knicks fans gather at FancyFree to watch Game 2 of the NBA finals (Adam Gray/Getty Images)
Cacho used to be called “delusional” by friends because of that lack of fear, but this air of confidence has made its way across to London in recent weeks, too.
Opposite Victoria Tube station in central London, sports bar Greenwood has been hosting Knicks watch parties since their Eastern Conference semi-final series against the Philadelphia 76ers in early May.
“That West Ham-Arsenal game was hours before one of our Knicks watch parties,” Greenwood’s Hayden Carpenter tells The Athletic. “Each one was just as full and, in the period of time VAR took to disallow that West Ham goal, I’d never seen a crowd lose their mind as much.
“Three hours later, we have a different crowd for a completely different sport, and it was the exact same, but you could see as soon as there was an inkling of a turnaround and one three-pointer went in, the sense was that another six were coming soon after.”
Approximately 200 people attended that first watch party.
The venue is used to hosting late-night Super Bowl parties each February, but their first Knicks venture was aided by an early tip-off time of 8pm in the UK, alongside promotional help from the team’s official account and that of NBA Europe on social media, with the hashtag #6thBorough.
The Knicks were so keen to build their footprint in London that three members of their team travelled to the English capital with former player Steve Novak, who attended the watch party.
“We’re official partners with the NFL and UFC, but we reached out to the NBA two years ago to have as many followings as we could, because we want authenticity in the bars,” James McCracken of Greenwood tells The Athletic. “We struggled a bit two years ago, but kept in contact and, as the Knicks reached the playoffs, they reached out to the NBA to ask who to speak to about hosting in London and they mentioned us because of the pre-existing relationship.”
In the six weeks since, two to three meetings have been conducted each week, with the Knicks happy to send commemorative T-shirts, signed Brunson jerseys and waving towels to try to bring a little bit of the finals to London.
Interest has soared ahead of Game 5 this weekend, with up to three times the original numbers now pre-booked (around 600 people). Previous Knicks watch parties were hosted in Greenwood’s large upstairs space, but this greater demand is requiring a quick repurposing of its downstairs area, too. Not least with Brazil’s opening World Cup group fixture against Morocco expected to end less than an hour before tip-off at 1.30am local time.
“Normally we have the NBA finals on, but the interest (in previous seasons) has been nothing like this year,” adds McCracken, who is also an Arsenal fan. “The Knicks have been unbelievable. Their backing is a big reason why it’s been so successful.
“They are also committing to a long-term partnership with us, and are in the process of making a plaque for our bar upstairs calling us ‘The Official Bar of the New York Knicks’.”
London has witnessed regular eruptions of red and white happiness in the three weeks since Arsenal were confirmed as Premier League champions.
On the night of Manchester City’s May 19 draw at Bournemouth, with the two dropped points rubber-stamping Arsenal’s title, fans spontaneously descended onto the Emirates Stadium to celebrate. Around 100,000 of them stayed at the ground into the early hours of the next morning, with some bumping into players — Saka, Eze, Declan Rice and Jurrien Timber — there at 5am.
More stadium-based celebrations came after their final match of the Premier League season at Palace, and then over a million packed the streets of Islington, Arsenal’s home district, for their trophy parade on May 31.
The streets of Manhattan have been a sea of blue and orange after each Knicks game in these finals, too.
Ahead of a potential championship decider tonight, Crooks says: “The energy of the city feels so ripe for exploding, like a pressure cooker. It’s the first time since I’ve lived in the city that it’s felt like this.”
Cacho concurs.
“The city is alive in a way I haven’t seen in a while,” he adds. “It’s a sense of collective happiness and joy.
“I’m thinking, ‘This is what I was talking about a decade ago when I was being called delusional’. Some of those friends have reached out, both in regards to Arsenal and the Knicks, to say they know how much this means and that they’re happy for me.
“People understand the gravity of this past month for both teams.”
