Aaaand we’re back in London for another long-awaited installment on the Beautiful Game.
AKA Calcio / AKA Soccer / AKA Football / AKA Fútbol / AKA Fußball. Whatever you want to call it. ⚽️
Today we return to football tourism with our quest to visit all the stadiums in the English Premier League. Up to this point we’ve covered Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, Fulham’s Craven Cottage, West Ham’s London Stadium, Spurs’ Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and Brighton’s AmEx Stadium. Now, at long last, we’re visiting Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, which sits in North London, within walking distance of my new flat! We’re going watch the EFL Cup quarter-final against the classic South-London side, Crystal Palace.
So here’s our destination today, along with a couple of nice pictures from the walk over. This match took place on December 23rd, so you will see lots of Christmas imagery & references in the images.
One great way to score cheap tickets to the stadiums you want to visit is to look for tickets to cup games. This is now my 3rd EFL Cup game! I suppose there’s less demand for these tickets because—since this is not part of the regular season—it just doesn’t matter quite as much to people. Regular season matches can be extremely expensive, especially here at the Emirates, but these tournaments that run in parallel to the season are a good place to hunt for bargains. And we found (relatively) affordable seats in the away-section for this Arsenal-Palace match!
If you’re unfamiliar, there is a specific section of each stadium where the fans of the ‘away’ team sit. The rest of the stadium is assumed to be for fans of the ‘home’ team, although some sections are known to be more rowdy and raucous than others. When you purchase tickets, the websites for these teams will explicitly tell you NOT to wear the colors of or show visible support for the wrong team for your assigned section. If you want to cheer for the ‘away’ team, you must sit in the ‘away’ section. I think this is literally for the avoidance of fist fights. 😂
Going into this game, it seemed like there was potential for it to be a really good one! In regular season play, you’d expect Arsenal to demolish Crystal Palace here, since Arsenal are currently on top of the table and in remarkably good form. Gunners fans have waited a LONG time for this season, and are still actively holding their breath hoping that Arsenal doesn’t blow it late in the season, which is a very real possibility. But in the EFL Cup… one interesting facet of football is how wildly the divergent a single team’s performance can be in different contexts. Let’s take Tottenham from last year (the 2024/2025 season): in regular season Premier League play, hot garbage. They placed 17th out of 20 teams, making them the highest ranked team to avoid relegation. BUT, that same season, they somehow won Europa League. I think at some point it just came down to motivation. Likewise, Crystal Palace is a mid-table team with some amazing talent that has been over-performing in tournament play over the past couple of seasons. Last year (2024/2025) they won the FA Cup, which was their first trophy since 1994. They also won the Community Shield this season already! Clearly this is a team with some amazing potential.
So, with Arsenal distracted with regular season play and Champion’s League, and probably a bit over-confident going into this match… I wouldn’t have been surprised if Arteta (the Arsenal coach) had chosen to rest some key players. Only time would tell!
Well, as I predicted, Arsenal did not start their ‘A squad’. While they have an increasingly deep bench, Noni Madueke, Gabriel Jesus, and Gabriel Martinelli have not been the ‘go-to’ frontmen this season. Eventually, for lack of goals, some of the bigger names were subbed in. Even though I was in the 'away’ section, I was quite star-struck to see Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice, and Martin Ødegaard take the pitch. Meanwhile, Palace had fielded their A team right from the start. I was particularly excited to see Jean-Philippe Mateta and Marc Guéhi play for them!
I am constantly amused by the antics of English football fans, I love their cheers almost as much as I love the obscenities they scream in these matches. One fun cheer—since it was Christmas—was the ‘away’ section singing “Last Christmas” by Wham!, but altering the lyrics to be, “…This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to Ollie Glanser!” (That’s the Crystal Palace coach, FYI.) This was closely followed by somebody screaming “BOOK HIM! GET THE FUCKING BOOK OUT YOU KNOB!” at the referee. This is the Premier League I love. 😂
One other interesting thread of this match was the fact that certain players on this field had previously played for the opposing teams, making this a bit of a grudge match! Eddie Nketiah, who was on the pitch for Palace, had come up through the Arsenal youth system and only transferred away in 2024. Conversely, Eberechi Eze had only completed his blockbuster £67.5 million (~$91 million) transfer from Palace to Arsenal at the start of this season!
Although, it wasn’t a great performance from the Gunners, they seemed to have the game in-hand when Maxence Lacroix conceded an own-goal at the 80-minute mark. HOWEVER, at 90+5, the man himself—Guéhi—scored an equalizer. Usually it’s a perfectly acceptable outcome for these games to end in a draw… but THIS was the quarter final of a tournament, which meant there HAD to be a winner and a loser. We were going to a shoot-out.
Yep, this would be my first penalty shoot-out live!
Me and 100 other dudes sprinted to the bathroom to try to squeeze in a quick pee break before it began, and the banter in there was hilarious. One guy yelled to his friends “I’M IN BITS MATE! MY HEART IS THROUGH MY DICK!” 😂
I barely made it back on time to catch this drama play out…
As fate would have it, this was an exciting shoot out! Normally, this goes to the best of 5, but if the teams are still tied after 5 shots each, they enter sudden-death. This shootout when 8 rounds, which is quite rare! Every single person made their shots… until Maxence Lacroix on the 8th round. Poor guy. He really blew it in this game. 😂 The pressure and disappointment has to have been insane.
So, Arsenal won in the end. They advanced to the semi-final, where they beat Chelsea, to advance again to the final, where they will face Manchester City in about a month.
Here’s the replay for you (for best results, set VPNs to UK).
And, here’s a quick attempt to make my grainy, zoomed-in pictures a bit more engaging. I zoomed in even further and labeled them for you. The last picture shows Christantus Uche—who was on loan from Spanish side Getafe—making his shot against Kepa Arrizabalaga in the shoot-out.
As always, the game ended with many thousands of people exiting the stadium all at once. As we made our way through the crowds, I started noticing some striking similarities between people’s Christmas clothes, and the Arsenal color palette. In fact, there were lots of Santa hats in the crowd… red and white… IS SANTA AN ARSENAL FAN?? 🎅🏻
THIS IS DEFINITELY NOT AI; THIS IS THE REAL SANTA
The crush of the crowd is never fun, but once we got back onto the streets of Finsbury Park, things took an unexpectedly festive turn. As the crowds of people streamed through the streets, one older man in a reflective vest stood on a pedestal in the middle of the street and began singing Christmas carols over a megaphone in a working class London accent. He was not a particularly good singer, and that made it all the more fun! He was just putting himself out there, and it was really nice! The crowds smiled as they passed him, with some people singing along with him where they knew the words. It was like that scene in Elf where they sing to the crowds outside of central park and eventually everybody joins in. ❤️
Once we’d passed that sweet, singing man, another man in crowd, who was walking nearby with the flow of traffic, took a page from this book and started singing Arsenal chants. He was gruff and intimidating, like something out of Green Street Hooligans, but he sang with conviction! This is one of my favorite things about the UK: one of the manliest things you can do is break out into song. It’s hilariously whimsical when you think about it! Unfortunately, nobody else in this particular crowd was man enough to join him in song, so when there was a break in the verses, he screamed at the rest of us around him, “SING UP YA CUNTS!” Laughter could be heard in every direction. It was fun.
At one point, we passed a house selling hot sandwiches out its front window, as if it were a food truck. Above the window, there was a sign that said ‘AFSC SANDWICH BAR”, and through group of black puffy coats, I could see and old woman and her grandson passing warm food through the window. Up to this point, I’ve mostly just been a fan of whichever players are on my Fantasy team each week, but now that I live in this neighborhood… I dunno, maybe it’s time to choose a side! This walk home was very cool.
This season is still playing out, and while Arsenal is still a real contender for the coveted “Treble” (the feat of winning 3 trophies in a single season, typically your domestic league, Champions League, and a tournament like this one), Crystal Palace’s fortunes have not improved. In the January transfer window, team captain Marc Guéhi transferred away to Manchester City (where he seems to be thriving), and the coach, Oliver Glanser announced he’d be leaving the club at the end of the season.
I’ll end with an Arsenal fanbase favorite for you!
