Arsenal are champions of the Premier League. Twice now, without anyone organising it, tens of thousands have turned up outside the Emirates just to be together. On Sunday, a million more are expected for the official parade. And I can’t stop thinking about my brother. 

A month after he died, I went to Kenilworth Road.

It was December 2023. Freezing cold. Arsenal away at Luton. The kind of night you go to, not because you’ve planned it carefully, but because you need to be somewhere that isn’t inside your own head. And for those ninety minutes when Arsenal came back to win 4-3 with a Declan Rice goal in stoppage time, I was somewhere else entirely. Transported.

The grief was still there when I got home. But during that time, I was just a fan. Just present and alive in the moment in a way that felt like breathing again.

My brother AbdiAziz had known that feeling his whole life.

He would have had many hot takes about this title run. We argued about Arsenal like it was the most important thing in the world because in the moment, it was. I rarely agreed with him. But his love for Arsenal was unmatched. Arsenal was his escape from the harder things in life and from his own demons. It was a world he could step into, a place where something joyful was always possible, even when life outside sometimes was anything but. I picture him in the kitchen, cooking, Arsenal on in the background or an Arsenal podcast playing. That was how he lived.

He was just six years old the last time Arsenal won the league. He grew up through the near-misses, the heartbreaks, the endless almost-seasons, never wavering. There were periods in my own life when I drifted away from football, lost the thread of it. He wouldn’t allow it. He kept me updated. Dragged me back in. Insisted it was still our thing, because for him it always was.

AbdiAziz died by suicide in November 2023.

And in the weeks and months that followed, I found myself turning to the same thing he had always turned to. Going to games, sitting in the stands, letting the noise, the cold and the ninety minutes carry me somewhere outside my grief. Football had been my brother’s lifeline when he was struggling. It became mine when I lost him. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I think that’s what football does, at its best. It holds people, giving them a safe space to put themselves when everywhere else feels impossible.

When a hundred thousand people turned up spontaneously outside the Emirates, and the internet became one long, joyful roar, I was joyscrolling like everyone else. The scale of it was astonishing: Arsenal fans celebrating from Somalia to Vietnam, parade buses moving through crowds, people out in the streets of Addis Ababa to Tokyo. This club reaches everywhere, holds people everywhere, and means something to people in every corner of the world in ways you would never expect.

And then, among all of it, I started seeing the other posts. Fans visiting graves. An Arsenal scarf draped over a headstone, a shirt laid carefully across it. People speaking to the camera about a parent, a friend, a sibling or someone they used to go to games with, someone who taught them what it meant to support this club, someone who wasn’t here to see this. The grief is sitting right alongside the joy.

I wasn’t surprised. Because I know what this club means to people who are struggling. I know it from my brother, who found in football a place that accepted him, absorbed him and gave him joy when that joy was hard to find. And I know it myself, from a freezing night in Luton, from all the games since where I have carried him with me into the stands and felt, for ninety minutes, like we were still doing this together.

There is something particular about grief in moments of collective joy. Absence becomes sharper, not softer. The louder the noise, the more clearly you can hear the silence where someone used to be. And yet there is something else in it too, something that feels like witnessing on their behalf, carrying them into the moment, feeling the joy for yourself and somehow, for them as well.

It is now on all of us to celebrate this win for those we have lost. To keep their memory alive in the celebration. To let the joy be as big as it can be, because they would have wanted that, and because that is how we carry them forward.

He waited his whole life for this. On Sunday, a million of us will line the streets. I’ll be one of them. And I’ll be thinking about AbdiAziz.