My story with Emirates Stadium begins in earnest in August 2005. Existing season ticket holders were invited to an office near Caledonian Road underground station to select their seats in the new stadium. In the vast majority of cases, most fans were performing ‘level transfers’ to an equivalent seat at the Emirates. That wasn’t the case for me so a feat of engineering was required. I wanted to move to sit with two friends I had been travelling to away games with. I also wanted to make a reasonably drastic move in terms of where I sat. At Highbury, having graduated from the Family Enclosure I spent the last six seasons at Highbury in Block 19 of the Clock End, right next to the away supporters. There wasn’t really an equivalent seat at the Emirates since the South Stand Lower Tier (officially renamed the Clock End in August 2010) was to feature no season ticket seats. This was simply because, for domestic cup games, teams are obliged to increase their away allocation. At Highbury, my fellow Clock Enders and I were relocated into the North Bank lower tier for domestic cup games. I was 22 years old when Arsenal moved to Emirates Stadium. At 22, sacrificing view (row 4 of the Clock End did not offer a particularly good view when the team attacked the North Bank end) for a bit of needle with the immediately approximate away support (2000 until 2006 were good years for that too) was a good trade off. But the plan was to keep my next seat well into my dotage. I decided to sit in the upper tier of the East Stand and prioritise the view. Now aged 42 with bad hips and a bad back, I am very satisfied with the choice I made. But there was no mechanism to hook up with friends who sat in other parts of the stadium when it came to selecting your new seat. With Jon and Trev after Reiss Nelson’s last minute goal against Bournemouth My appointment was a few weeks later than Jon and Trevor’s, so we operated strategically and took a bit of a risk. They opted for two seats but left a single seat between them. We gambled that nobody would opt for the middle seat in the meantime and we let some people we knew at the Box Office know what we were intending via back channel. It worked and we got our three seats together. I was fortunate enough to be invited to the first public event at the stadium, an open training day that permitted 20,000 supporters as part of the ‘health and safety ramp up’ required to fully open a new stadium. The turnstiles failed which I was later told was a deliberate ploy to ‘test’ how the stadium could deal with such a scenario. The day the Emirates opened officially, on 22 July 2006, my own inauguration with our new home proved to be inauspicious. I lived briefly in Brighton and commuted from there for the game. Lightning had struck a signal box near Gatwick Airport causing enormous delays. I was touch and go for kickoff. Had I been commuting for any other game I might have missed the whole thing; such were the delays. But because it was the first game at the new stadium I had wanted to get there early. As it turned out, I became embroiled in a photo finish for kickoff. I arrived at Finsbury Park station around 12 minutes before the game was due to start. It’s about a 15-minute walk from there ordinarily, so I put the afterburners on and made haste. (I was 22, I had afterburners back then). As I sprinted down St. Thomas’ Road, a banner flew in the sky from a plane marking the opening of the stadium. I ran after it like it was the North Star. Having sprinted through the turnstiles, I briefly regretted opting for an upper tier seat- a regret I have repeatedly belched in the ensuing years, taking on all those stairs after a few frothy tankards and in various states of food coma is no mean feat. With my sister after the opening game at the Emirates I arrived in my seat, gasping, just as Dennis Bergkamp’s father Wim helped to kick the game off. I wouldn’t miss a home game at the stadium until December 2018. Over the years the stadium has evolved. Initially, the stands weren’t even named geographically but were, rather heartlessly, split into coloured quadrants, blue, red, yellow and green. Keith Edelman had been the Managing Director who oversaw the stadium move. He had the perfect ‘bean counting’ credentials required to finance the move but when it came to giving the stadium a soul, he lacked a little. The stands were quickly renamed into the points of the compass. Gradually the bare pieces of concrete around the perimeter of the stadium were coloured and subsequently adorned with the major trophies the men’s team had won since their maiden FA Cup in 1930. In August 2010, prior to the opening home game of the season against Blackpool, the South Stand was renamed ‘The Clock End’ with an enlarged replica of the Highbury Clock created and suspended above the South Stand. The stadium gradually underwent a process of ‘Arsenalisation’ with images from the club’s history projected onto the exterior of the stadium. This process was updated in 2023 and, what do you know, my face features on the ‘Found A Place Where We Belong’ artwork just outside the North Bank. I was part of the large supporter consultation group that input into what each artwork should feature. The Invincible artwork on the outside of the South Stand features the 2006-07 quadruple winning Arsenal Women’s team and I have had a front row seat as the stadium has been transformed into the home of Arsenal Women too, with the women’s team selling out the Emirates for the first time for a Champions League semi-final against Wolfsburg in April 2023. Arsenal have probably suffered a little by being ‘first movers’ when it comes to building a new stadium. At the time that Arsenal moved, being in an area filled with pubs and restaurants was undoubtedly a good thing. It still is for supporters, less so for the club. The Etihad Stadium is, to coin a phrase, in the middle of nowhere but Manchester City have been able to leverage this by building food and drink hostelries around the stadium. The immediate area around Tottenham’s stadium is also not as well appointed either and the club cashes in on that in terms of stadium catering. At the 20-year mark, the club have openly communicated that they are looking at small ways to refurbish areas of the ground to enable them to ‘sweat the asset’ further. Safe standing will be installed in the Clock End next season- this is partially to satisfy the local council. In recent years, the local Safety Advisory Board has been unwilling to sign off on away fans being seated in the upper tier for cup games when allocations are expanded, meaning away supporters have been placed closer to the pitch. This is a marginal gain Mikel Arteta has been keen to choke off and installing rail seating in those areas will smooth that process. But I think one of the most important facets for Emirates Stadium is that it has a league title of its own to project onto its perimeter. When Arsenal broke their nine-ear trophy drought by winning the FA Cup in 2014, they changed their traditional parade route so that the players emerged at the stadium rather than Islington Town Hall. This was to really brandish the stadium with this silverware. By 2026, Arsenal had to consciously eliminate the stadium as part of the route for their league title trophy parade. Fans automatically coalesced around it like a maypole in their hundreds of thousands in the days after the hours after the title was confirmed. Emirates Stadium with friends, May 2026 And ultimately, for all the decoration, there is no substitute for what occurred in May, both as a confirmation as the stadium as the team’s proper spiritual home and to copperplate the fact for future generations. Any stadium needs a proper sense of history. Arsenal were perhaps slower to provide the success we envisaged inside those walls than we would have liked. But as we look back at 20 years at the Emirates, a generation removed from Highbury, it becomes clear that a place feels like home due to what happens inside its walls. Henry against Leeds, Arshavin against Barcelona, Welbeck against Leicester, Reiss Nelson against Bournemouth, 45 points won against Spurs and hundreds of thousands of Arsenal fans congregating around the bowl in May 2026- these are the moments that have made a house a home. 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