Arsenal | History & Notable Players (2024)

Arsenal, English professional football (soccer) team based in London. Arsenal is one of the most successful squads in English football history, having played in the country’s top division (Football League First Division to 1992, Premier League thereafter) each season since 1919. In the process it has captured 13 league titles.

The club was founded in 1886 and took the name Royal Arsenal after its first game, combining the moniker of the Royal Oak pub, where the team members met, with that of their workplace, the Arsenal munitions factory in Woolwich. The name was changed to Woolwich Arsenal in 1891, and Woolwich was dropped from the name after the 1912–13 season, when the team moved its home stadium to the Highbury section of the London borough of Islington. The club played at Arsenal Stadium (commonly referred to as “Highbury”) until 2006, when it relocated to a new, 60,000-seat stadium in Islington’s Holloway district.

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Arsenal has a long-standing rivalry with another North London club, Tottenham Hotspur, against whom it plays the “North London derby” match nearly every year. When the Football League resumed play in 1919 after World War I, Arsenal—which had finished fifth in the Second Division before the war—was controversially promoted to the First Division over higher-placing Tottenham after Arsenal’s chairman argued that his club deserved promotion because of its longer history, further spurring the rivalry between the two teams.

While Arsenal has remained in the top division ever since its contentious promotion, its periods of great achievements have been widely dispersed. The club won five league championships in the 1930s but only three total in the 50 seasons from 1938–39 to 1987–88. Arsène Wenger became the team’s manager in 1996 and has served longer in that role than anyone else in club history. Arsenal went undefeated in the 38 matches of the 2003–04 season, becoming just the second top-division English club to do so, and it set a national record by extending its unbeaten streak into the next season to 49 consecutive league contests in total. In addition to its league championships, Arsenal has won the Football Association (FA) Cup 13 times and the League Cup twice, as well as the European Cup Winners’ Cup (1994). Among the standout footballers who have played for Arsenal are forwards Cliff Bastin and Dennis Bergkamp, goalkeeper Pat Jennings, midfielder Liam Brady, defender Tony Adams, and, arguably the team’s greatest player, striker Thierry Henry, who scored a club-record 226 goals between 1999 and 2007.