Beyond the Scoreline, How Foreign Football Becomes Local Identity

May 30 , 2026
By Kidist Yidnekachew

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A wave of street celebrations in Addis Abeba following Arsenal’s success has prompted reflection on modern fandom. The intensity of reaction to a foreign league outcome has been criticised as excessive. Observers argue that emotional energy is being channelled away from local realities. The phenomenon raises questions about identity formation through distant sports affiliations. The debate exposes tension between entertainment and lived social responsibility.

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The recent celebrations in Addis Abeba following Arsenal’s success were, to put it bluntly, hard to watch. While I acknowledge that fans who have waited over twenty years for a title feel a deep sense of loyalty, the sheer scale of the reaction, the street-filling intensity, the deafening noise, and the emotional obsession are completely disproportionate to the actual reality of our lives. Watching thousands of people lose their minds over a scoreline from a league thousands of miles away makes you realise that we are no longer just dealing with “fans.” We are looking at the mechanics of a cult.

As someone who has always loved football, I speak from a place of experience. I grew up playing the game, and for me, the joy of football has always been in the physicality of it, the actual act of running, the tactical thinking required in getting past the opposite team’s defence, dribbling and all that that comes with playing a match. I even used to be one of those people who watched it on TV. But somewhere along the line, I stopped being a passive observer. I realised that sitting in a dark, crowded lounge, screaming at a screen for a team that does not know I exist, was becoming an unhealthy habit. The love for the sport should shift back to the field, where the impact is real and personal. Because of this perspective, seeing the way others treat these foreign clubs is even more jarring to me.

When you look at the behaviours on display in our streets and cafes, the parallels to a cult are impossible to ignore. A cult demands absolute devotion, a suspension of critical thinking, and the elevation of a distant, unreachable symbol above one’s own immediate family or community. That is exactly what we see here. These fans speak about Arsenal as if the club’s success or failure is a personal milestone. They carry the “trauma” of losses and the “triumph” of wins as if their own lives have been fundamentally altered by a group of players who do not even know they exist. It is a closed loop of irrational emotional labour. You do not have to be a doctor, a teacher, or an activist to belong; you just have to wear the jersey and parrot the same talking points as everyone else in the circle.

What is truly unsettling is the total absorption of identity. In a healthy society, a person’s identity is built on their contributions to their family, their neighbourhood, and their city. But for fans in Addis, the “Arsenal” identity has replaced that. They feel a sense of pride that is not earned through hard work, but through association. This is a massive drain on our collective social capital. We have pressing, life-altering issues here in Addis, that I will not even get into, the energy that could be used to solve these problems is being siphoned off into the ether of foreign football.

The cult-like nature of this fandom acts as a powerful social sedative. It provides a false, low-effort sense of belonging. It allows people to feel like they are part of a “movement” without having to face the messy, difficult work of addressing the real-world problems in their own backyards. You can go to a bar or sports lounge, scream until your voice is gone, and walk home feeling like you have been part of something great, all while the actual quality of your life and the lives of your neighbours remains exactly the same. It is a way to bypass the frustration of our own reality by hiding in the results of a game. They have essentially created an “us versus them” mentality based on team colours, effectively dividing our own people over irrelevant foreign matches while the things that actually impact our survival go ignored.

We are spending an incredible, almost staggering amount of mental and emotional energy on something that offers zero return on investment for our actual lives. If we applied even a fraction of that intensity towards the social issues that plague us, the change in our day-to-day lives would be massive. Instead, we choose to prioritise the scoreboard of a game that does not care about us.

It is time to be brutally honest: this obsession is a luxury we cannot afford. We are acting like spectators in our own lives, waiting for a foreign entity to provide us with the joy that we should be building for ourselves. The temporary high of a championship in London does not pay the bills, it does not heal our social divisions, and it does not make our city a better place to live. We need to wake up, break the spell of this sports worship, and start acting like citizens who have real, difficult, and important work to do right here at home. The real victory is not found in a trophy across the ocean; it is found in the work we do for each other, right here in Addis Abeba.

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PUBLISHED ON May 30,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1361]

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