Arsenal celebrates first league title in 22 years with parade

Hundreds of thousands of fans lined Islington and north London on Sunday as Arsenal turned a 22-year wait into a citywide celebration, sending four open-top buses along a roughly five-mile route to mark its first league title since 2004.

The Champions Parade began at about 2pm and wound through the club’s home borough, where streets filled with red shirts, flags and packed pavements. For supporters who could not get near the route, the celebration was streamed live on Arsenal.com, The Arsenal app, YouTube, Facebook and X, extending the scene far beyond the cordoned streets.

The scale of the event made clear that a title parade in north London is not only a football moment but a civic one. Arsenal warned in advance that roads on and around the route, including side roads, would face temporary closures and parking suspensions, a move that reshaped movement across the area for much of the afternoon. That disruption also brought the kind of foot traffic local businesses around Islington prize on major match days, from cafés and pubs to corner shops serving a sudden surge of visitors.

The celebration came with a sharp edge. Arsenal had lost the Champions League final to Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest on Saturday, May 30, on penalties, but the mood changed quickly once the Premier League title was secured. The club described the day as one of contrasting emotions, and the parade gave supporters a chance to shift from disappointment to release in the space of 24 hours. Martin Odegaard later lifted the Premier League trophy in the moment Arsenal supporters had been waiting 22 years for.

Arsenal said the title was its 14th top-flight championship, confirming the club’s place among English football’s most decorated sides while also ending the long wait since 2004. The women’s team joined the parade too, showing off the first-ever FIFA Women’s Champions Cup earlier in the season and giving the procession a broader club identity rather than a single-team victory lap.

For Islington, the parade doubled as a statement of local belonging. The streets became the stage for a title that had eluded Arsenal for more than two decades, and the scale of the turnout gave the day the feel of a borough claiming the club back as much as the club celebrating its crown.