Arsenal will take the Premier League trophy onto an open-top bus and through the streets of Islington on Sunday, a celebration of the club's first English league title in more than twenty years. The parade, due to set off in the early afternoon, will wind from the Emirates Stadium toward Islington Town Hall, taking the team up Holloway Road, along Seven Sisters Road and down through the streets of north London that form the club's heartland.
The title was sealed earlier in the week, when Manchester City failed to beat Bournemouth and left Arsenal beyond reach. The Gunners then closed the campaign with a 2-1 win at Crystal Palace to finish on 85 points, seven clear of City in second. After a string of near-misses in recent seasons, in which Arsenal had finished as runners-up while building one of the youngest and most expensively assembled squads in the division, the margin of victory gave the achievement an air of long-deferred inevitability.
The parade carries an unusual complication of timing. It comes the day after Arsenal's UEFA Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest, meaning the celebration could mark either a domestic title alone or a continental double, depending on the result in Hungary. Organisers have planned the route and staging to accommodate either outcome, with the club determined that the league triumph be honoured regardless of how the European campaign ends.
In a deliberate gesture, the celebration will feature both the men's and women's teams. Arsenal's women have enjoyed a decorated season of their own, and the club has framed the joint parade as a recognition that the institution's success this year has not belonged to one squad alone. The decision reflects a wider shift in English football toward presenting men's and women's achievements on a single stage rather than as separate footnotes.
For a fan base that stretches well beyond Islington, the celebration has been a long time coming. Arsenal's support is among the most globally distributed in the sport, and the title has been greeted from London to Lagos as the end of a drought that had become a defining feature of the club's modern identity. The parade is expected to draw enormous crowds into the borough, with the men's and women's squads sharing the buses and the trophies between them.
Whatever unfolds in Budapest, Sunday's procession will close a season that restored Arsenal to the summit of English football. The points total, the gap to City and the manner of the run-in left little doubt that this was a champion built to last rather than a one-season aberration, and the streets of north London were preparing to say so.