The English Premier League and British football hardly featured notable African players before Arsène Wenger arrived as manager of Arsenal F.C. in 1996. The few high-profile exceptions were Tony Yeboah and Lucas Radebe at Leeds United F.C. and Daniel Amokachi at Everton F.C.

By the time Arsenal dismissed Arsène Wenger in 2018, he and the club had earned the distinction of being primarily responsible for mainstreaming African footballers in the top flight of the English game. At one point in the mid-to-late 2000s, at least seven of Arsenal’s eleven starters on any given match day were black, either the children of African migrants to Europe, African-descended players from the Caribbean, or, more to the point, players born in an African country. By 2025, more than two dozen African-born players had played for Arsenal, primarily due to Wenger’s doing.

At least three African players—Lauren, Kolo Touré, and Nwankwo Kanu—were regular starters on the “Invincibles,” the legendary Arsenal team that went unbeaten for a whole season in 2003–2004. It is also a striking coincidence that the last major player Wenger signed at Arsenal was an African: the Gabonese Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

In this way, Arsenal inaugurated a revolution about race in British and global football culture. On the field, represented by these players and their successors, Arsenal came to represent London’s diversity, especially its African diaspora. Arsenal legend Thierry Henry (his parents are immigrants from the French Caribbean; his mother from Martinique and his father from Guadeloupe) commented on the occasion of his retirement from the club that Arsenal, by being one of the first clubs to have black players at the heart of its team, became “the club of the people and the streets.” All this combined to cement Arsenal’s place in African football lore and to make it one of the most supported football clubs on the continent, especially among football fans who came of age in the 21st century.

Like other professional clubs at the pinnacle of the English game, Arsenal had historically recruited only white players from Africa. The first was a descendant of white South African settlers, Dan le Roux. He had an unremarkable career at Arsenal between 1957 and 1958, playing in only seven matches. The first black player to play for Arsenal was Brendon Batson, a Grenadian-born immigrant to Britain from Trinidad. Batson played 10 times for the club between 1971 and 1974 before moving to West Bromwich Albion F.C., where, together with Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham, he became part of perhaps the most iconic trio of black players at an English top-flight club in the 1970s. Batson’s signing also opened the way for a smattering of black players whose parents were also from the Caribbean to run out for Arsenal for the first time, and the side that in 1989 won the Gunners their first title in 18 years featured the unforgettable trio of Michael Thomas, Paul Davis, and David Rocastle.

When the Premier League was born in 1992, Coventry City F.C. was the first, that season, to pick an African footballer to start a league match: Peter Ndlovu from Zimbabwe.

It was left to Wenger to sign Arsenal’s first player from the African continent, Christopher Wreh, from Liberia. One of Wreh’s distinctions is that he is one of only two players (the other is Thierry Henry) signed by Wenger during Wenger’s time at both AS Monaco FC and Arsenal. But perhaps a more significant detail of Wreh’s biography and Wenger’s time at AS Monaco is that he is a cousin of George Weah, later president of Liberia, who, as a footballer, won the Ballon d’Or in 1995—the first and still only player to have done so while representing an African country. Wenger’s relationship and success with George Weah at Monaco also explain his subsequent affinity for African players. (It bears mentioning that when Weah won the Ballon d’Or, he called Wenger on stage and handed him the trophy instead. Later, when Weah became president, he invited Wenger for an official visit and awarded him Liberia’s highest honor: “Knight Grand High Commander of the Humane Order of African Redemption.”)

Christopher Wreh had a decent career at Arsenal, spending four years at the club and an additional three years on loan. He contributed to Arsenal’s FA Cup (scoring the goal that won the semifinal) and Premier League double in 1998. It was Kanu, however, whose 1999 arrival forever changed the perception of African players in England. He had previously won the UEFA Champions League with AFC Ajax and the Olympic Games with Nigeria. A proven winner and a tall, rangy player able to score goals from apparently impossible angles, Kanu was, in Wenger’s words, “a genius, creative, technical, brave, a player everyone admired.” He quickly became a cult hero at the club.

In 2000, Kanu was followed by Lauren, the son of Equatorial Guinean exiles who settled in Cameroon (for whom Lauren later played at the World Cup) and then Spain, where Lauren started his football career. In 2002, after a short trial, Kolo Touré joined Arsenal from an academy in Côte d’Ivoire. In his book about his time at Arsenal, Wenger singles out Touré, along with Sol Campbell, as “fundamentally important” to the success of the Invincibles. Bought on the cheap (he cost just 150,000 pounds), in Wenger’s words, Touré “became one of the best central defenders in the game.”

Next came Emmanuel Éboué, who also started his career at the same academy as Éboué in Côte d’Ivoire. (Yaya Touré, Kolo’s younger brother, had a trial at Arsenal in 2003, but Wenger decided not to sign him.)

These players, along with recruits from France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere (at one point, controversially, Wenger fielded no British-born players), would form the nucleus of Arsenal’s success in the first decade of the 21st century.

At the beginning of the 2010s, as that first group aged and moved on, Wenger made another run with a new crop of players and another group of African players at its core—including Alex Song, Alex Iwobi, Emmanuel Adebayor, and Gervinho. Both Song and Iwobi are part of African football’s familial legacies, respectively those of Rigobert Song and Jay-Jay Okocha. However, success became more elusive for Wenger’s second generation: these teams won the FA Cup multiple times and qualified for the Champions League every season, but never won the Premier League again.

By 2013, Arsenal fans were beginning to call for Wenger’s dismissal. With Wenger’s eventual retirement, Arsenal’s reliance on players from Africa also came to an end. However, Wenger’s successors would continue this legacy by signing the children of African immigrants in London, such as Eddie Nketiah and Bukayo Saka.

Wenger also signed a number of North African players or players of North African descent, most notably Mohamed Elneny from Egypt, Marouane Chamakh from Morocco, and Samir Nasri from France. And, from South and Central America, players like Joel Campbell (Costa Rica) and the Brazilians, Gilberto Silva and Julio Baptista.

When Wenger signed players like Kanu, Lauren, Touré, and Éboué, English football was still distrustful of foreigners, especially players and coaches from outside Europe. African fans, watching via satellite television, recognized themselves in Wenger’s Arsenal (he was one of the first foreign coaches in the Premier League). Their accents, hairstyles, fashion, and joyful football (though when they needed to, they could also play a physical style) stood in stark contrast to the tactics of their opponents at other clubs. Wenger also seemed unfazed by African players flying off every two years for a month to play in the Africa Cup of Nations, further endearing him to African fans who felt disrespected by Europe’s top leagues, their clubs, and football managers when their native sons were denied the opportunity to represent their countries.

Today, the African legacy at Arsenal is felt more off the field than on. Among the popular “Fan TV” outlets on social media for English Premier League teams, those aimed at Arsenal fans are the most diverse. On YouTube, Kelechi, a Nigerian immigrant scientist and Arsenal fan, is now equally recognizable as Saka. Kelechi autotunes afropop songs to describe his mood before giving his match analysis on AFTV or, increasingly, on his own social media channels. That channel and its offshoots have done more to mainstream African participation in the World Cup and the Africa Cup of Nations among young Euro-American football supporters. All this has cemented the view of Arsenal as open, welcoming, and diverse, and above all as representing democracy, antiracism, and forward-looking values, something in short supply on the continent.

There is, therefore, a grim irony in the fact that the same club spent years (from 2018 until 2025) advertising one of Africa’s most efficient dictatorships through its “Visit Rwanda” sponsorship. Although Arsenal’s sleeve sponsorship agreement with Rwanda has now come to an end, the controversy surrounding the partnership left unresolved questions about the contradictory relationship between global football branding, authoritarian image-making, and the political aspirations of the new generation of African supporters who found an affinity and identity with the club.