A Conversation with Andrew Mangan: The Mind Behind Arseblog | OneFootball

Covering everything from how he built a loyal community to creating the first club-specific podcast in the footballing world, we sit down with Arseblog founder Andrew Mangan for a Q&A interview. 

Much to the annoyance of fans of rival Premier League clubs, there are an awful lot of Arsenal fans in the good old US of A. But being on the North American continent, so many miles and one ocean away from North London, one can’t help but feel occasionally disconnected from the day to day of the club: the inner workings, the minutiae, the rumor mill that comes from close physical proximity.

We don’t always get to stroll down to the Tollington for a pint. Instead we have to seek out our folks, wherever they might be. Wearing an Arsenal shirt in public tends to elicit questions from well-meaning yet uninitiated NPCs, such as “Are you a big fan of Emirates Airlines? A frequent flyer, maybe?”

While the rabid community of likeminded fans many of us desire might not be milling around the same city blocks as us, there’s a place online for Arsenal fans of all backgrounds to gather, celebrate, and commiserate.

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Andrew Mangan’s Arseblog has served as a guidepost and hub for Arsenal fandom the world over since its inception in February 2002. A kind of shibboleth for identifying kindred Arsenal spirits has emerged, as we roam around asking, almost as if it were an afterthought.

“Do you read Arseblog? Do you listen to the Arsecast?” Nearly every Arsenal enjoyer of discerning taste invariably responds: “Religiously.”

Mangan, along with a litany of high-profile Arsenal bloggers and journalists, have provided a one-stop shop for all things Arsenal to an ever-increasing array of fans around the world, helping daily readers feel just a little bit closer to the streets of North London, whether they live 10 or 10,000 miles away.

Mangan launched “The Arsecast,” in 2006, a groundbreaking, first-of-its-kind club-specific podcast, which seems especially revolutionary given the modern podcast ecosystem in which even the smallest clubs have dedicated broadcasters chatting about them into USB microphones.

He and a revolving cast of guests preview each match, do special episodes for new player transfers, and discuss everything from Arsenal’s Financial Fair Play standing, to the Emirates Stadium atmosphere, to Mikel Arteta’s tactical genius. The show has been a smashing success, boasting a wide-ranging listenership and winning myriad awards, including being named the Football Supporters’ Association’s Best Club Podcast in 2023.

The Arseblog empire has expanded to include news updates, specialist tactical columns from the likes of Phil Costa, Lewis Ambrose, and Tim Stillman, and spin-off podcasts. Stillman launched the Arsenal Women’s Arsecast in February of 2019, embracing the burgeoning field of women’s football with a gusto that other outlets have been slow or reluctant to emulate.

In 2014, Mangan and co-host James McNicholas debuted The Arsecast Extra, a companion podcast which analyzes and reviews nearly every Arsenal match in great detail. In the second half of each program, the duo answer listener questions which they cull from various social media platforms.

Viewing Arsenal from top to bottom, from the boardroom to the lowest of the youth levels and everywhere in between, Arseblog has built a reputation as an inclusive, measured oasis of Arsenal fandom, shining in the proverbial desert of shouty, click-bait peddlers, grumpy ex-player pundits, and AI-slop hucksters trafficking in transfer rumors and controversies usually invented from whole cloth.

Despite the success of Arseblog, Mangan remains a grounded figure. While he hobnobs on his show with the likes of Arsenal legend Ian Wright, he’ll post about his love for dogs, and even answer his doorbell during podcast episodes, accompanied by charmingly bespoke “doorbell music.”

Mangan’s modesty further sets Arseblog apart from modern-day internet culture in that the site has managed to completely eliminate advertising. The entire endeavor is funded by Patreon members, which the site offers for the humble sum of $6 per month.

Each April, the site donates 100% of its Patreon revenue to support both local and international charities, as well as running special merchandising campaigns with the goal of funding charitable work around the globe. In the past, the site has contributed to UNICEF, the Islington Food Bank, and notably, the Arsenal Foundation, which works to provide aid to people living at the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan.

Mangan took some time out from his busy schedule for an interview with us, discussing how he has created a community, balancing support and criticism of Arsenal, and how Arseblog avoided the toxic hot take culture that has plagued sports media.

Urban Pitch: How do you balance your two roles — being a fan, first of all, but also addressing Arsenal topics from a journalistic perspective?

Andrew Mangan: The way I would put it is that, despite the fact I have a qualification in journalism, I would not necessarily consider what I do journalism per se.

I think there’s a distinction to be made between what I do on Arseblog, and even on Arseblog News to an extent, and the team that we have there, versus traditional reporters, you might call them beat reporters, people who follow the club. James McNicholas is on that beat.

I think what my qualification did was give me the grounding in how to write about things in a certain way. But ultimately, what I do on Arseblog is essentially opinion pieces or reaction pieces to what’s going on the day before or what’s happening around the club, whatever that might be.

I think you can ground it in journalistic standards and ethics, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it is journalism per se.

With news, we occasionally break some news, and that’s not a case that we are an investigative organization. Sometimes we get information, and sometimes that’s worth a news story.

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A lot of the time, again with news, we are a secondary outlet in many ways. We are reporting the reporting, if that makes sense. I don’t know if you would necessarily say “aggregator,” because we still produce original content — our reports and ratings, stats, behind-the-scenes things like that.

So, I think there is a difference. But it’s been very, very useful to have an understanding of journalism and how journalism works in order to do what I’ve done for the last 24 years.

The Arsecast was the first club-specific podcast in the world of football. Did it come from the idea that you would do a radio show, or was it sort of commiserating with your buddies after a difficult loss? Where were the origins of that?

It was about becoming aware of podcasting as a concept, before anybody really knew what it was. This was back in 2006.

I’m spending time on the internet and I’m quite tech-savvy, I think. I’m interested in technology and developments like that. It occurred to me that basically the podcast was your own radio show.

You could do whatever you wanted. You could say what you want. Obviously, again, within reason. When you’re a music radio presenter like I was, you get a playlist and you’re told, “Play these two songs,” then you do a link, then you do the promo into this, then you take an ad break, then you play these songs, and so on.

So the idea to me that a podcast would be essentially just your own radio show that you could put out, do what you want, produce it however you like, make it into whatever you wanted in terms of segments and bits and bobs, was very appealing.

Because of the background that I had in radio, broadcasting, radio production, and all those kinds of things, I knew how to do it. I knew what to do, how to talk into a microphone, how to edit, and how to ultimately produce an MP3 file that was the show every week.

I think I was quite lucky in that sense. Now, if you want to start a podcast, it’s like, bang, go to one of the sites, record, and it’ll do all the work for you. It wasn’t the case back then. You had to do good work. So I was lucky in that I knew what to do.

And I think it is the first club-specific podcast in the football world. Now they’re everywhere. Why shouldn’t you start a podcast if you’ve got a favorite team and you want to talk about them? Whether it’s Premier League, whether it’s MLS, whether it’s the Maltese third division, who gives a shit? If that’s your passion, why shouldn’t you talk about it?

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With the direction things are going, with social media accounts and very algorithmic content producers, has it ever been a temptation for you to lean into that financial reward? How do you keep yourself so grounded in an internet environment that’s so clicks-based, ad-based, and algorithmic?

If you want to do something in the long term, it’s got to be based around honesty and integrity.

It’s also just kind of who I am. That would not be me. I could not pivot to ITK, where all of a sudden I’ve got all these transfer rumors. And I don’t have that information anyway. I could sit there and make it up like any other idiot, but what happens then? You’ve got a really short shelf life because ultimately you’re just proven to be an idiot.

I would feel very bad about my life if it was based around trying to get hits and likes on Twitter, on social media. That would be thoroughly depressing to me.

I think the fact as well is that because I started early with the blog and because I started early with the podcast, I got established. It didn’t happen overnight. Arseblog started in 2002, and we’re speaking in 2026. I’ve been there for the long haul.

I’m not going to do anything that will undermine that.

I feel like, and some people might disagree, that what we put out in the world is good quality stuff. It’s based on honesty. We’re not trying to be sensationalist. It doesn’t mean we don’t have strong opinions. Of course we do. But it’s how you express those opinions, I think, which is more important than ever these days.

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You can be angry, but you don’t have to be abusive. I think the internet has gone a little bit too far in that regard, on some platforms.

I think people think that unless you’re screaming at a camera, you don’t have any passion for the game or passion for the club or passion for what’s happened. And clearly that’s nonsense.

So I’ve never been tempted by that stuff.

Obviously, over the years, when we did run advertising on the site, we would get offers. Big offers. Five-figure offers, which is a lot of money, particularly when you’re in the building-something phase, to do pop-ups and autoplaying videos and those kinds of really grotty ads that cover the content. You’ve got to keep scrolling.

We got offered a lot of money to do those, and we always, always turned them down. Our advertising was really basic: at the top, at the side, and that was it. We had no ads in the content or anything like that.

I could get some short-term money in here. But in the long term, what’s the damage that that will do to the website, where people go, “I was trying to read Arseblog, and there was a pop-up, and then I clicked the pop-up, and the pop-up came back up?”

So it always felt very short-term to me. Yeah, we could get a big chunk of cash in the short term, but I think it would drive away your long-term audience.

Ultimately, I think that’s borne out, by the way. We’ve launched our Patreon. There are people on our Patreon who don’t want any of the extra content. They are just willing to pay for a website with no ads that gives them a clean reading experience. For them, that’s enough.

One of the hallmarks of Arseblog and the Arsecast has been your nuanced approach, which is what really resonates with people. It’s never described as sensationalist. Obviously, you’re a fan of the club, but you also serve as a voice for the fandom.

I’m recalling particularly the podcast that you did with James McNicholas immediately after the Thomas Partey news was broken. I think you both very eloquently expressed the frustration that the fandom as a whole was experiencing.

How did that feel for you, putting those ideas out into the world when you’re such a big fan of the club, but you’re also, in a way, journalistically speaking truth to power in your critique and criticism of the club?

Listen, I think that particular situation was very complicated. There were legal issues, which meant nobody could talk about that, even though everybody knew what was going on.

I think in the U.S. our libel laws are different. We were more free to speak about it, and a lot of people found that very hard to understand and would be saying, “Well, why aren’t you saying anything about this?”

Ultimately, the right thing is that justice is done and that nobody perverts the course of justice. If I, for example, said something about that case or those charges, that could undermine justice, either for the victims or however else that plays out. That would be completely wrong and irresponsible of me.

I felt at the time, and you heard the conversation that James and I had, that the club could and should have done things differently.

I think you can be a fan of a club or an institution and recognize that that institution is not perfect. Ultimately, there are people who represent that institution who sometimes get things wrong, in your opinion.

It doesn’t change the fact that you’re still a big fan of the club, but you can be critical of those decisions.

What I mean is I’m a supporter of Arsenal. I’m not a cheerleader.

When things go wrong on the pitch, I’ll talk about that. When things go wrong at board level, I’ll talk about that. When I feel the club have made wrong moves or done something that I think harms the reputation of the club, I’ll speak about that. I’ve got no problem with that.

At the same time, when there’s praise to be given, there’s praise to be given. When credit is due, it is given.

But when they get things wrong, I don’t really have any issue with talking about that. I think you can be measured, you can be honest, you can be angry, you can be all of those things, but you don’t have to lose the plot.

Thankfully, those kinds of situations don’t crop up too often. And I don’t think it damages my fandom, or causes any kind of issue between me and the club, or Arseblog and the club, or anything like that.

There are people who disagreed with what we said. But, to my mind, it was the right thing to do to talk about it, and the right thing to do to say what we said.

In the past few years, Arseblog has given a huge platform to the women’s team. Is that something you’re looking to give more bandwidth to in the future as well?

Yeah, I mean, we’ve committed quite a lot to that. Tim Stillman, who covers the Arsenal women, does an amazing job in that regard. It just seemed a natural thing to me.

Arsenal Football Club isn’t just the men. It’s not just the first team. It’s the women, it’s the youth teams, it’s the backroom stuff, every bit of the club. Every aspect of the club we’ll cover, to certain degrees.

The growth of women’s football sort of coincided with the coverage that we put in place well over 10 years ago, probably by this stage.

It’s not to say that we’re responsible for that, but I think the fact that we were there before most was important in how our coverage of Arsenal women is perceived, which I think is best in class.

The breadth and the consistency of the coverage is second to none. We’re very proud of that. We’re very proud of the work that Tim and the team do on Arsenal women, and it’s something that we will continue to do.

If we can develop that further, like we can develop any of the coverage that we do, then yes, definitely, we’ll be open to that.

Do you have a future in mind for Arseblog and the Arsecast? Is there a particular direction of growth in your mind, or is it just full steam ahead with what you’ve been doing?

I think just sort of full steam ahead. You’ve always got to be aware of any developments that there might be in terms of the technology and what people want or how people are consuming the content.

I’m not really a strategist. I just try stuff, and when it works, it works, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

So I don’t think really about, “How do we get to this? How do we get to that?” My focus is almost entirely on ensuring that we put out the best possible content. With that, the growth sort of happens organically, or the audience comes with us regardless of what platform we’re on.

So, yeah, I don’t think about it. Maybe I’m a bit reactive in that regard, but I think that’s probably the best way to go.

The idea that, right, I’m going to sit down and we’re going to try and achieve this goal this year, that doesn’t really work for me. It is not how my brain works.

Interview lightly edited for clarity and brevity.