Language is always evolving. “Nonplussed” is now used as an antonym of its original meaning. “Woke,” initially intended to describe awareness of America's systemic oppression of Black people, has been twisted into a dog-whistle pejorative for any children’s book or Marvel movie with a nonwhite character—or any concept that makes one specific Canadian psychologist cry.
And sometimes language can change in completely unintentional but nonetheless creative ways. For example, a word meant for a soccer team's supporters can morph into forum slang, only to further devolve into a term meant to reference enthusiastically degenerate chronic masturbators.
In January of 2020, I chose to be a supporter of Arsenal. This decision came after a lifetime of watching the English Premier League and the Champions League over the shoulder of my father, a longtime recreational soccer player and admirer of former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. I wanted to have some skin in these matches, not only while watching with my dad but with my rec soccer teammates, several of whom are Arsenal supporters.
Self-selecting into this fandom granted me perks, like access to several (OK, three) Arsenal-focused group chats. When I would catch a game at a bar in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, acclaimed director Spike Lee would appear in his reserved section to cheer on the club, since the pub was right around the corner from his film production company. Equally cool benefits, of course.
Founded in 1886, Arsenal Football Club has been known as the Gunners for over a century. The team’s crest features a cannon, and its first players worked at a munitions factory. The nickname makes sense when you trace it. Through linguistic evolution, Arsenal's supporters have become known as the Gooners. According to the team, this originated from Herbert Chapman, who managed the club in the 1930s, before the club officially embraced the term for fans in the ‘60s. Across the following decades, “Gooner” was used to describe hooligans, especially one violent Arsenal firm which adopted the name. These days, it’s a much tamer descriptor, used to refer to any supporter of the club.
Well, it was tame, until an internet phenomenon gave it new meaning. (For maximum effect, feel free to read the next few sentences in the voice of Ice-T’s character on Law & Order: SVU.) “Gooning” is a subculture focused on diabolically prolonged bouts of masturbation. A practitioner is known as a “gooner,” and the location in which they do this is called a “goon cave.” A 2023 Vice article places the origins of gooning—“an extended edging session marked by mindlessness, loss of control, and total surrender”—as early as 2017, though it didn’t seem to spread into the mainstream until recently. Because of this unholy new definition, it’s now unintentionally funny when, say, Spike Lee tells Vanity Fair that his local Arsenal pub is ideal “[i]f you want to watch a game and you’re a Gooner.” Besides, if any team’s fans were going to be associated with off-putting serial jerkoffs, wouldn’t it be the Dallas Cowboys?
The trend surfaced in magazines, tabloids, and advice columns, including coverage in Men’s Health, the New York Post, and Slate. “Today, there are plenty of dedicated websites, communities, subreddits, forums, and media designed for gooning,” read a Mashable explainer from March of 2024. “We are all gooners here.”
We are not all gooners here—not like that, anyway. All of this is very unfortunate for the original Gooners, as well as anyone generally concerned with how some of humanity spends its time. But out of morbid curiosity, I spoke to several people who were aware of both communities, to see how they’ve managed with the lexical update.
Roger Feeley-Lussier, a writer and musician who lives in Massachusetts, was introduced to Arsenal by his wife. She pitched the club to him as “the Red Sox of soccer.” After NBC purchased the rights to broadcast EPL matches in 2013, it became much easier for both of them to watch. “I was hooked from there,” Feeley-Lussier said.
The family’s Arsenal support is serious. During their honeymoon in 2018, Feeley-Lussier and his wife visited North London to watch Arsenal wallop West Ham in a thrilling 4-1 victory, in which the Gunners scored three goals after the 80th minute. He’s also attended exhibition matches in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and has taken his daughters to several games.
Feeley-Lussier remembered exactly when he learned that “Gooner” didn’t just mean “Arsenal fan” anymore. On Dec. 18, 2021, he said, he posted a photo of his daughter and wife on Instagram, captioning the photo with “my two favorite Gooners.” A friend then sent him a direct message along the lines of “Yo, ‘Gooner’ is someone addicted to porn. Update your lingo, bruh.”
“Couldn’t ‘Yankees’ also be a masturbatory term?” Feeley-Lussier asked, in a somewhat exasperated tone. There’s a germ of truth there, but people don’t say “Yankees” like that. Ultimately he acknowledged that the coincidence is “objectively funny,” although he didn’t find it surprising. (When Feeley-Lussier asked his wife if she wanted to comment, she laughed and then declined.)
Lifetime Arsenal supporters find the coincidence less amusing. Ryan Gaur, a writer based in London, said he was an Arsenal fan before he was born. Growing up in Birmingham, he inherited his support through his father, and “was predestined to suffer through supporting this club.” He could recall his dad yelling “C’MON YOU GOONERS” at the television when he was a kid. Within the last year, Gaur came across the new definition, and his attitude was resigned: Why us?
Gaur said he thinks twice whenever he sees the term now. “I want to block off the part of my brain that knows its new meaning,” he told me. He’s attended a bunch of Arsenal Women Football Club matches, where he’s heard the crowd’s Gooner chants, and he can’t help but giggle. “I kinda hate that I’m cursed with this knowledge.”
It’ll be an uphill battle to reclaim the word, Gaur predicted, but he doesn’t want to abandon the word’s history with the football club. We both shared the mission to keep our dads blissfully ignorant about the other kind of gooning for as long as possible.
Gooner awareness—of both types—is global. Paolo, a 24-year-old who requested I use only his first name, is a dedicated Bukayo Saka defender from the Philippines who found his way to Arsenal through its unlicensed representation in a Pro Evolution Soccer video game for PlayStation 2. He was only 11 when he realized this team was Arsenal, and he’d wake up to watch match highlights because of the time-zone difference.
In the Philippines, basketball is a far more popular sport than soccer. Because of this, as well as the Dutch striker Robin van Persie leaving Arsenal for Manchester United in 2012, Paolo wouldn’t return to watching his beloved club until nearly a decade later. Holed up during the pandemic, he got back into Arsenal while the club was in a period of rebuilding, though the roster was stacked with young talent.
“While it may not sound appealing to most, I just absolutely love supporting a project that looks like it could prove haters wrong in a few years,” Paolo told me in an email. That season, Arsenal finished in fifth place, but Paolo found this disappointing conclusion just solidified his love for the club more than any other time in his life.
As a member of Gen Z, Paolo was innately familiar with the brain-rot humor of gooners and gooning. He saw the terms being used “only by those porn-addicted communities who try to overload their videos with multiple sexual clips in a single video.” But recently, he said, “these terms went from being sexual-deviant terminology to mainstream Gen Z skibidi toilet sigma lingo.” To his point, “brain rot” is the 2024 Oxford word of the year.
If all that makes complete sense to you, please remember to get some fresh air today. Still, a Google Trends search supports Paolo’s categorization. He said he thought the terms “gooner” and “gooning” have stuck around in part because the words sound very funny. It’s also ripe for material when the two worlds collide: Paolo recalled when actor Anne Hathaway’s clandestine support for Arsenal was covered by The Guardian, a British newspaper. “Anne Hathaway is a secret Gooner and now her reinvention is complete,” the newspaper tweeted, to confusion and amusement.
Since not everyone is necessarily up to speed with the latest low-quality internet joke, Paolo theorized, it probably wouldn’t affect that many people. “It’s so unserious, but at the same time, it’s just amazing how one person’s usage of language can affect another’s life even in very small ways,” he said. His advice to both Gooners and gooners was to “use the words you want to use, even if it sounds stupid. It just feels so much better to be able to say what you want (as long as you're not hurting anyone), even if the world might judge you for it.”
The proliferation of unsavory gooning references makes sense in the broader societal context. As Twitter continues to deteriorate under the ownership of Elon Musk, 4chan language has leaked more into the public pool, to the detriment of all involved. Robert Jones, CEO and co-owner of Goonhammer, runs one of the largest websites dedicated to the popular battle strategy game Warhammer 40,000, though it covers other games as well. Jones says the website, a worker-owned collective with around 40 owners, has over 2 million monthly readers. But the site’s name has nothing to do with Arsenal or self-scrimmaging.
“This goes back to old internet lore,” Jones said, “and I feel like an asshole even saying those words.” The “Goon” in Goonhammer is a reference to Something Awful, an influential shitposting forum where members were referred to as “goons.” There, the connotation was “being a hired goon, thug, or just a general brazen idiot,” Jones explained.
Real-life meetups of Something Awful posters were called “goon meets,” and projects were called “goon projects.” Goonhammer was a Goon project. The site considered a name change in 2020, but ownership decided to keep the original name, since a better one was not immediately available. (Jones is not an Arsenal fan; he roots for the Houston Dynamo, his local MLS squad.)
“Here we are, fuckin’ four years later with the name ‘Goonhammer,’ and it just sucks,” Jones said.
The Online Gooner, a forum for the longest-running Arsenal fanzine, did not respond to a request for comment. The Gooners Pod, an Arsenal podcast, also did not respond to a request for comment; neither did The Chronicles of a Gooner, also an Arsenal podcast. For those who wish to steer clear of all kinds of Gooners until the situation cools down, there are plenty of other Arsenal fan sites without any misleading connotations, like Arseblog.
