James Clifford Kent’s first foray into photography started in Havana. It was 2004; he was 20 and had just landed a teaching job at the Universidad de La Habana, where he lived with a Cuban family. “I walked into the classroom during a blackout, and everyone was dancing,” he recalls. “I fell in love with the place.” He’d brought a camera with him, a gift from his mum, a former NHS nurse who wanted pictures and updates as proof that he was doing alright. Before long, he was the household’s unofficial photographer, shooting birthdays, weddings, quinceañeras and the daily life unfolding around them. 

Every evening he played futsal barefoot on the street, where they called him yuma (foreigner) and where he was, as far as he could tell, the only Arsenal fan in the neighbourhood. “The internet was terrible, so following the club from Cuba was a struggle,” he says. “I read Andrew Mangan’s Arseblog religiously whenever I could get online […] I was an instant fan and first wrote to Andrew from Havana in 2004.” 

That email sparked a friendship that has lasted more than two decades. Over the same period, Kent’s photography developed from a way of documenting people around him into a career exploring culture, health and social change, while his devotion to Arsenal stayed constant in the background. When the club finally ended its 22-year wait for another Premier League title, those two worlds collided. “There was my life as a photographer and this parallel life following Arsenal, with all the history, friendships and waiting that came with it. The 22 felt like a natural way to bring those things together.” 

The title arrived on the night of 19 May, and Arsenal didn’t even have to play. Manchester City drew 1-1 at Bournemouth, leaving Mikel Arteta’s side four points clear with one game to go, and that was that. It ended a wait that reached back to Arsène Wenger’s Invincibles in 2003/04, making it the first league title a whole generation of young supporters had ever seen. Celebrations rippled across North London and stretched into the early hours. 12 days later, less than 24 hours after losing the Champions League final to Paris Saint-Germain on penalties in Budapest, the squad took the trophy around Islington on an open-top bus, in a parade that drew more than a million fans. Red smoke from thousands of flares hung over the streets, and people clung to bus stops, lampposts and trees to get a look.

Kent, though, calls the night itself a “blur”. His daughter had just gone to sleep, and he wanted to drive to North London, but it was a school night. In the morning, they danced in the kitchen instead, and he told her there’d been a party while she slept. What followed in the days after was, as he puts it, “this monumental outpouring”. He adds, “We’d come so close so many times, with those consecutive second-place finishes. Each time, that sense of growing expectation would disappear. Brutal. Then, when it finally happened, there was almost a sense of disbelief that it was happening, and I felt a responsibility to capture that.”

The result is The 22, a 160-page photo book produced by Arseblog and Yuma Studios. Alongside Kent’s photography, it features an account of the 2025/26 season by Mangan and a foreword by former Arsenal striker and lifelong supporter Ian Wright. Its 76 images move between monochrome, duotone and colour, capturing the roaring scenes in North London which Kent says “became the centre of everything”. “The stadium had a magnetic pull, drawing people back from all over the world to that relatively small patch of the capital. You could feel it in the streets and on the underground – trains packed with supporters, euphoric fans flooding out onto the streets. It felt like a proper moment, and you could sense the weight of everything that had built up to it.”

You can see that energy in the pictures, and it’s often found in the smallest gestures. In one frame, a crowd howls towards the camera with their arms thrown skyward, and in another, a fan stands apart from the noise, pulling their Arsenal shirt up to their mouth as if they still can’t believe what they’re witnessing. While some photographers captured the parade from balconies, rooftops and helicopters, Kent chose to be in the thick of it. “You have to be patient, read the environment and allow things to happen,” he says. “Making pictures is an encounter, a kind of dance. It depends on attention, rhythm and trust. It’s about bodies moving through space, and responding to what’s unfolding in front of you rather than trying to impose something on it.” It’s an approach that Wright picks up on in his foreword: “you can tell he wasn’t taking pictures as a bystander; he’s lived it all as an Arsenal fan, too.” 

A few moments have stayed with Kent, particularly those involving younger fans. Outside a pub on Holloway Road, a bare-chested boy with “Godspeed” tattooed on his chest was “thrashing about” as a “wrecking ball of energy” while those around him hugged, laughed and cried. “He felt like a living embodiment of everything a football season puts you through, playing out right there on the street.” There was also a teenager perched on a fence in the sun, who Kent had stood next to for hours. He was staring silently into the bedlam, until he turned and said: “This is the best day of my life.” 

“The younger fans had inherited all the rituals, the history, the near misses and those consecutive second-place finishes without ever knowing what actually winning the league felt like,” Kent says. “For them, this was something entirely new. At the same time, you had older supporters who’d waited decades celebrating alongside them, grabbing one another, almost checking that what they were feeling was real. I found that generational crossover really moving.”

Football is something handed down, kind of like a recipe or a dodgy knee. It arrives in a kid’s first replica shirt, in songs learned on a parent’s shoulders, in a seat that’s been in the family longer than anyone can remember. “Football is never really just football,” says Kent. “Its meaning lives in the friendships, rituals, shared histories and communities that grow around it. You can find yourself standing next to someone you’ve never met, from a completely different background, and still understand exactly what they’re feeling.” Kent adds, “These were some of the easiest photographs I’ve ever made. There was no shortage of emotion, connection or energy. It was everywhere you looked and I’d never witnessed anything quite like it. As Wrighty says in the foreword, it was ‘simply pure joy and love for Arsenal’.”