Arsenal firm
Groups of football hooligans
The Arsenal firms are groups of football hooligans who are fans of the Arsenal Football Club. There are two Arsenal firms, The Gooners (a mutation of the club's nickname, The Gunners) and The Herd. The Gooners were a violent football hooligan firm mainly active in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the name is now used by most non-hooligan Arsenal supporters.
The Herd was mainly active between the late 1970s and early 1990s, it still exists. The Herd are a hooligan gang. The main rivals of The Herd in the 1980s and in the present day are West Ham's I.C.F., Tottenham Hotspur's Yid Army, Chelsea's Headhunters and Millwall's F-Troop (later known as the Millwall Bushwackers). Although The Herd was mainly considered to be a hooligan gang, a few members were not physically violent. Dainton Connell (aka Dainton "The Bear" Cornnell) was considered a folk hero by many Arsenal fans, but died in a car crash in 2007, with 3,000 mourners attending his funeral including several ex players. During the 1980s, Connell was highly active in an Arsenal FC's hooligan "firm" and was a "main face" amongst the ranks.
“Arsenal firm” enters the record as groups of football hooligans. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Arsenal, firm and Groups can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4796419. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arsenal firm” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.