Sixers

It Feels Like a Violation that Joel Embiid Supports Both Real Madrid and Arsenal

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: May 20th, 2026 · 9:47 AM EDT

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Arsenal won the Premier League on Tuesday afternoon when Manchester City stumbled to a 1-1 draw with Bournemouth. It’s the Gunners’ first title since 2004, when they didn’t lose a single game with the super-stacked “Invincibles Squad” that featured all-timers like Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, and Gilberto Silva.

This resulted in a tweet from Joel Embiid:

IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING… PROUD TO BE A GOONER #COYG

— Joel Embiid (@JoelEmbiid) May 19, 2026

This was news to me because I thought Embiid was a Real Madrid fan. You’d see the occasional Hala Madrid! on his Twitter feed when Real was playing a big game, or a seemingly-cryptic tweet that Sixers fans had no idea was about soccer.

But apparently he supports both Real Madrid and Arsenal at the same time, which, on the surface, seems reasonable. One plays in Spain and the other plays in England. He is from Cameroon and doesn’t have a local rooting interest in Europe. So you’d think, “well he’s got an English team and a Spanish team,” two different leagues, though something about this is bothering me. Probably because Real Madrid is a top 2 team in La Liga and Arsenal is a top 5 team in England, even though it took them 20+ years to win the league again. They were always challenging for the title and they were winning FA Cups and going far in the Champions League. Arsenal is a big club in the same way that Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern, and PSG are big clubs.

So here’s the question –

If we’ve spent years killing the American frontrunner guy who likes the Yankees, Lakers, and Cowboys, then how is Embiid’s fandom any different? Isn’t he just riding the best teams in Europe? Why didn’t he pick Burnley as his EPL team and Elche as his La Liga team? Why does nobody ever pick the teams that suck? And what would he do if Arsenal and Real Madrid ran into each other in the Champions League? Does he cheer for a draw?

Here’s the problem: When the Premier League became big over here, and ESPN and other outlets were writing “how to choose a soccer team” stories, most ended up picking Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool, etc. All of the big teams. Some even picked Tottenham. Why? No clue. But it created this lame and flimsy scene in which people went bandwagon jumping to the world’s biggest teams despite having absolutely no cultural or geographic connection to those clubs. “I’ve been a lifelong Chelsea fan since 2017!” Give me a break. Stuff like that has always been derided in American sporting culture, Philadelphia specifically. Look at all of these stupid Cowboys cockroaches from New Jersey who couldn’t point to Texas on a map and should have been riding out the hard years supporting the Birds, like real fans. Instead, they gravitated to Dallas because they were on television and won a bunch of Super Bowls.

They are, and always will be, rat bastards.

A lot of younger fans these days have a “live and let live” type of sports fan mentality, which is whatever. It’s soft, but that’s how they are. They cry about “gatekeeping” and other such concepts, so maybe it’s just a generational shift we’re experiencing. Personally, I think the guy with the Alabama hat and Golden State Warriors jersey who lives in Iowa should be mercilessly crushed for being the frontrunning poser that he is. I don’t think his situation is THAT much different than Joel Embiid picking two of the best soccer teams in Europe to support, but if you have a rebuttal, please go ahead…

EDIT – I wanna say one more thing. I think the biggest misconception in sports is thinking that you have to have a rooting interest to enjoy a game. Why do we HAVE to pick a Premier League team? Does the Greek basketball fan HAVE to pick an NBA team? Can’t you just watch the games and appreciate the highest level of athletic performance?