When you hear that that something represents the best of Britain, treat it as nonsense. The phrase ‘best of British’ has been used to describe the Royal Navy’s new Astute-class nuclear submarine the HMS Agamemnon, as well as Waitrose’s pork loin medallions.

But turning things, people and institutions into flattering national allegories is addictive, and there’s one institution that pops up all the time: Arsenal football club.

Arsenal’s sophistication, its urbane nature, its diversity, is regularly cited as a good example of British multiculturalism. A current exhibition at UCL East, ‘Black Arsenal’, says that the club has a ‘unique’ relationship with black British culture. Arsenal’s cosmopolitanism is meant to, if not be representative of the country, be the best example of what Britain should be. Last week, while Suella Braverman was arguing that she shouldn’t identify as English, the New Statesman’s Oli Dugmore said simply ‘Ian Wright. Bukayo Saka.’

Wright and Saka, both Arsenal men, were and are brilliant footballers, and are definitely likeable people. But they aren’t necessarily typical of the average assimilation story, nor can their personalities be neatly slotted into a happy-clappy story of the reconciliation of liberalism and multiculturalism. They’re much stranger individuals than you might think.

Take Saka: he’s said before that his success is because ‘I just choose to put my faith in God’. He reads the Bible every night before bed, and said at the Qatar World Cup that ‘it is really important to have the presence of God in me all the time’. This would already put him out of step with a culturally secular modern Britain, but his denomination emphasises that point even more. 

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Saka was raised as a member of the congregation of the Kingsborough Centre in Uxbridge, which is part of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a Pentecostal church. Their doctrines are........

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