adidas and Arsenal just dropped the club’s new home kit and for every shirt purchased directly through the Gunners, £5 will go to the Arsenal Foundation to support neighbouring areas and projects in the community.

Arsenal’s charity arm has a long and proud history of working to support the club’s local community, delivering sport, social and education programmes to more than 5,000 individuals every single week. The 22/23 home kit can authentically claim to be part of the fabric of the community.

The new home shirt drops in iconic Arsenal red and takes inspiration from home kits of the 1990s. The shirt features a buttoned collar to give the fit a classic feel, while a lightning bolt design taken from iconic jerseys of the past accents the shirt. The men’s team will debut the shirt in their final Premier League game of the season against Everton.

“We’re extremely proud of the work we’ve been doing to bring our community together and support the lives of people in our local area for more than 35 years,” said Freddie Hudson, Head of Arsenal in the Community. “People are the heartbeat of our community and the £5 donation from our home shirt sales will provide vital support for the local projects that serve our diverse community in north London so well.”

“The last couple of years have been especially tough and the impact continues to be felt, but it’s amazing what we can achieve when we all come together to support each other. We continue to draw inspiration from those who make the Arsenal family so special, and we’re thrilled to be able to give a little back in this unique way.”

Ensuring the community thread runs through the campaign, players like starboys Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe are pictured wearing the new kit while engaging with local community groups. One of the core members of the Arsenal family – both on and off the pitch – is defender Lotte Wubben-Moy.

The born and bred Londoner, recently made a long-term commitment to actively work with Arsenal in the Community as part of her re-signing contract. Over the coming years, Wubben-Moy and the organisation will work together to develop an impactful programme which uses the power of football to help girls and young women build self-confidence, develop communication skills and try new activities on and off the pitch.

As part of Arsenal’s latest kit launch, VERSUS caught up with LWB3 to talk about the importance of community, the club’s latest shirt drop and why she loves to give back to the club that helped shape her.

VERSUS: If you had to describe ‘community’ in one word, what would it be?

Lotte Wubben-Moy: Life.

Why is it so important to you that you give back to your local community?

In this humongous world, it is so easy to get carried away and forget about where you came from or what contributed to your journey. But playing for Arsenal – in my hometown – has allowed me to remain connected to my community.

Amongst a lot of the struggles and obstacles I see around me on the daily, I think most prevalent to me is seeing first-hand how energetic and hopeful the young girls and boys are, who all live locally to me. When you see this, it’s hard not to want to make the community a better place for them.

A £5 donation from every shirt sold is massive! How proud are you of your childhood club that they’re the ones spearheading a campaign like this?

We need to shout about this from the rooftops! I hope other clubs will jump on this too and do something similar.

What’s your favourite feature of the new home shirt?

The vibrant red. I love the little features too, they’re so intricate, but every Gunner knows a shirt is made great by the colour that runs deep. And that’s only ever going to be red for us.

What’s your favourite Arsenal shirt…ever made?

The 2001 SEGA gold shirt.

Talk to us a little bit about the types of community-led initiatives you’d like to be involved in. What do you see your role as specifically?

It’s important with community work to give it the time and energy it deserves. Obviously, that is hard for me because I have to balance my responsibilities as a professional footballer. But I’m not here to just add my name to an initiative and move on. I want to give what I can, to whatever it is I am involved in.

Right now, that is focusing on the community programme that I’ll be running in collaboration with Arsenal in the Community starting next year. We’ve got some exciting things happening that I can’t wait to put into action for the kids of Islington, Hackney and Camden.

What do you hope the wider implications are for a charitable campaign like this one? Hopefully other clubs will follow in Arsenal’s footsteps like you said earlier!

When charitable campaigns become visually active, like this with a shirt for example, it draws more attention to the cause and makes it more exciting. It creates hype. Hype means trends, and trends imply that others will jump on it too and do something similar. I hope that is the case in the Premier League, with other clubs, I really do.

But I mean, for how many years have Arsenal in the Community been leading the way with community projects! Just because it’s not been visually pushed, like on a shirt this time round, it means the whole world doesn’t know about it even though they should! That’s what is great about this shirt, now everyone can know!

Maybe it would be cool to add a feature onto the shirt that says, “Arsenal in the Community” too – that would be cool! We’d draw even more attention to our community and the work we’re doing in it that way.

The new Arsenal home kit will be released from today with £5 from every new home shirt bought directly through Arsenal ahead of the new season going to the Arsenal Foundation to support local community projects. For more information, please visit arsenaldirect.arsenal.com

‍