Claim: Metropolitan Police estimate 1.5 million attendees for Arsenal EPL victory parade
Source: Social media accounts
Verdict: False
Researched by Alfa Shaban
English Premier League (EPL) side Arsenal tasted league triumph for the 2025 / 2026 season, ending a 22-year drought. The Mikel Arteta-led team managed to clinch the prize after coming second for the previous three seasons.
When Arsenal arrived at Crystal Palace for their final league fixture, they were already champions because second-place Manchester City had drawn against Bournemouth days earlier meaning even if Arsenal lost at Palace, City would still not overtake them.
On May 24, Arsenal celebrated their title at Palace but the EPL trophy parade was postponed to May 31, 2026; a day after their Uefa Champions League (UCL) final against French side Paris Saint Germain (PSG) in Budapest.
Despite losing the UCL final to PSG on penalties, the Arsenal team returned to London from Budapest for their EPL trophy parade. Across social media platforms, images and videos from the parade were widely shared by attendees, sports accounts and news organizations.
A claim about the number of attendees at the parade gained popularity with popular accounts putting the figure at an estimated 1.5 million citing the Metropolitan Police.
“BREAKING: Metropolitan Police confirms that Arsenal’s parade is the biggest ever parade held in the country. Over 1.5 million people estimated,” The Touchline X account captioned a post that showed an aerial shot of the area around Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.
The post has been viewed over 3.7 million times, and it has 1.4 comments, 16,000 reposts and 87,000 likes. Other accounts made similar posts citing the Met Police and quoting the 1.5 million parade attendees figure (here, here, here, here, here.)
Did the Metropolitan Police put a figure to the number of attendees at the Arsenal parade?
Fact-Check
GhanaFact sent an email to the Metropolitan Police asking whether they had released any estimated figures on the parade attendees.
In a response to our inquiry, the Police denied putting out any figures, referring us instead to the club.
“This isn’t a figure we’ve put out, we won’t be providing an estimate on crowd numbers. I believe Arsenal have a figure so I’d suggest speaking to them,” Josh Coupe, Deputy Head of International Communications at the Metropolitan Police Service told GhanaFact.
GhanaFact observed that no credible news organization that reported on the parade cited the 1.5 million attendees data. Except for the Football Ground Guide website which quoted a figure of around a million attendees even though they did not explicitly cite the Metropolitan Police. Our email to Arsenal about the attendees data has yet to elicit a response.
On July 1, however, the Islington Council, the local government authority for the London Borough of Islington announced that over a million people had attended the parade. “With over a million people attending, it’s a major clean-up,” the Council wrote on X.
Verdict
The claim that the Metropolitan Police estimated a million and half attendees at the Arsenal trophy parade is False.
