Spike Lee in the Bleachers

Alexandre Song and Spike Lee

The influence of pro sport upon Spike Lee as both a man and a filmmaker has been well-documented, and is richly confirmed by his very latest movie project with Kobe Bryant. But did you know of Lee's consuming passion for English soccer? His biographer Kaleem Aftab has witnessed it at close quarters, and shares this close-up portrait of an unlikely 'Gooner', taken in London on the night of April 3 2008.

Spike Lee and I are sitting in a limousine on the way to the Emirates Stadium in north London, there to watch Arsenal Football Club's biggest game of the 2007-08 season. It's the European Champions League quarter-final first-leg tie against Liverpool FC. After Lee sent me a text that morning asking me to the match I had to make a hasty change of plan for the evening: I couldn't believe my luck. For him, tonight's entertainment is a detour on his trip back to New York from Rome, where he's been recording five lines of ADR for his upcoming Italian World War II picture Miracle at St Anna.

Lee's love affair with basketball — specifically the New York Knicks — is well known. The book Best Seat in the House (Crown, 1997) recounts his remarkable descent from being a kid in the cheapest seat in the roof of Madison Square Garden to his current premier position in the most expensive courtside spot. Of course, movie stars watching basketball games are now almost as much a part of the event — or the increasingly important TV spectacle — as the players themselves. Lee, though, gets immense pride out of being to the Knicks what Jack Nicholson is to the L.A Lakers.

But above all Lee is a sports fan, and when he's outside the US English football is his game of choice. Arsenal — to whom he loves referring by the popular fan's moniker 'The Gooners' — are his team. Tonight as he chats effusively about their starting 11 he's proudly sporting the club's latest replica shirt. Even as we sit stuck in London traffic, Lee's excitement at his first visit to their massive new stadium is writ large on his face. So I'm surprised when he mentions that only last night he was at the Roma v Manchester United game — 'Man U' being Arsenal's chief adversary in the English league for the last decade.

Football is not just governing Lee's playtime: as well as attending matches he is assistant coach to his son's soccer team. And 'the beautiful game' is now inspiring his film career too. 'I'm going to shoot a documentary on Kobe Bryant this weekend', he tells me casually. 'It's going to be in the style of the Zidane film?'

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006, dir. Douglas Gordon & Phlippe Parreno) was made in the same style as 1962's Garincha, Alegria do Pova (Garincha: Joy of the People, directed by Joaquim Pedro do Povo) and Helmuth Costard's George Best: Soccer as Never Before (1970). In all three films the camera tracks a sole player on the football field with the single-minded determination of a groupie trying to snag a rock star; the lens never veers away, even when said player doesn't have the ball. Zidane departed from its antecedents by featuring a musical score by the Scottish band Mogwai; Costard was content with the natural ambient noise of the stadium.

Emirates Stadium

'I think basketball is better suited to this type of film than football', enthuses Lee. 'The players have more touches of the ball, they're more involved in points-scoring. We're going to have 15 cameras on Bryant during the game and the lead cameraman is going to be Matty Libatique. But I'm not just going to show Bryant on court — I'm going to start filming him from his home, and we're going to follow him as he goes through his pre-match ritual. We've even got permission from the league and [Lakers manager] Phil Jackson to go into the dressing room at half time.'

As Lee is painting his vision it dawns on me that I'm getting to observe a celebrity fan go through his own pre-match ritual. Next, Spike wants a low-down on how the Arsenal players have been performing recently. Despite the departure of his friend and Arsenal goal-scoring legend Thierry Henry to Barcelona, Spike has stayed familiar with the new signings and the current crop of players. I must admit I'd thought that once Henry left Arsenal, Lee would stop being such a keen supporter, but like every true fan he's put his club before the individual. I'd done him a disservice, forgetting that years of practice watching the Knicks under-perform must have got Spike used to sporting disappointment.

The traffic is a bottleneck so we decide to walk the final mile to the stadium. Outside this impressive 60,000-seater we're greeted by Arsenal staff and are given a tour of the immaculate new facilities. I get chills up my back as we walk through the players' tunnel, past the Arsenal and Liverpool team crests, into the middle of the pitch. An hour before kick-off the stadium is only just starting to fill, but out there one gets a rush of adrenalin that must be some fraction of that which courses through the players just before they enter the fray.

The recent purchase of Manchester United by the Glazier family and of Liverpool by Tom Hicks and George Gillett — owners of prominent American sporting franchises — has highlighted the sudden influx of interest in English football from across the Atlantic. In US sports the importance of celebrity fans has been recognised for quite some time and now it seems that English Premier teams — especially the dominant 'big four' of Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea — are fighting it out to officially be the so-called 'F.C Hollywood'.

We retire to the Players Lounge where Spike has to do a brief interview that will appear in the next Arsenal match-day program. In all the time I've spent with Spike, he's never more relaxed and content than when he's at a big game. He tells the club reporter about the game in Rome last night but is quick to add — like any real Gooner — that he hates Man U and was supporting Roma. (It's all reminiscent of the baiting Jon Savage gets in Do The Right Thing for wearing a Boston Celtics shirt in Brooklyn.) I laugh aloud, and the reporter admits he's not allowed to print fan badinage of that ilk in the official program.