For a while it seemed Arsenal had turned finishing second into a branch of philosophy. Every spring came with the same arguments. Progress. Expected goals. Youngest squad in the league. Trust the manager. Then Manchester City would win another title, somebody on television would call Arsenal “naive”, and the season would disappear into the compost heap with the others.
Twenty-two years is a long time in English football. Long enough for a stadium to be demolished and replaced. Long enough for children carried into Highbury on their fathers’ shoulders to become middle-aged men muttering at televisions in pubs near Holloway Road. Arsenal won the league in 2004 without losing a match. Since then they had become something stranger. A giant institution carrying itself with the nervous energy of a club half its size.
They had to make do with subpar players, watch their rivals take their best ones. See Manchester United create history, Chelsea and Manchester City spend their way to triumphs. All while Arsene Wenger and Arsenal were sentenced to mediocrity, to finance a new home.
But Arsenal were never truly bad in those years. They were merely haunted. Wenger’s late period drifted into inertia. Good patches, good transfers, were followed by injuries, bad decisions and the infamous #Wengerout plane flying over the Emirates encompassed all that was wrong with the club. It needed new blood.
Unai Emery looked overwhelmed by the scale of the job within months. A great start, a run to the Europa League final. But his reign ended the same way that final did. In humiliation.
Then came Mikel Arteta, hired in December 2019 with no senior managerial experience and a vocabulary that sounded borrowed from management seminars and expensive coffee shops.
At first, he looked like another bright assistant who had mistaken intensity for authority.
People don’t realise how ugly parts of his reign were. They remember the FA Cup in 2020 because trophies clean up memory. They forget Arsenal sitting fifteenth in December that same year. They forget Willian wandering around the pitch like a man looking for his parked car. The horror show at the back with Shkodran Mustafi, the multiple penalties given away by David Luiz, and the midfield’s inability to stand in the face of any sort of pressure.
They forget supporters demanding Arteta’s dismissal after losses to Burnley, Everton and Wolves. There were long stretches where Arsenal looked coached within an inch of their lives and somehow still incoherent. There were longer nights where Arsenal looked hapless, played dreadful football and got no results to back themselves.
The club persisted anyway. That was unusual enough in modern football to feel almost suspicious. English clubs speak endlessly about “projects” but sack managers at the first sign of discomfort. Arsenal kept Arteta through the embarrassment. Through the sterile football. Through the endless social media clips of him crouching theatrically in technical areas. Through the accusations that the club had become more interested in drone footage and slogans than winning anything meaningful.
And there was ridicule. Endless ridicule.
“Trust the process” became a punchline because Arsenal supporters made the mistake of speaking publicly before they had actually won anything. Football punishes that sort of thing. Rival fans dined out for years on the idea that Arsenal were emotionally fragile. Bottlers. Too soft. Too pretty. Too eager to celebrate fourth place and “good performances”. Every near miss sharpened it.
The cruelest seasons were the recent ones because they offered evidence that Arsenal really were close enough to touch it. In 2022-23 they led the table for most of the year and collapsed. Last season they lost only five league matches and still finished behind Manchester City. There is something psychologically exhausting about chasing a team coached by Pep Guardiola. City turned title races into accounting exercises. Win thirteen in a row. Win fifteen. Apply pressure until everyone else suffocates.
Arsenal usually suffocated around April.
This time they almost let it slip as well, but as fate would have it. Their resilience kept them alive.
There was no grand aesthetic revolution either, which annoyed some romantics. Arsenal won this title the way hardened teams tend to win titles. Narrow victories. Ugly corners. Controlled games. Set pieces delivered with the joyless efficiency of tax collection. Arteta’s Arsenal became colder this season. Less interested in admiration. More interested in accumulation.
Declan Rice represented the shift perfectly. Arsenal spent £105 million on him in 2023 and were mocked for it. Then he became the emotional centre of the side. Not flashy. Not poetic. Just relentless. The sort of footballer who treats every second ball as a personal insult. And his, “It’s not done.” That will go down in North London folklore.
Around him the squad finally looked complete instead of promising. Bukayo Saka stopped being a talented boy carrying the emotional burden of the club and became something harder. William Saliba stayed fit and formed something incredible with Gabriel. Something unforgettable. With David Raya behind them, they sometimes felt invincible.
Martin Odegaard gave Arsenal control without turning matches into exhibitions of decorative passing. Jurrien Timber returned after injury and gave the back line a calmness Arteta values almost to the point of obsession. Viktor Gyokeres, mocked and put through the ringer, proved to be the final piece of the puzzle.
And then there were the ghosts. Granit Xhaka left before the title arrived.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had already gone into acrimony after being stripped of the captaincy. Alexandre Lacazette departed during the years when Arsenal still seemed trapped between identities. Aaron Ramsdale lost his place after helping drag the club back into relevance. Gabriel Jesus became another reminder that sentiment has a short shelf life in elite football.
Even some supporters who stayed through the drought seemed unsure how to react when Manchester City finally slipped. On Tuesday night, Arsenal players gathered at the training ground while City drew with Bournemouth. There were celebrations at pubs around Islington. Fans climbed traffic lights outside the Emirates. Ian Wright was mobbed in the street. Somewhere, no doubt, a middle-aged man drank a commemorative lager that expired during Boris Johnson’s premiership.
By 5am, Declan Rice, Bukayo Saka, Jurrien Timber and Eberechi Eze were posing outside the Emirates Stadium. Saka filmed Timber beside a blacked-out Premier League trophy installation waiting to light up. “Twenty-two years,” Saka said. “They’re not laughing anymore.”
The line mattered because the laughter had become part of Arsenal’s identity. For years they were football’s most online club. Too emotional after victories. Too miserable after defeats. Every documentary clip and every premature celebration was stored away for future mockery. Even Myles Lewis-Skelly, still only 19, understood the script when he held a champagne bottle and said: “They called us bottlers. And now we’re holding the bottle.”
Crude, yes. Effective too.
Arteta deserves enormous credit for surviving long enough to see this happen. That sounds obvious but it is not. Most clubs would have sacked him before he reached this point. Many supporters wanted exactly that. There were moments when they probably had reason to. Patience in football is usually romanticised after success arrives. Before success, it just feels like losing repeatedly while executives ask for calm.
Still, this title does not erase everything that came before it. Nor should it. Arsenal spent years becoming a case study in self-inflicted anxiety. They cycled through expensive signings, half-built squads and identity crises while watching rivals collect trophies with mechanical regularity. There was something faintly absurd about a club of Arsenal’s size treating qualification for the Champions League like a civic achievement.
Now they are champions again, and the timing carries its own irony. English football has rarely been richer, colder or more transactional. The old idea of Arsenal as elegant aristocrats of the game died long ago. This team is harder than that. Less romantic. Less concerned with style points.
Which is probably why they finally won the league. Back to their roots, 1-0 to the Arsenal.
