Morning.
It’s a beautiful warm morning here in Dublin, the birds are singing outside my window, and I’m reflecting on the end of the Premier League season. It’s very difficult to come up with anything new to say. My observations are unlikely to be particularly insightful, other than to quote a very wise Swedish man who once said, “It’s f*ckin’ excellent”.
We live in weird, dark times generally speaking. Where it’s almost impossible to read the news or look at what happens around the globe without a crushing sense of despair and helplessness. We often talk about football as our escape from that, and this week in particular it’s been precisely that.
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you anything about what’s happened anywhere else or to anyone else. I’ve been so wrapped up in our celebrations, it’s been kind of all consuming. Just one more video, just one more podcast, just one more set of photos. My scrolling thumb looks like Popeye’s arm when he eats the spinach. I know it can’t last forever, eventually the good times will fade, but I do think it’s really important we cherish this as it’s happening.
People have wondered was it like this in 2004 or 2002? I can only say from my experience it was obviously brilliant, but it felt more ‘normal’. It’s not that we expected to win the league but after the double in 1998, we knew we could. We had three second place finishes in 1999, 2000, and 2001 after that, but there wasn’t, at least in my recollection, the same level of angst. In 2002 we won the double again, should have won the title in 2003, and then went Invincible in 2004.
There have been years since when we should have won it, or at least had the opportunity. 2008 is, potentially, a real sliding doors moment for the club. We had a lot to contend with that year, but if you allow yourself to look back, what would it have meant to become champions with that young team and some of the talent we had available? If we hope that this season unlocks something in this current version of Arsenal, the same could very well have been true back then.
Think of 2016. I remember being at the Leicester game when Danny Welbeck scored that late winner. It felt so big. Like it was meant to be, but we know now it wasn’t. Nobody inside the stadium that day will forget how the goal resonated, but we then won just 1 of our next 8 games in all competitions, and in the Premier League we kick-started the career of Marcus Rashford at Old Trafford, and lost at home to Swansea with a team that, when you see it now, looks a long way from being good enough to win a league title (although it should have been able to beat Swansea).
We finished 5th in 2017, 6th in 2018, in 2019 we won just 1 of our last 5 games (the last one!) to finish 5th under Unai Emery, and after Mikel Arteta took over in December of that year, that weird Covid hit season saw us finish 8th with just 50 points. Just to add some further clarity, we finished behind Sheffield United and Wolves that season. That’s where we were, even in the midst of the most surreal time many of us have ever experienced in life, let alone football.
I was reminded of an Arsecast Extra conversation by a Liverpool fan and fellow Dubliner, Dean Van Nguyen, who sent me a DM last week with this question:
On the August 23, 2021 episode of #ArsecastExtra, my question was thus: “How confident are you that Arsenal can win the league title before 2034, when they’d match Liverpool’s 30 year drought?” James believed there was a 25 percent likelihood that Arsenal could do it; Andrew’s confidence was at 7 percent. “Right now, it’s very difficult to see that as a possibility,” he added. My question today is: Has it ever felt so good to be so wrong?
It has never felt so good to be wrong, and perhaps I was more gloomy than I should have been, but we were so far off the level being set by Man City and Liverpool. In 2021, we finished 8th again, on 61 points. I was always a strong advocate for Mikel Arteta, particularly as he – to my mind anyway – recognised that that a malaise had set in at Arsenal and a significant part of his job was to fix that. He knew he had to change the culture inside the club, on and off the pitch, and that’s a really difficult thing to do, especially when you also have to produce results on it. It wasn’t progress in our final league position but it was in terms of points gained. You take what you can get, I suppose.
2022 saw 8 more points added to the end of season tally, and a 5th place finish. Further progress, before we had the excitement of that first title challenge. What made it so much fun was that we expected the team to be a bit better, but not that much better. I liken it to a movie you’re not sure you want to watch but which turns out to be a belter. We didn’t have enough, but we finished 2nd on 84 points. 15 better than the previous campaign.
The foundations were in place. This was when we started to believe winning the title was a possibility, but that’s different from when we absolutely knew we could go the distance like those Arsene Wenger teams. Reiss Nelson’s moment against Bournemouth felt a bit Welbeckian, as if the fates were aligned, but again it wasn’t meant to be. Close, so close, but no cigar.
Last season Liverpool won it, we hung on gamely but didn’t have the quality or depth to match one of the greatest individual seasons in English football history from Mo Salah. It made us all think we needed someone like that to win it. That’s what we were told, and it made some sense. Unless someone goes supernova, it can’t be done. We were told we had to go Man City and win and go to Liverpool and win because you can’t win the title without doing that.
I think there’s something quite fitting that when Mikel Arteta did it, he did it in a way which made those assertions a lie. We didn’t have that stellar goalscorer. Only one Arsenal player, Viktor Gyokeres, got into double figures for Premier League goals, only one of those goals was scored against a team in the top 6 (the penalty in the 2-1 defeat to Bournemouth). The next best were Eberechi Eze and Bukayo Saka on 7. We lost at Anfield. We lost at Man City. Two things you absolutely cannot do if you’re to become champions.
And yet. Look at that league table now. Sweet as sweet can be. All the things we’re confidently told by people in football that turned out to be wrong. You can’t appoint someone with no experience like Mikel Arteta and hope to succeed at the highest level. You can’t buy a centre-half from Brighton for £50m and expect to build a winning team. You can’t dispense with your popular goalkeeper to bring in some other guy who is actually a bit too small to be any good. You can’t dispense with talent just because they have challenging personalities. As a club you can’t demonstrate your ambition by hanging onto a manager who finished 8th two seasons in a row. You can’t compete with Man City. You can’t compete with Pep Guardiola, the pupil can never outdo the master. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.
We can. We can. We can. We did. We really f*cking did. Max Dowman’s goal against Everton felt like Nelson and Welbeck, but this time it stuck. So when I try and sum up what this all means and how it feels, there’s just so much going on. 22 years is a long time to wait for a title, and so much happens in a time period like that. On its own it feels like a lifetime, and indeed there are so many Arsenal fans celebrating now who weren’t even alive the last time we won it. Grown adults, driving cars and voting in elections and drinking beers and stuff.
Yet it’s all those experiences – those gut punches; those nearly moments; those far away moments; those glimmers of hope that raised our spirits and expectations but ultimately, season after season, left us bereft; those dreams dashed; those painful experiences, and goddam some of them have been excruciating; those slings and arrows that have come our way all throughout those 22 years but which have increased in sharpness and frequency once we got good again; those prizes that were within touching distance but stayed agonisingly out of reach; all of those things that have made this one feel like such a release.
Maybe as we get closer to Saturday and Budapest, it will start to fade a bit, but if the good thing happens in Hungary, we start up that celebration machine again. If the Premier League has caused us some pain down the years, so too has the Champions League. Let’s wipe that slate clean. 1-0 to the Arsenal, thank you very much.
“What’s rare is wonderful”, as the old saying goes. This is wonderful for all those reasons I laid out, but hopefully after lifting that burden of time and expectation, it won’t be as rare. It won’t make it any less enjoyable, but this one has 22 years of build-up going into it, and that’s why it feel so special.
The birds continue to sing outside my window. A perfect soundtrack to a beautiful morning and Arsenal remain champions.