Morning all. Happy Friday everyone.
I guess at this point we can start looking ahead to West Ham on Sunday, and Mikel Arteta will meet the press later today ahead of that game. While I’m absolutely sure his focus is 100% on that game, there will be questions about the fact we’ve made it to the Champions League final and, honestly, while I know he’s not the kind of person to do it, I hope he has had the chance to at least privately reflect on the job he’s done and take some real pride in it.
He’s probably not allowing himself to do that yet, because for him the end goal is, and always has been, about winning. It’s been a consistent theme in everything he’s said about what he wants to do at Arsenal since he took over. In his first ever interview after he was appointed, he said:
We have a lot of things to do but what is clear is that the ambitions of this football club are very clear. You have to be in Europe, you have to fight for trophies and the rest is not good enough.
We’ve fought for trophies, we’ve re-established ourselves in Europe, the final step now is delivering the silverware. For some, that is the be-all and end-all. Without trophies, you’re a failure, a fraud, a charlatan, a spoofer, whatever. The reality is, of course, far more nuanced than that. Has Mikel Arteta done amazing work at Arsenal, considering where we were when he took over, and who we’ve had to compete against? Unquestionably, yes. I don’t think anyone sensible could objectively argue otherwise.
Would not winning anything be failure? Perhaps a failure at the final hurdle, but that doesn’t mean what came before is meaningless or worthless or something to be dismissed. We live in a world where everything is so polarised, and that’s true across the board. Sport, politics, culture, societal norms, everything you can think of. You’re this, or you’re that. And if you like one thing, then you must hate that other thing. If you’re a fan of X, then you’re the mortal enemy of Y.
It’s both tiring, and unhealthy. Public discourse has been damaged, probably beyond repair for a generation or two, because of this. Rather than living in a 2026 which is progressive and built on the foundations of everything we’ve learned to this point, it is all too often regressive and driven backwards by the richest people on the planet who never suffer from the actions and policies they inflict on the poorest and least influential. And yet we’ve been conditioned to see them and their wealth as aspirational, while the blame is placed on the increasingly marginalised people who have nothing to do with it at all.
It’s why, for example, the leading broadcaster of football in England, Sky Sports, now routinely engages in the worst kind of ‘bantz’ as part of their coverage. The reality is, nobody wants to see some halfwit pretending to drink a bottle of tears, yet when that kind of low-rent shite is inflicted on us, it generates a wider reaction and has a broader impact. For some, it’s nonsense that can be ignored; for others it’s now about that simpleton with his bottle, it hits closer to home.
We’re all desperate for Arsenal to win the Premier League, and that’s a thing that’s perfectly normal and reasonable on its own merits. Nobody should be more desperate to win it because they can then go online and laugh and point at the dickhead with the bottle. Or the broadcaster who made him famous because their standards have slipped so far. Of course there’s always been an element of getting one over on your rivals, that’s part of the joy of winning, the ability to laud it over everyone below you, to gloat at everyone who didn’t win. But it’s gone too far the other way now. It’s as if that is the main prize, and it obscures the rest to an unhealthy degree.
I thought Tim’s column this week touched on this really well. We have to be able to stop and remember and enjoy the moments, even in those seasons where there’s nothing tangible at the end. Did the experience of that Real Madrid game mean nothing because we didn’t go the distance last season? Of course not, unless you’re so wedded to the idea that the only thing that can be celebrated is the final whistle of the final game of the season when you’ve actually won the final or the league or whatever. And that misses the entire point of football and going to/watching football.
Tim wrote:
We still don’t know our fate this season, whether we win two, one or zero major trophies. What I do know is that nights like this are to be enjoyed and squeezed and wrung dry of every nourishing drop. They don’t happen often but, when they do, you talk about them and remember them for years to come. Nights like this sustain you.
They are fuel to the fire of our support and engagement with a team. In much the same way as getting pumped by Bayern or Barcelona poured cold water on our dreams, as increasingly unrealistic as they were back then. You must be able to recognise and enjoy progress as part of the journey.
In 2022 we had no European football at all. In March 2023, Arsenal went out of the Europa League to Sporting on penalties. In April 2024, Bayern beat us by a single goal as we got to the Champions League quarter-final. In May 2025, over the course of two legs where an Arsenal team without a recognised striker and barely an attacker on the bench in the second leg, lost to PSG by a single goal margin.
In May 2026, we’ve reached the final. Arsenal’s record in Europe this season is P 14, W 11, D 3, L 0, F 29, A 6. We all hope we keep that L at 0 in Budapest. If we do, it will be historic, a monumental achievement for a club that has never won Europe’s biggest trophy and has too rarely been consistently competitive in this competition. If we don’t, it will hurt … badly … but it doesn’t undo what we’ve done to get there and how we’ve done it.
Success may only be measured in trophies, but progression is not. You can be very, very good and not win anything. And I say this not to make any excuses. I’m not advocating for anything or anyone, but at a time when we’re being infected with pernicious ideas and ideologies that insist we cannot be happy unless we do X, Y, and Z, which must also come at the expense of something or someone else, I want to push back.
Like many of you, they drive me mad sometimes, they frustrate me sometimes, they don’t always do my blood pressure and heart rate any good, but I’m happy with my team right now. And that’s not something I’m going to let be obscured by the reality-tv adjacent culture of ‘dunce with a bottle’. The real Twats of Sky Sports.
Get f*cked.
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Right, I’ll leave it there for now. We’ll bring you press conference stories on Arseblog News, and we’ll have a West Ham preview podcast on Patreon a bit later on.
Until then, have a good one.