BUDAPEST — What if Cristhian Mosquera hadn’t gotten his legs in a tangle? Imagine if, in that moment, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Ousmane Dembele hadn’t clicked as they so often have in every game other than this one. Maybe the pass got overhit for once, or Mosquera got a foot to the ball instead. It didn’t. Instead, Mosquera committed the 64th-minute penalty that led to a tie game, and PSG went on to win in a penalty shootout.
That’ll be the question that haunts this team. Maybe not forever. When you are this good, this organizationally aligned, and this able to improve in the transfer market, there is no reason to think they won’t be back in Madrid in 2027 or Munich in 2028. Arsenal have already proven they have the guts to go again and again. The cruel truth, though, is that they might not have had to. The truth is that Bukayo Saka was right when he said the game would be decided in moments. There was just that one for Paris Saint-Germain to balance out Arsenal’s.
Could Arsenal have held on to the lead Kai Havertz won them in such thunderous fashion? There really was little else in the 90 minutes that would have you believe they couldn’t. An instant or two where Arsenal were similarly jittery, Kvaratskhelia breaking away from William Saliba only to tire under pursuit and see his shot cannon off the post via Myles Lewis-Skelly. A last push for a winner at the end of 90 minutes, where Bradley Barcola stayed high and nearly got something on the counter. That was your lot.
Arsenal were so close to perfection. If they weren’t erring, PSG were getting nothing. Europe’s finest attacking force were made to look as toothless as Burnley. Wait, no, that’s an exaggeration. Michael Jackson’s men came back from the Emirates Stadium last week having put up shots worth 1.29 non-penalty expected goals. PSG’s tally for the 90 minutes, when you strike out the Dembele penalty was just 0.84. From their perspective, this was remarkably low, a mark that this season they have dropped below only in two Ligue 1 games.
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Arsenal’s xG was not all that high either, but then Mikel Arteta didn’t need his team to chase this match right the way through. The squiggly lines you’ll see above don’t tell the story of how well Arsenal did. They are entitled to play the game as they want. They came to win the Champions League, and they came incredibly close. It is not their job to captivate the neutrals, though those who cannot admire a team as organised and ferocious as Arsenal might need to prove their ball knowledge. Ultimately, this was the sort of six of one, half a dozen of the other game that could only be decided from 12 yards out.
Arteta knew he could not have asked for more.
“What I said to the players and the staff is that if I tell them thank you a million times, it won’t be enough,” he said. “It’s not because we won the Premier League. It’s not because we played the cup final, because we played the Champions League final in the manner we did. It’s because of the joy and the moments we have lived together, every single day. That’s above anything else.”
Still, they were so close to the best of those days. And maybe closer than many expected. The natural inclination for anyone looking at a game like this is to unleash something along the lines of a combined XI brain. PSG had comfortably the better attack, two-thirds of a superior midfield and fullbacks you’d die for. Why wouldn’t they win this? Well, because this game isn’t attack vs. attack. It’s attack vs. defense. And football history has, at most, a handful of defenses that have sustained Arsenal’s level for this long.
Their rearguard was brilliant. Gabriel was his customary self whenever PSG got the ball in the box, and for a long time, that was an infrequent event. Flying into challenges with the ferocity that so entranced this club six years ago, but that aggression now wholly focused on the ball. Whenever his teammates needed him, he stepped up, dropped back, or hurled himself into the line of fire. He is the Arsenal project writ large: shrewd recruitment, exceptional player development, incredible at set pieces, and a ferocious competitor to the last.
It could not have been crueller that he was the one to miss the decisive penalty, just as it felt brutal that Mosquera should concede the penalty. There was no disputing that he had made a calamitous error; it was just that for so much of the hour that preceded his tackle, Arsenal’s third-choice right back had been infuriating, arguably the best player in this season’s Champions League.
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Time and time again, Kvaratskhelia looked for space and found that Mosquera, dropping deep and wide, was only prepared to cede the areas he wanted. If the Georgian wanted to drive to the byline and lob a cross in, he could be Arsenal’s guest. When he did try to drive into the box, he hit a wall. No way around it either, with Saka dropping back to help out. The same was true on the opposite flank, where Leandro Trossard and Piero Hincapie had Desire Doue locked up. This was not even the A team at the back, either. Riccardo Calafiori had been banged up in the week and, despite Arteta’s insistence to the contrary on Friday, Jurrien Timber had not been fit enough to start at right back.
Then again, this was more than just a back four effort. For an hour, Martin Odegaard struggled to get the possession he needed, but his work without the ball was exceptional. As something of the line backer of this Arsenal rearguard, it looked like he was calling out PSG’s deep passes before they came, easing the defensive line from one side to another, gumming up progression lines that went through Vitinha. Havertz too did yeoman’s work with and without the ball.
Should Arsenal have offered more to add to the goal he fired high over Matvey Safonov? Certainly. It is natural that they wanted to go over the PSG man-to-man press at every opportunity, but David Raya going long with 35 of his 37 passes was comfortably in the realms of perverse. Too often, any opportunity to build possession died because Havertz could not win the aerial duel, hold the ball up and bring his teammates into play all at once. When the openings came for Saka late in the second half, he just couldn’t find the guile to get a good shot away.
As was the case last year, the solution to what ails Arsenal when they are beaten by the best teams, they just need a few more of the game-breaking attackers that the other guys have. What this team could do with a Kvaratskhelia of their own. What they did to him, too.
Arsenal, champions of England, a club who have restored hope to a bereft fanbase, really did give themselves an almighty shot at immortality. They demanded perfection of themselves, just as they knew PSG would of them. How close they came.
