It is a dubious honor, writing and talking about the team you’ve followed for as long as you can remember. Almost everyone doing this gig has a club, and, honestly, it’d be weirder if someone got into this without any emotional attachment. And, really, 99.5% of the time it is quite easy to do your job like a professional grown-up. It’s an honor, of course. I get paid to share the thoughts, insights and information I might otherwise share for free. It’s just that there have not been quite as many of those, honors that is, to really delight an audience, chronicling the second half of that 22-year wait for the grandest of prizes.
Of course, Arsenal’s problems in that time have been the sort thousands of fanbases might swap for theirs in a heartbeat. Three FA Cups, Champions League nights, that thing Mesut Ozil did when he kicked the ball into the ground and it looped up: there has been a lot to like. No one should apologize for wanting a bit more, though.
For a very long time, it seemed like that wouldn’t come. The banter years, the Wenger In and Wenger Out banners over the Hawthorns, the annual contract crisis: there really were countless opportunities to serve as a misery courier for one of football’s biggest fanbases. What Mikel Arteta inherited was a toxic mess, within and without. Being on the ground for an Arsenal game felt like being locked in the heart of the men’s mental health epidemic. Anti-depressants and merch drops can only do so much.
By the summer of 2019 it really was quite hard to see a way out of all this for Arsenal. The owner, the coaches, the players, the fans: everyone seemed to be the problem. It says everything about how chaotic things had become that the club captain refusing to join the team on the eve of a pre-season tour is barely a footnote in the history of the Unai Emery interregnum.
How Mikel Arteta saved Arsenal and ended a 22-year Premier League title drought
James Benge
And just as you were about to abandon hope, the Starboy came along. That’s what was so incredible about Bukayo Saka. When he told me, in his first conversation with external media, that he and his fellow bright young things “can be in this Arsenal team and take on the world,” I believed him. At 17 years old, Saka was issuing rallying cries from the scorching bowels of Bank of America Stadium that seven years later would be fulfilled and then some.
Not that the struggles were over. To the last, this team would flay you to pieces, both professionally and personally. There’ll be no easy filing well before the whistle at home to already relegated Burnley. When this team go from slamming in three goals against Bournemouth and Aston Villa to hunkering down for the ugliest split-the-0.88-xG clash at home against Liverpool, it is as if they are daring you to understand what you can say about them.
This season, Arsenal have challenged everything the last decade has taught us about football. You know, that it is attack that wins you titles. Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger: that’s how they did it. Experience had taught me that the 1.60 xG for, 0.7 xG against approach just opens the door to more variance than big attacking numbers, even though common sense tells me that’s not the case.
You kept waiting for the game where Fulham would score with their first shot, where a daft red card or an injury would derail Arsenal. It never quite came. Well, except the injuries. They never quite stopped. Even in that last game you had to remind yourself that there is something extraordinarily special about locking up shop for the final half hour of a game you lead by a single goal. If someone were to ask me for the greatest professional disappointment of my time covering Arsenal it is that I still haven’t seen them pitch that proverbial no-hitter, and keep a team from taking a single shot against them. I still believe.
By May, North London’s tension had become contagious. Bournemouth must have taken some back down south with them when they broke the hearts of the Emirates back in April. Ultimately, Andoni Iraola and his players delivered Arsenal their title in the most fitting of fashions, effective and yet somehow terrifying football.
When Michael Oliver blew that final whistle, though, and Arsenal fans could smash out of their glass case of emotions, they delivered a party easily worth waiting 22 years for. A 20-minute walk from the stadium, you could hear cheers in every direction. Then silence. Thirty seconds, a car horn pierced it. Then another. Then a cacophony. City players were still filtering off the pitch in Bournemouth as the cars backed up beyond the Banksy on the Hornsey Road. Out of every door came a beaming face, whatever red and white shirt they could rustle up hastily hurled on as they headed down the road for… what exactly?
No one seemed quite to know at first. The few hundred who had been waiting at the ground for the final whistle were joined by a throng that began with the mass emptying of pubs nearby and never seemed to stop growing. They came in their droves from everywhere: the surrounding boroughs, south of the river, and the Arsenal enclave that is Peckham, even a few who had hopped on the train to make the 118-mile pilgrimage from Bristol just to be there in the moment.
It took a while and a fair few drinks for the crowd to really rev up. At its peak, it must have been 40,000 or more. No one was entirely sure. “Too many,” said an officer manning the Bear Roundabout. The crowd they watched over, though, had nothing to get aggravated over. This was a communion in its truest form. Everyone had been dragged out: those old enough to perhaps remember the Double celebrations of 1971 and an awful, awful lot who probably were not around when Arsenal last lifted the title in 2004. There were even a few who weren’t old enough to remember the start of this season. You had to bring them, though. These were the nights you’d be telling them about for a lifetime. They, also, it appeared, made for quite a useful approximation of a Premier League trophy.
The fireworks. The flares. The embraces with complete strangers. The reunions with friends you’d not seen for years but suddenly bumped into in the ground. The kids with the drum up on the bridge over the Northbanksy tunnel, who in a moment lived the twin boyhood dreams of celebrating their team winning the league and headlining what was, functionally if not actually, a music festival. Thousands united in chants to their No.6 the king of Brazil, Super Mik Arteta, the guy who had one chat with his new boss and said to Tottenham, well, you either know the rest or probably shouldn’t be learning it on cbssports.com
Plenty in this crowd had been raised on tales of the post-89 parties and were determined to create tens of thousands of their own. Mine? Not sure yet, there’s still Budapest to think about after all. Whatever happens at the Champions League final it might not beat the experience of walking back home in the wee small hours, a woman heading in the opposite direction who gave every impression that she was heading to the Emirates to tell them to turn this racket died down so she could get back to bed. That was until she saw a group of six Gooners, at which moment she produced a water bottle from her coat pocket and mimed that Man City fan with the Arsenal bottle.
Was she still there at 5 a.m. when the boys rocked up at the ground? It would appear not. Regardless there were still a hardy few on hand to give Saka, Jurrien Timber, Declan Rice and Eberechi Eze a champions’ welcome. This team had earned the right to keep going all night and on into tomorrow. “They called us bottlers,” said Myles Lewis-Skelly. “And now we’re holding the bottle.” One suspects Thursday’s open training might not be the most productive.
The celebration might have to stop for the players, but, as the banner said, it’s still a party in the streets of London. At the time of writing, it’s a 90-minute queue to get that gold Premier League badge on your new shirt. The heavens had opened, but they were still congregating to soak in the vibes and to empty their wallets. You’ll do well to go into a restaurant or a supermarket, let alone the pub, without seeing someone embrace a fellow fan. To the man who gave me a fist bump in Sainsbury’s, you’ve already made my day.
Though little will compare with Tuesday. Over a decade following from a distance, starting to grasp the sheer scale of this thing called Arsenal that Arteta tasked himself with turning around, and nothing can ready yourself for the jubilation to which you get to bear witness: from London Colney via video screen and amid the scrum of tens of thousands. To call that an honor falls woefully short.
