Arsenal Football Club are the Premier League Champions for 2025/26.
How good does it feel to be able to say that? Stop reading this post for a second, step back from your tablet, or your mobile, or your laptop and say to yourself, “Arsenal are the Premier League Champions”.
Savour it.
I think it’s fair to say that this has not always been the most fun you can have during a football season, and the last month has been quite tortuous at times, with only the technicolour slapping of Fulham for light relief. But what a massive, massive credit to Mikel Arteta and his players to come back from the defeat at Manchester City in the way they have.
One goal conceded – and that a UEFA penalty for handball – since the 19th April. Under the highest of pressures, chased by the run-in specialists and the greatest coach of his generation and with the spectre of an unthinkable fourth second-place finish in four years looming.
Well, now we don’t have to think about it, because we are the Champions.
I’ve had a couple of days off this week. Mainly because I was thinking Sunday had the potential to be a big party and I might not want to work on Monday. And then Burnley got moved, so I thought, I might as well add an extra day and then go and play snooker for a few hours on Tuesday afternoon.
On my way to snooker, I was messaging my mate James and said, “isn’t it weird to think we could be champions in a few hours?”. Cards on the table, I’ve been in a prediction league with my mates all season and I did predict us to win this weekend (obviously), I also predicted City to draw. A bit of magical thinking, rather than any real belief perhaps – although the weekend’s cup final felt like a potential factor, especially against Andoni Iraola’s brilliantly coached Bournemouth side.
But I didn’t want the stress of watching the City game, so we ended up watching Nemesis on Netflix, with me very aware that City were a goal down. Periodic checks on my mobile became more frequent until the clock ticked around to half nine and I finally said to Jo “can we put Sky Sports on for a minute?”
We’d barely turned over and then Bournemouth had a three on one, which they hit the post from. Arsenal the width of the post away from the title.
How big did the width of that post feel when, minutes later Haaland then, well, Haalanded? Like you, I’m sure, my irrational, Arsenal fan PTSD ohmigodhowmuchhavewesufferedoverthelastthreeyears brain kicks in and I was thinking, they couldn’t, could they? Even as the rational bit of my brain was saying no, they couldn’t.
But I was finding it difficult to breathe, so I open the balcony door, not wanting to look at the television, but desperate to see what’s happening.
And then after what feels like half an hour of injury time, the whistle goes and we are the champions. Years of decline and being laughed at, Arsenal fans fighting with each other, irrelevance, apathy and quite a few false dawns all melted away on one blow of the referee’s whistle.
22 years is the longest time Arsenal have been without the title in my Uncle Stevie’s lifetime, nevermind mine. His son Josh was a baby when we last won the title and has grown up in the shadow of the unknowable Invincibles. Now he gets to come to North London to celebrate his team on Sunday.
Jo and I got together in the summer of 2004, and her first game was that summer’s Community Shield game in Cardiff. Watching Jose Antonio Reyes (RIP) take United apart, if you’d have told either of us it would be another 22 years before we were celebrating our defending champions – well, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I started a six-week contract at the HQ of a national charity in April 2005 with Arsenal as defending champions. 21 years later, I still haven’t found the exit door and this August will be the first time I walk into work since then with my team the one with a target on their backs.
I mentioned James above, I met him in 2008 and in amongst all of the people with whom I share this wonderful football club, I have shared most of my very best Arsenal memories in that time with him. But obviously, never a title. I can’t wait to celebrate this with him when we catch up next weekend at the Emirates for the Champions League Final screening.
Did somebody say Champions League Final? Yes, yes I did. And we will celebrate, whatever happens in Budapest.
The biggest change for me over the last 22 years is that this is the first Premier League title I get to write about us winning. I started writing about Arsenal, almost by accident in the autumn of 2004, having been feeling a little melancholy whilst sat outside Highbury’s Marble Halls after a game I hadn’t even been to. There isn’t much melancholy in me right now, I can tell you.
I suppose, 900 words in, I better start talking about how we got here.
For me, this triumph is completely and utterly Mikel Arteta’s. And on another day, there should be many words written on how special it is that a former captain of this football club walked away from a cushy little number as Pep’s number 2 into a “dead” football club and returned us to our former glory. In his first managerial role.
I have had my doubts about Arteta over time, I can’t say I haven’t. But I’ve generally been on board having been to many games in the 2021/22 season – yes, the one we finished 5th when we really should have made 4th and felt the way he had managed to connect the fans back to the team. I loved that season, even if we finished up with Spurs laughing at us, and it was clear to me that we were on the way back.
A year later, we finished second when we really could (and maybe should have) won the league. But the atmosphere in the stadium on a gorgeous, sun kissed final day of the season told you all you needed to know, the progress was clear, we were back.
It’s taken a bit longer to get to the summit than we’d have all liked. And we’ve had to endure a lot, especially over the last two years, having been so close in 2024 and then – well, you all know how last season went.
I have a theory about why Arsenal are so universally disliked. I think that we are so good defensively that basically most teams know they’re going to have to have a very good day and hope we have a bad one to get anything out of us, so they just park the bus, sit tight and hope to nick something. Which; a) doesn’t make for great viewing, but; b) more significantly, is about the absolute denial of hope.
Mikel Arteta has created a machine that gives the opposition absolutely nothing and, in doing so, has proved the old adage “defences win you titles”.
George Graham must be so proud of him. I know I bloody am.
For the players too, there must be so much relief in this ultimate victory. As the Tuesday Club pointed out a few weeks back, three second-place finishes has given us a context in which this season has felt like it’s gone on for four years. Imagine how the players would have felt.
Bukayo Saka has been at the vanguard of Arteta’s Arsenal revolution. When he reports for England duty at the World Cup, he now does so as a Premier League winner. Declan Rice, regularly taunted by West Ham fans, “You should have signed for a big club”, now has the biggest prize in the domestic game and we all know, this couldn’t have happened without him.
The twin towers at the back, Gabriel and Saliba have committed the best years of their career to our football club, what would another year of finishing second done to them? How would they have felt about it? It’s completely irrelevant now. David Raya came here with massive question marks over why, especially from your writer. I was wrong wrong wrong and happy to be so, his save at West Ham last week is one that will live on forever.
Obviously, Viktor Gyokeres and Ebere Eze have only been here a year, but for those two, they have played key roles in this title. After a very slow start to life in North London, Gyokeres influence has grown steadily over the last few months, when it has really mattered – a real zero to hero story.
As for Eze, well, you all know how I feel about him. He hasn’t scored a lot of goals this season, but the goals he has scored have usually been important and almost always bangers. My one feeling about this run in was, even as it got tense, was there was no way Eze would go back to Selhurst Park on the last day and not get his hands on the Premier League trophy.
So it came to pass. Ebere Eze is a Premier League champion. Arsenal are the Premier League Champions.
Roll on North London on Sunday!
- Why Arsenal’s 2025/26 title triumph belongs to Mikel ArtetaArsenal Football Club are the Premier League Champions for 2025/26.
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- Palace manager’s comments on Eze likely to anger Spurs fansOliver Glasner has congratulated Arsenal, Mikel Arteta, and Eberechi Eze on their Premier League title success, but his comments might not make Spurs fans too happy.
- Jurrien Timber injury update pre-Champions League finalMikel Arteta has revealed that whilst Mikel Merino is returning to full training, Jurrien Timber is still a little further behind in his recovery.
- 6th Arsenal player called up for World CupKai Havertz has been called up by Germany for the World Cup, with Julian Nagelsmann sending a message of support to the Arsenal striker.