The response to Arsenal winning the Premier League for the first time in 22 years has been predictably partisan. To mangle Tolstoy's famous line about families, fans of the club have been happy in pretty much the same way while those unhappy about the outcome have exhibited a lot more variety in their discontent. While I am firmly in the former camp - generically relieved we got over the line and happy for the players, staff and fellow fans - it is the latter that are of real interest because the variety of their views tell us a lot more about the state of the game, and arguably the country. Arsenal have been accused of being boring, of being lucky with refereeing and VAR decisions, of time-wasting, of being too physical at corners and generally of taking it all too seriously, which is nothing if not ironic. They apparently stank out the Champions League Final in Budapest by stopping Paris St Germain from exhibiting the full range of their balletic skills. Mikel Arteta has personally killed the beautiful game, has despoiled the sanctity of the technical area and has generally been insufferable with his Lego hair and motivational gimmicks.
Hating Arsenal isn't new. The club's contested move from Woolwich to Islington in 1913 and its controversial promotion to Division One in 1919 at the expense of Tottenham Hotspur (among others), both engineered by Chairman Henry Norris, obviously explains the roots of their chief local rivalry. More interesting is how quickly Arsenal riled everybody else, first by spending big - they were known as the Bank of England club in the 1920s - and then by dominating the top division during the 1930s under Herbert Chapman with innovative tactics on the field and innovative marketing off it, notably renaming Gillespie Road Tube station. I'm not going to recap Arsenal's history from then till now, but suffice to say it went through many iterations and corresponding periods of fluctuating fortune. What was consistent was the club's willingness to reinvent itself stylistically, its faith in unconventional managers, and the premium it placed on coaching. Compare and contrast George Graham and Arsene Wenger's teams. Consider the promotion to manager of George Allison (a journalist) and Bertie Mee (a physio). Consider the crucial roles of Tom Whittaker and Don Howe.
Mikel Arteta is a typical Arsenal manager: unproven when hired, having a strong identification with the club's values (as he interprets them), and having a highly systematic approach, both on the pitch and off it. Nicolas Jover may be a figure of fun for many opposition fans and pundits, but that's because he has been unusually successful, not because other teams don't have set-piece coaches. Arsenal have just done many things better than other clubs, not only in the Premier League but in the Champions League as well. It's easy to forget after Saturday's final that not only did Arsenal win the league phase without dropping a point, but they didn't lose a knockout game in normal time: won 11, drew 4, lost 0. They scored 30 (an average of 2 a game) and conceded 7 (under 0.5). The final was obviously a contrast in styles of play, as expected, but it is silly to reduce this to the claim that only PSG wanted to play football - a tired old trope of unimaginative pundits - and that what Arsenal offered was somehow "anti-football". Arsenal were never going to try and emulate PSG's semi-fnal first leg against Bayern Munich, and neither were PSG.
What's interesting about criticisms of Arsenal is that they can easily accomodate variations in style, and have done from Chapman's day onwards. Thus late-era Wengerball could be praised for its beauty while the team was derided as lightweight and lacking courage on a wet winter night up against Stoke's muscular midfield (the clubs's long wait between titles was punctuated for many fans by a series of unpunished GBH assaults: Diaby, Eduardo, Ramsey). Bertie Mee's double-winning team might appear the antithesis of this, but they would also be condemned for their dour pragmatism, grinding out an FA Cup semi-final replay win against the artistry of Stoke. This is why the perennial criticism of the club oscillates between "boring" and "lucky": the one to describe a team that overpowers its oppponents, the other to describe a team that nicks a win. Both are really claims that Arsenal are somehow inauthentic, as is the "anti-football" trope, which ultimately goes back to that relocation north of the river.
This concern over authenticity also explains the negative reaction of many to the sight of Arsenal fans flooding the streets around the Emirates Stadium on the night the title was clinched and Sunday's victory parade around Islington. What was made clear over the last fortinight was the enormous support that Arsenal enjoys not only across London but across the world. The club's history meant that it always retained strong support in South East London, which was reinforced down the years by the recruitment of players like David Rocastle (Lewisham) and Ian Wright (Brockley). It also became the favourite club of European refugees in the 1930s (it actually has more Jewish fans than Spurs), and of Irish and West Indian immigrants in the postwar years, which pushed its support out to West and South London. Arsenal's popularity also reflected its accessibility, both in the sense of the lack of intolerance towards minority fans and in its convenient location for two Tube lines (it was easier to get from Brixton to Highbury on public transport than it was to get to Stamford Bridge, even before the national Front started recruiting in the Shed End). Arsenal is the only truly pan-metropolitan club.
Its periodic success and dramatic victories (the 1971 double, the 1989 win at Anfield etc) during the era of televised football meant it acquired fans across the country, while the global reach of the Premier League and Arsenal's particular popularity in francophone Africa during Wenger's tenure saw it become a truly global club, if some way behind the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona, or even more parochially of Manchester United and Liverpool. Its pioneering support for the women's game also helped expand the fanbase in new directions. The point is not the number of "genuine" fans, assuming this can even be accurately gauged (proxies like social media followers or the number of "official" supporters clubs are unreliable), but the anger that Arsenal's diverse fanbase seems to elicit among the fans of other English clubs. This encompasses both ethnicity (which can easily slip into xenophobia and racism) and the idea that Arsenal attract a disproportionate number of middle class fans who adopted the club as a form of cultural capital after reading (or watching) Fever Pitch (think of the Roger Nouveau character in The Fast Show).
For many fans of the bigger English teams, this concern with authenticity is often an expression of anxiety about their own club in the era of foreign ownership and the "pricing-out of working-class fans": the number of "plastics" or "tourists" at Old Trafford and Anfield, the role of petro-dollars at Chelsea and Manchester City. Arsenal is a convenient outlet for this unease: the game is being destroyed by global forces so surely the most cosmopolitan club must take much of the blame. That its owners are now American plutocrats rather than the scions of old English banking families is seen as evidence of the club's loss of its soul, like its move from the marble halls of Highbury to the Emirates Stadium, even though the club in the wider social sense has never been simply a reflection of its owners or its location (again, see Norris and the move from Plumstead's Manor Ground), and even though other big clubs have seen even more dramatic changes in ownership and ground.
The stylistic criticism of Arsenal is tied up with the claim that the team will always fall short: that there is something missing because the club is inauthentic. Thus even the Invincibles failed to win the Champions League, while the 2006 vintage couldn't hold a lead against Barcelona when down to 10 men (had Arsenal grimly hung on and won the game, the criticism would have been both "boring" and "lucky"). Finishing second in the Premier League for three seasons running was put down to "bottling" rather than the vagaries of competition, still less the advantages enjoyed by a team led by Pep Guardiola, the most successful manager of the modern era in Europe. It has been amusing to see the Catalan, who was often dismissed as a "bald fraud" by the fans of Liverpool and Manchester United, now being eulogised by those same fans in his final season precisely because they hoped he would once more edge past a nervous Arsenal in the final stretch.
The tale of Arsenal's season is simply told. They won 29 points over the first 12 games, then 27 over the next 13 and 29 over the final 13. In other words, they were consistent. The final lap of 5 games saw Arsenal win all of them, while City could only manage 2 wins and 2 draws. But nobody is about to say that City bottled it. Arsenal finished 7 points ahead of City largely because Guardiola's team have been sub-par for two seasons now. They won with 91 points in 2024, beating Arsenal by 2, but then recorded 71 and 78 points in 2025 and 2026 respectively. Arguably, Arsenal should have won last season, and would have done had they repeated their 2023-24 performance. What cost them was drawing 14 games. In short, an Arsenal title win has been imminent for some time, both because of Manchester City's relative decline and because nobody else was coming through (Liverpool's troubles this season reinforce the point and it's likely that Manchester United won't get near the title until they replace their entire defence, no matter how many plaudits Bruno Fernandes wins).
Arsenal fans can look forward with confidence. Arsene Wenger was intermittently successful, but always against the odds: first the generational talent of Alex Ferguson and Manchester United's wealth; then Chelsea's new-found wealth and ruthlessness; finally the financial constraints of the new stadium debt. Arteta doesn't face similar headwinds domestically, at least not yet, which means the club can realistically plan for more success over the next 5 years. Likewise, what the European campaign showed was that Arsenal can compete at the very highest level and, with a bit of luck, may yet pick up the big-eared pot. For some pundits, this is as a good as it gets. As Jonathan Liew put it, "What if this is a club already operating at 105% of their capacity?", as if it was about to blow a gasket, a variation of the usual trope of Arsenal falling to pieces at the sharp end of the season. But if the response by the fanbase is any guide, it looks like Arsenal still have plenty of headroom for growth in popularity and therefore revenue and that, allied to a realistically ambitious ownership (Spurs and West Ham take note), means they haven't topped-out yet. And it is the fear of that possibility that informs the negativity of the football press and the angst of so many other English fans.
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