It is fitting that the 2025/26 Premier League title race should end in a total non-event, Manchester City’s meek 1-1 draw at West Ham on Sunday putting one long sigh over a 2025/26 competition that never really got going.
But that should not detract from Arsenal’s soon-to-be achievement. In fact, they ought to be celebrated far more than they have been.
The first thing to say is that it really is over. Arsenal, nine points clear, will win the title.
Opta give them a 97.6% chance via their simulations, which will reflect that the league-leaders can draw four of their final seven Premier League matches and still be guaranteed to finish level on points with Manchester City, and even that’s assuming City somehow win all seven of their matches that aren’t against Arsenal.
Watching them toil at West Ham, we know that just isn’t going to happen. Pep Guardiola’s side are currently on course to win 77 points, just six more than last season.
They have never looked like getting out of second gear and, now so far behind, surely won’t have the emotional energy to do so from here.
Inevitably the entire shape of the campaign now shifts. Opinions are hastily corrected, legacies redrawn, and as the present becomes the past its wobbly nature is recast as something certain and pre-determined.
Man City were not gearing up for spring, they were a bunch of new players drifting aimlessly with a manager no longer motivated to climb the mountain.
Arsenal weren’t nervously bottling it, they were riding the bursts of anxious energy a listless Man City badly needed. Arsenal weren’t letting City back in, they were simply cruising: top since matchday seven and always, always in control.
History will be completely rewritten by what the league table declares. It was just Arsenal’s time; it was a procession; they were the best team throughout.
If that line still sounds unlikely to you, then look back on how people wrote about Arne Slot’s Liverpool as late as February last season, when Arsenal were closing in following consecutive Liverpool draws and many pundits were readying for a proper title race.
But what is still open to interpretation, what has not quite crystallised yet, is how history will remember Arteta’s first Premier League title.
Right now they are Set Piece FC, derided almost universally as a boring team, master of the dark arts, and a soul-crushing example of everything that’s wrong with modern football.
This will change, and quite rightly.
For starters the Premier League is nowhere near as boring as people are making out.
A herd mentality has taken hold, thanks in no small part to a pundit class who have decided that anything short of the Klopp-Guardiola peak is unwatchable; who, addled by short attention spans, have conveniently overlooking the dribblers and the individuality everywhere, at the constant stream of long-range goals, and at the engaging stories up and down the division from Sunderland to Tottenham to Manchester United.
But beyond that, history tends to look kindly on winners.
All three of Jose Mourinho’s title wins with Chelsea are remembered fondly, as is Antonio Conte’s, Roberto Mancini’s, and many of the Sir Alex Ferguson titles won in the 90s and in the final few years after the Rooney-Ronaldo-Tevez partnership was broken up.
None of those involved brilliant attacking football.
Football is simply more boring in real time, but it compresses neatly into highlights packages, which is why years from now what will emerge is Arsenal as a ruthlessly efficient force; the brittle young team that matured into something admirably stoic.
The set-pieces will always feature heavily in the imagination. But as soon as the fashion for set-plays begins to wane there will be nostalgia for it and for the way Arsenal perfected it.
There will also be space to celebrate the more glorious moments – the Eberechi Eze goals, Max Dowman’s impact – and a general appreciation that Arsenal were really just a very, very good team who won matches in a variety of ways.
The defining image might be Gabriel rising to meet a dead ball, or maybe Declan Rice slowly walking towards the corner flag.
But as soon as the present becomes the past, as soon as the urgency and fierceness gives way to the restful reflection of another chapter finished, Arsenal and Arteta will be rightly lavished with praise for an outstanding, generational campaign.
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