The Undeniables

An ode to a team of champions who refused to let the world keep them from deserved glory.

22 years is a long time.

22 years ago, I was an awkward fifth-grader. Pudgy with big buck teeth in an even bigger mouth with puffy hair to match on top of my head. I constantly craved attention, but hadn’t quite matured enough to master the art of asking for it charmingly or to simply realize that the spotlight must be shared. My future as a theatre kid was basically already foretold.

22 years ago, Arsenal won the Premier League title. The Invincibles etched their names into folklore by playing all 38 games in the English top flight without suffering a single defeat that season. As a result, they finished top of the table and became legends. It was the last time the Gunners won the league.

Until now.

On Tuesday night Manchester City failed to win at Bournemouth, meaning that Arsenal sat four points above Pep Guardiola’s men with a single game left. Mathematically, the Gunners had sealed their first Premier League title in over two decades. And as the City players sunk to their haunches in sweet, sweet heartbreak, the party began over in London.

The Arsenal squad had assembled at the Sobha Realty Training Centre in anticipation of a possible conclusion to the title race. And when Anthony Taylor blew for full time, they erupted in sheer elation, the kind you only see from people who had come so close to achieving their goal and had had to start again repeatedly. A rendition of the “Campeones” chant broke out among the players. Andrea Berta enjoyed a spell of crowdsurfing. Champagne was sprayed and drunk. Tears of joy and relief rained onto the floor to mix with that beverage of winners.

But as the Premier League champions-elect prepared for what I can only assume was a legendary night out on the town, the delightful disbelief in the players’ faces slowly morphed into proud defiance. This Arsenal team have taken their licks from the masses over the years, and they know it. Now was their chance to begin throwing it back in their detractors’ faces before the fans ratcheted things up a notch.

Piero Hincapié took the initiative in this regard. As he and his teammates jumped around deliriously, the Ecuadorian pretended to drink from an Arsenal-branded water bottle, just as the most obvious media plant of a City fan had been spotted doing when the Gunners faltered against them last month. That same supporter was caught on camera despairing as his team struggled against Bournemouth on Tuesday. Gabriel reposted a meme making fun of the man as his team celebrated.

Hincapié wasn’t the only one to comment on that particular narrative. Martin Ødegaard showed up pretending to drink from an Arsenal bottle of his own on Eberechi Eze’s Instagram story. Bukayo Saka posted an Instagram story in which Myles Lewis-Skelly, holding a champagne bottle, exclaimed, “They called us bottlers! Now we’re holding a bottle!”

Saka himself showed up in Jurrien Timber’s Instagram story from Tuesday night. In it he stands before the silhouette of a Premier League trophy that has been installed on the wall at Sobha, which is meant to light up when Arsenal finally finish top of the table. It has served as one of Mikel Arteta’s many creative motivation tactics. Saka points to the light-up symbol and triumphantly states, “22 years. 22 years they was laughing, they was joking, they’re not laughing anymore. Look, it’s gonna be shining. Look, it’s gonna be shining bright.”

A theme of this season, and perhaps of the Arteta project at Arsenal generally, has been working towards the ultimate goal in the face of extreme adversity. It is no exaggeration to claim that a siege mentality has been necessary during this title challenge. Since the 2025/26 campaign kicked off, it has been Arsenal against the world. Almost no one outside of the club and its fanbase wanted the Gunners to win.

At each step of the season, a different accusation of unworthiness has been levied at these players and their manager by the naysayers. The season began with Arsenal being written off entirely. Liverpool, having spent almost half a billion pounds on Jeremie Frimpong, Milos Kerkez, Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike, and Alexander Isak, were practically declared repeat champions before a ball was even kicked. Many pundits had Arteta’s men finishing second once more, if not barely qualifying for a Champions League place.

Simultaneously, it was seemingly decreed by everyone but the club itself that Arsenal had to win something major this season or that major changes would have to be made. Arteta would have to be sacked, important players would have to be sold. The weight of this claim snowballed to the point where it felt like the current project itself was on the line. Even Arsenal fans adopted this viewpoint as the season progressed. Personally, I’ve never really been sure if that was truly the case.

Then, the Arsenal manager’s tactics were widely characterized as too conservative. Mikel Merino was mischaracterized as a defensive midfielder by the general public as Arteta was chastised for not playing the high-octane attacking football Arne Slot’s side attempted earlier in the season. Not long after defeating the Gunners at Anfield, Liverpool squandered their lead at the summit via several weeks of putrid results and vanished from the title race. That, of course, has not been discussed all that much by mainstream football media.

After that came a tidal wave of gripes and groans regarding Arsenal’s set piece process. The Gunners have now set the record for the most corners scored in a Premier League season, which has sparked debates regarding changing the rules around activity in the six-yard box and even the value of set piece goals. Instead of admiring how Arteta and his coaching staff value every aspect of football, Arsenal’s secret weapon was used as a stick to beat them with. Rival fans and pundits mocked them for only being able to score from dead balls despite the fact that open play attacking numbers were down across the league this season. Even Manchester United’s Amad Diallo tweeted that Arsenal’s “only hope is corner”. And Peter Schmeichel’s constant whimpering about Arsenal’s set pieces has also been part of the soundtrack of this season.

As it began to dawn on detractors that the Gunners could actually win the title this season, the criticisms grew more desperate.

Arsenal would be the worst champions to ever lift the trophy.

The Premier League and the PGMOL had worked to rig the title race in Arsenal’s favor.

Arsenal fans were unbearable, their manager and players were completely unlikable, and they had spent ten figures assembling their title winning team (as if this doesn’t apply to every other club that wins the highest honors these days).

It has been clear from the outset that an almost ubiquitous swathe of onlookers and hate-watchers have rooted against Arsenal, have wished for them to fail so they can continue to point and laugh and ensure these players’ legacies boil down to losing. Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, nation-state-backed sportswashing enterprises that have essentially sought to eliminate parity in their respective leagues, were held up as saviors of football by those intent on seeing the Gunners blow it once more. And when that didn’t look like working, detractors employed the most cynical of strategies: they preemptively attempted to undermine Arsenal’s imminent achievement with as many arbitrary, bad-faith criticisms as they could conceive.

They did this in spite of Arsenal overcoming a Manchester City side whose wage bill is twenty percent larger than the Gunners’, who were overseen by perhaps the greatest manager in Premier League history, who can shrug off flop signings that cost them £70 million to £100 million, who signed Marc Guéhi and Antoine Semenyo for nine figures in January.

They did this in spite of Arsenal contending with yet another onslaught of injuries. Kai Havertz missed half the season. Ødegaard suffered multiple long-term injuries. Saka missed extended time with Achilles issues. Gabriel lost a month to a hamstring injury. Merino’s fractured foot has cost him the second half of the campaign. Riccardo Calafiori has been in and out of the treatment room all season, as has Ben White. Eze missed critical fixtures in the spring with a calf problem. Timber has been out for several weeks and is racing to return in time for the Champions League final. Hincapié, Viktor Gyökeres, Noni Madueke, and Leandro Trossard all had their injury issues too.

They did this in spite of Arsenal playing the most hectic schedule in European football this season. When all is said and done in Budapest, the Gunners will have played 60 games in just over 40 weeks. This campaign has been a brutal, grueling slog that has pushed the players to their physical limits. In their first seasons at the club Eze, Gyökeres, and Martín Zubimendi have all made over 50 appearances for Arsenal. For the vast majority of the season Arteta’s men have competed against elite athletes on more rest while effectively playing every few days.

But still, the Gunners battled. Sure, they battled against the other teams in the league and in Europe. But they also battled against the armies of haters who obsessed over the prospect of their failure. They battled against the weight of expectation on them and constant criticisms over play style and touchline behavior and celebrating wins. They battled against the 22 years of heartbreak and disappointment that is thrust onto the shoulders of every footballer who wears that cannon on their chest.

And they did so successfully. Arsenal currently sport the second-most goals scored in the English top flight. They have conceded by far the fewest goals in the league, maintaining the best goal difference of all 20 teams at the time of writing. The Gunners have kept 19 clean sheets in 37 league games to date, and 32 in 58 total matches this season; David Raya has just collected his third consecutive Golden Glove award. Arteta’s men have won 42 matches this season, a club record for a single campaign.

But unlike in past seasons in which Arsenal have put up such phenomenal stats but couldn’t get title challenges over the line, they now have the silverware to show for it. Over 38 games, the Gunners will finish with the most points. The Premier League trophy, we have all tacitly agreed, does not lie. Arsenal are objectively, undeniably, the best team in England this season.

It doesn’t matter how much Arsenal rely on set pieces to put the ball in the back of the net.

It doesn’t matter how stodgy their style of play is, or how indirect their attacking play has been at times.

It doesn’t matter how they celebrate, what Arteta does in his technical area, how many chocolate labradors walk the halls of Sobha, or what happens against PSG in ten days’ time.

They are the Premier League champions, fair and square. They are the ones who will hoist the trophy on Sunday with red ribbons on it, who will go down as legends of the game according to millions upon millions of fans. That cannot be argued with. That is the irrefutable reality.

And so, as we inevitably search for a name by which to call this particular group of Arsenal footballers who have achieved immortality, I would like to suggest what I think is a fitting moniker. Just as the title winners from the 2003/04 campaign are known as the Invincibles for going the season unbeaten, I humbly dub the Premier League’s newest champions “the Undeniables” for overcoming the odds, for refusing to be beaten by rivals or agendas or misfortune or past demons, for digging their heels in and grinding out as many narrow wins as they needed to, for fighting tooth and nail to achieve greatness once and for all.

These players are Premier League champions.

These players now know, really know, that they have a chance to add to their legacies, both at the end of next week and in seasons to come.

These players can rightfully stick two fingers up at all who doubted them, who mocked them, who prayed upon their downfall.

These players have now achieved something that can never truly be taken away from them, even by the most bitter and envious critic imaginable.

They are the Undeniables.

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