BEST FOOTBALL EVER – HOW WE GOT THERE (LONG READ)

Have you been into the rival fan GCs? Lathering your artisnal smug salt into the gaping wounds of literally anyone who criticised our great club over the past 3 seasons?

Good job.

As a fan base, I hope people think we’re unbearable now, we deserve to be as annoying as Liverpool fans after a Champions League win, and as triumphant as Spurs fans were after that Audi Cup win. We’re back and it’s hard to know where to look!

I told a story on the latest podcast about going to The Rocket after the game. They had a United vs Arsenal classic on the big screen. It was circa 1997-98. I was there, watching the football back then, mesmerised by the speed, power and technical WOWness of it all. But when I watched it the other night, it felt very basic compared to the era of football we’re watching now.

So what am I about to say?

The football Arsenal are playing now is the greatest we’ve ever seen in our history. The speed with which we move the ball is outrageous, the intensity is truly shocking to witness, and the intelligence from every player has never been matched. It’s 11 players contributing to a work of art every week.

… and it’s only just begun. We’ll add new players with new superpowers and it’ll get better and better. We are at the cutting edge of the game. The football is so good, it has chairmen all over the world pointing to how we’re doing this, demanding they get some of it.

Imagine that, Arsenal, without oil money, setting the global standard for how the game should be played.

Without meaning to be self-serving to my own narrative, I have always said that you don’t have to be the richest to be the best, you have to be the smartest. Arsene Wenger missed this when he simply gave up competing when Chelsea and City came onto the scene. It’s easy cloud cover to say money cannot be bested. Well, here we are, in a richer era, proving that you can only have 11 players on the pitch at any one time, and there is more than one way to skin a cat.

The most important shift to the way Arsenal operated is they finally admitted who they were as a club, what their superpowers were, and they leaned in hard to make them work for us.

Namely:

Our superpower is our name. We’re the biggest club in London. Of that, there was no doubt.

We had to admit buying a title was impossible against beastly competitors, but there was an opening we could take advantage of…

Big clubs don’t like to invest in young players, they prefer to buy readymades. If they do sign them, they don’t often get the minutes.

If we could hire in a bright young coach, give him the best young players in the world, maybe we could get to the top in 3 seasons if we could keep them all together.

Mikel Arteta was ultimately the catalyst for the movement towards where we are now, but you really do have to give Edu a lot of credit for seeing the vision, and making a bold decision. Remember, this was all on him, he had Jorge Mendes in his ear with all sorts of bad ideas, and he passed up, and took a risk people called negligent.

Then you have the second major shift at Arsenal, the shift in age profile. Arteta realised the hard way that he was not going to be able to cobble together a group of older players to do the work he wanted to the level he needed. Willian was his ground zero. His decision. His error. His biggest player mistake.

But he rectified it and learned a few things. Firstly, older players did not want to listen to his ideas in general. Players in their thirties, at the level we were at, just want to have a good time on the IG feed. They don’t want to learn new ideas and they don’t want to suffer for the system.

Young players? Different gravy. Emile Smith Rowe might have been the catalyst for the shift. He was agitating for a move in December so he could get minutes. Mikel finally relented, put him in against Chelsea, and the rest is history. The best young players want to learn, be part of a system, and they want to secure a glittering career. They aren’t thinking about coaching badges or penthouses in Miami.

We followed ESRs debut with a loan move for a young hungry Norwegian who came in a showed the path forward.

That summer, instead of spending £150m on 2 superstars @ 28 years old, we spent it on 6 players, all under the age of 24, with some real head-turning names.

That window was ridiculed. Troll accounts literally savaged the club. Newspapers laughed about the difference in quality of Varane to Benny Blanco. It really was eye-opening how lacking in vision people were at the time.

But that set the wheels in motion to where we are now.

What did we learn? Young players with 2-3 seasons of experience and the requisite hunger really can move to a high level quickly with a generational coach guiding them.

Last season, we missed out on top 4 with a really high points total. 2 extra points could have taken us to the promised land.

We can all point to Thomas Partey, Kieran Tierney, and Tomiyasu as the reason we crashed. There’s merit there. But what was the real reason? That it took Arteta until April to realise the best striker at the club was Eddie Nketiah. If he’d started playing in January, we’d have picked up the extra two points, of that, there is no doubt.

Young players again proving that the recipe for success is investing in hunger.

The ground zero moment with regards to performances was the Newcastle game. The issue? Bravery. Part experience, part that we lacked true winners to guide in moments of despair.

So what did we do in the summer? For a reasonable sum of £70m, we invested in two players that had won 4 Premier League titles. The best bit of business of the window? Clearly.

Missing out on top 4, in hindsight, doesn’t look like the worst moment for us. Big teams have to face up to bad moments, they can act as a driving force, it can spark a shift in mentality. Look at how we’ve played this season. Has there been a moment when you’ve doubted our application? I haven’t seen it. We learned something from that Newcastle game and I think there’s an element of that horrible night under the lights that has us driving towards objectives we didn’t think were possible in the summer.

Clearly, plenty of other things have gone on, but what I’m trying to say is the path to the top isn’t always linear, bad moments inspire good moments, lessons failed can be lessons learned at a later day, and when you’re basking in the glory of the moment right now… just remember, things will get tough again. The key is not to catastrophize, because bad things happen to every team and we have been absolutely privileged this season to have dealt with very few of them.

There is a whole swathe of media that does not like that Mikel Arteta snuck up on them. They have their ‘this was all a mirage’ articles ready to go. They cannot wait to point to our slump being linked to behavior on the touchline. They are desperate to roll out the ‘you can’t win it with kids’ line. When the time comes, these people that cannot see what is going on at Arsenal, the folk that call this a Leicester-like run, will unleash all their powers of doubt onto the base.

Stay calm, the people that don’t understand strategy still don’t, the people that support other teams out in the open don’t like looking silly, you just have to remember their neutral observations will be caked in partisan beliefs, and they’ll be iced in the desperation not to look generationally silly. No one wants to be Alan Hansen right now, but there are a few heading that way, and they know it.

So enjoy the moment, know where it came from, and be calm when the storm comes.

P.S. Welcome Jakub Kiwior! Would imagine he has the same profile Lisandro Martinez has, but he’s way taller. Great move for us for £40m less. Arsenal moving rapidly in the window on great scouting an analysis.

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