The curtain came down on Arsenal’s season this week and the atmosphere inside the Emirates was of confused, muffled celebration.
Processing a season of absolute stasis is never easy, but particularly difficult for an Arsenal team handed a Premier League silver medal for the third year in a row.
Mikel Arteta’s side have secured second place in the Premier League table and reached a Champions League semi-final. By any measure that is a good season, and yet at the final whistle on Sunday afternoon the mood was understandably a little sombre.
There is an obvious risk here, a fear rising: treading water in the Premier League is a lot like beginning to drown.
Arsenal are now five years without a trophy. More significantly, for the first time in three years they were not engaged in a title race. It is perfectly understandable that some ers are beginning to question whether the Arteta project is running out of steam.
History would suggest as much. Momentum is everything in football, which is why there isn’t a single example in Premier League history of a team speeding up again after slowing down.
More than once Sir Alex Ferguson rebuilt at Manchester United, but only from a position of serial title winner.
The initial journey to the summit has to be constant. Those who stop for breath never make it to the top.
Arteta has been in the job for five-and-a-half years now, which is longer than most spells, including successful ones. He’s had the rebuild, the year as plucky outsiders, and the year they could and perhaps should have taken the final step.
That leaves 2024/25 as the aftermath, the comedown.
That’s the fatalistic reading, but not the only one available. Arteta has never really followed the traditional path, after all.
The speed with which he revived Arsenal’s fortunes hasn’t been praised enough and the way he has normalised second place is itself a major achievement.
They were way ahead of schedule in 2022/23 and 2023/24. A regression in 2024/25 merely puts them back on course.
And it doesn’t feel like the end, either, although it’s undeniable that Arsenal and Arteta are at a crossroads. They simply have to get this summer and their start to next season right.
Anything less than a powerful title challenge and the tide will turn against the manager.
Already there are murmurings in the media, a reaction to far too many dull Arsenal matches this season, during which the youthful attacking fury has been replaced with Stoke City-esque reliance on solid defending and set-piece efficiency; a turn towards tactical conservatism that might indicate Arteta’s gradual retreat and decline.
That’s why this summer is so important. Arteta has developed a habit of locking things down when the pressure ramps up, a path he cannot afford to go any further down.
Next season is Arteta’s last chance to show he can make that final step; that he can be brave and expansive at the moment when the risk is highest.
It doesn’t help Arteta’s cause, indeed only increases the focus upon him, that everybody knows exactly what Arsenal need to do in the transfer market. Runners-up are normally insulated against criticism because it’s difficult to pinpoint how to make that final step, but not in Arsenal’s case.
They’ve need a proper number nine for two years. Everybody can see it, just as everybody can see they need more creativity on the left wing and an upgrade at the base of midfield.
Even casual viewers roll their eyes at Arsenal’s reliance on Raheem Sterling.
But this should not be used as a stick to beat Arteta with, and rather ought to highlight what a superb job he has done to make Arsenal unquestionably the second-best team in the country.
It is perhaps fairer, then, to say this is a sliding doors moment for Arsenal’s new senior management team; for Director of Football James King, appointed in November, and Sporting Director Andrea Berta, who s this summer.
They need to spend big money on star names. It’s as simple as that; now or never to pull themselves to the same level as Liverpool, two clubs made vulnerable by their own transitional periods.
Arteta needs backing in the transfer window.
Another summer like the last and his project will die a slow death, leaving Arsenal fans to look back on this era in years to come as a glorious failure of the board’s own making.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’ll be seen as a parallel journey to the one Tottenham fluffed when Mauricio Pochettino was in charge.
Nobody before has stuttered for a full season and then made the final push, Pochettino included.
But then Arsenal’s trajectory under Arteta has always been unusual and under-appreciated. There is just about time to make history, but it’s running out.
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