Hope or heartbreak? Arsenal know they must slay the ghosts of failures past

The first time it felt like heartbreak. Arsenal travelled to the Etihad Stadium late in April 2023 as the Premier League’s coming force. Mikel Arteta’s young team, built around the bright promise of Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard, had flowered over the course of the season. They were fresh and light and joyous, and everything seemed possible.

Arsenal started and ended that night top of the table, ahead of schedule in every regard, but everything else had changed irrevocably. Manchester City had not just beaten them, but trounced them. Pep Guardiola’s side’s 4-1 win was an assertion of dominance. All of a sudden, City were just two points back but with two games in hand. Arsenal’s moment had gone, the spell broken, the fantasy evaporating in the cold light of day.

The second time it felt different. Arsenal came back to the Etihad in March 2024, recalibrated as more physical, more obdurate, more mature, determined to take their chance to prove they were no longer callow youths but something more concrete, more serious. They were gnarled and grizzled, all gritted teeth and scar tissue.

The 0-0 draw that followed was, at the time, greeted as a triumph of common sense. When the final whistle blew, the fans conducting the livestream of the game on AFTV clenched their fists, exchanging handshakes and hugs of congratulation.

The draw had sent Liverpool top, but still, this was, they thought, a job well done. Arsenal had proved they could do what was necessary. Two weeks later, on the same day that Liverpool lost at home to Crystal Palace, Aston Villa went to the Emirates and won. City did not need a second invitation. Guardiola’s team won their last nine Premier League games, and claimed the title by two points. The stalemate at the Etihad was, as it turned out, a mirage, a monument of false hope.

Now the trilogy resumes; it may even be nearing completion. Arsenal once again go to the Etihad with the season at its inflection point and the title in their grasp. Once again, they do so top of the table, this time by six actual points and three theoretical ones, given that City boast a game in hand.

Given the stakes, it is no exaggeration to say it is probably Arsenal’s biggest game since the 2006 Champions League final. More than that, it is also the most fitting conclusion imaginable: Guardiola’s team cast once more as a sort of final boss; the Etihad once more the setting for Arsenal’s ultimate test. To claim a first Premier League title in a generation, Arteta’s team must not only confront their nemesis, but also their ghosts.

Contrary to popular perception, being involved in a title race is not a vast amount of fun. That might be football’s equivalent to a first-world problem, the sort of petty concern that is the preserve of a cosseted elite, but that does not make it any less true.

Most of the time it is intensely stressful: the pressure is high, the demands are exacting, and the missteps are costly. That is particularly true when you are competing against an opponent backed by a nation state and capable of casually splashing almost £100m on Marc Guéhi and Antoine Semenyo as January reinforcements. Peril lurks around every corner. Every game is a pitfall. Victory does not bring pleasure. It brings temporary relief.

Even by those standards, Arsenal’s season has felt like a form of torture, a series of weekly psychological examinations for Arteta and his players to pass. That is in part somewhat self-inflicted. It is famously a game of opinions, but it would take a particularly masochistic form of contrarianism to suggest Arsenal are good to watch.

Instead, they are a fine-margin sort of a side. Six years in, that is the probably greatest hallmark of Arteta’s ethos as a coach. He is not a stylistic ideologue. There is no Arteta school of football, no Mikelismo. He might have played under Arsene Wenger and cut his teeth as a coach under Guardiola, but his most obvious influence (and this is a compliment) may well be David Moyes.

In his time at Arsenal, he has proved himself to be flexible, adaptable, endlessly pragmatic. Above all, he is a man who will do anything for an edge. It is that more than anything that explains so much of the culture he has created: the lightbulbs and the pickpockets, the pen-balancing and the TikToks playing during training, the training ground dog, the Nicolas Jover of it all. Some of it is admittedly slightly too LinkedIn for comfort – Arteta, you sense, could teach a lot of people a lot of things about B2B sales – but the purpose is clear: he will do anything he can to extract every last drop from his squad, to make sure Arsenal are just a little bit better than their opponents at every aspect of the game.

That has been Arsenal’s strength and also their weakness. They went top of the Premier League in the autumn and have stayed there; they have by most measures passed every test they have faced. But even their fans would not suggest it has felt comfortable. They have won just six Premier League games by more than two goals. The majority of their matches have involved no small measure of tension.

As the season has reached its denouement, as the pressure has increased, that has become more and more pronounced. Arteta threw on Max Dowman, still just 16, to try to avert dropping points against Bournemouth. He admitted that Declan Rice and Piero Hincapié “had no chance to play” against Sporting in midweek, and then “put themselves through the line to contribute”. He has asked for his team to be “pure fire”, a point he decided to emphasise by the lighting of an actual fire at their Colney training ground for a players’ meeting this week. Arteta enjoys an on-the-nose metaphor.

This is kitchen sink time, the climax, the single afternoon that will – with the caveat, obviously, that there will still be five games to play – define not just this season, but possibly Arteta’s whole tenure.

Everything he has done, every edge exploited, every corny motivational technique applied, every margin pushed, has been geared towards this. For the third time in four years, Arsenal go back to the Etihad in spring time, top of the table, the title in their grasp, a wait of more than two decades almost over. All they have to do is change the ending, to ensure there is no heartbreak, there is no false hope, that they do not leave Manchester again carrying their ghosts.

Photograph by Ryan Pierse/UEFA/Getty Images