How Mikel Arteta saved Arsenal and ended a 22-year Premier League title drought

Mikel Arteta transformed Arsenal from a fractured club with a half-empty stadium into Premier League champions after a grueling seven-year rebuild

James Benge

May 19, 2026

7:48 pm ET

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16 min read

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For the first time in a generation, Arsenal are champions of England. When they last lifted the Premier League trophy 22 years ago it seemed the good times might never end for the Invincibles. Two doubles in the preceding seven years, a new stadium that would eventually bridge the financial gap to their great rival Manchester United: sure, there would be some pain in financing the Emirates and the millions at Chelsea's disposal were a worry, but the idea that a generation might pass without the biggest prizes coming to north London would have seemed unthinkable.

That's how it always begins. Then one day, you find 15 years have gone by and you are as far from glory as ever. On and off the pitch, the structure is a mess, the players are bafflingly expensive for the quality of their performances, the fans aren't even at their throats anymore, they're resigned to ignominy. That was what struck Mikel Arteta, then Pep Guardiola's assistant at Manchester City, five days before he took the plunge and returned to the club at which he had ended his career. Even as the Emirates Stadium has become a fortress once more, the memory of how far his club had fallen before he picked them up off the mat is still as vivid now as it was in December 2019.

"That image, that feeling of the stadium, the crowd," Arteta said last week. "Fifty percent of the stadium was empty. It really got into me. I said, with this, there is no project, there is anything that we're not going to do. This is not going to work."

That it did work is Arteta's great victory. The Premier League title they secured as Manchester City dropped points to Bournemouth

on Tuesday is the outcome of his triumph, and a particularly glorious one.

The story of Arsenal is not the norm-breaking, discourse-making, nerve-shredding 2025-26 season. No, the story of Arsenal is the seven-year journey that got them back to where their manager always knew they belonged.

The long rebuild

To understand the sheer scale of Arteta's achievement, one that should probably make the holy trinity of Arsenal managers -- Arsene Wenger, George Graham, Herbert Chapman -- into a quartet, one must appreciate the depths this club had to climb out from. For many, it had never got quite as low as it did in 2019. Co-owner Josh Kroenke would admit he had to develop a "rhinoceros hide" to cope with the anger aimed in his direction amid the We Care, Do You movement, one which challenged ownership on a deeper level than just getting their checkbook out. Kroenke Sports and Entertainment had held a stake in Arsenal since 2007 and, after a protracted boardroom battle with Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov, took the club private in 2018.

That decade had been hard on Arsenal. Wenger had become a divisive figure and a post-prime coach. Though the bulk of the stadium debt had been lifted, neither Kroenke nor Usmanov were putting money into a club that wasn't theirs. The ground might have been a great revenue generator, but in the 2010s the revenue growth was in broadcast and commercial, both areas where Arsenal were lagging behind. Their defining games of the years gone by had been the routs inflicted on them by the teams they once battled with: 5-1 to Liverpool, 6-0 to Chelsea, 8-2 to Manchester United.

Defeat at Old Trafford did at least deliver two of the foundation pieces of the future rebuild. Per Mertesacker and Arteta were cornerstones of a club that won three FA Cups in four years. The former would go on to manage the academy, the latter, well it was apparent even when he was club captain that he was destined for bigger things. His presence ahead of the 2015 FA Cup Final, a match he would miss through injury, stood out to more than one senior figure at the club as a lightbulb moment, when it struck them they were looking at a future Arsenal manager. Wenger entrusted Arteta with a mid-week team talk in which a video reflected the importance of the competition the Gunners have won more than anyone else. Reading and watching back the press conference from a few days' later, it is already striking how at ease the then 33-year-old seemed in front of the media.

Arteta as an Arsenal player talking with manager Arsene Wenger

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"His focus and his dedication were remarkable," said a source. "I thought Wenger was obsessive and committed to a degree I'd never seen before. Mikel is another level again."

That was what Arsenal needed. They just didn't know it, though Arteta was agonizingly close to getting the job after Wenger's departure. After a manager who had bent the very turf at London Colney to his will, it felt natural that they should go for a pure head coach. It did