A decade covering Arsenal: Inside the emotional journey from toxic mess to Premier League champions

After 22 years of heartbreak and hope, North London finally erupts as Mikel Arteta completes his Arsenal revolution

James Benge

May 20, 2026

12:34 pm ET

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7 min read

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It is a dubious honor, writing and talking about the team you've followed for as long as you can remember. Almost everyone doing this gig has a club, and, honestly, it'd be weirder if someone got into this without any emotional attachment. And, really, 99.5% of the time it is quite easy to do your job like a professional grown-up. It's an honor, of course. I get paid to share the thoughts, insights and information I might otherwise share for free. It's just that there have not been quite as many of those, honors that is, to really delight an audience, chronicling the second half of that 22-year wait for the grandest of prizes.

Of course, Arsenal's problems in that time have been the sort thousands of fanbases might swap for theirs in a heartbeat. Three FA Cups, Champions League nights, that thing Mesut Ozil did when he kicked the ball into the ground and it looped up: there has been a lot to like. No one should apologize for wanting a bit more, though.

For a very long time, it seemed like that wouldn't come. The banter years, the Wenger In and Wenger Out banners over the Hawthorns, the annual contract crisis: there really were countless opportunities to serve as a misery courier for one of football's biggest fanbases. What Mikel Arteta inherited was a toxic mess, within and without. Being on the ground for an Arsenal game felt like being locked in the heart of the men's mental health epidemic. Anti-depressants and merch drops can only do so much.

By the summer of 2019 it really was quite hard to see a way out of all this for Arsenal. The owner, the coaches, the players, the fans: everyone seemed to be the problem. It says everything about how chaotic things had become that the club captain refusing to join the team on the eve of a pre-season tour is barely a footnote in the history of the Unai Emery interregnum.

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

James Benge

And just as you were about to abandon hope, the Starboy came along. That's what was so incredible about Bukayo Saka. When he told me, in his first conversation with external media, that he and his fellow bright young things "can be in this Arsenal team and take on the world," I believed him. At 17 years old, Saka was issuing rallying cries from the scorching bowels of Bank of America Stadium that seven years later would be fulfilled and then some.

Not that the struggles were over. To the last, this team would flay you to pieces, both professionally and personally. There'll be no easy filing well before the whistle at home to already relegated Burnley. When this team go from slamming in three goals against Bournemouth and Aston Villa to hunkering down for the ugliest split-the-0.88-xG clash at home against Liverpool, it is as if they are daring you to understand what you can say about them.

This season, Arsenal have challenged everything the last decade has taught us about football. You know, that it is attack that wins you titles. Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger: that's how they did it. Experience had taught me that the 1.60 xG for, 0.7 xG against approach just opens the door to more variance than big attacking numbers, even though common sense tells me that's not the case.

You kept waiting for the game where Fulham would score with their first shot, where a daft red card or an injury would derail Arsenal. It never quite came. Well, except the injuries. They never quite stopped. Even in that last game you had to remind yourself that there is something extraordinarily special about locking up shop for the final half hour of a game you lead by a single goal. If someone were to ask me for the greatest professional disappointment of my time covering Arsenal it is that I still haven't seen them pitch that proverbial no-hitter, and keep a team from taking a single shot against them. I still believe.

By May, North London's tension had become contagious. Bournemouth must have taken some back down south with them when they broke the hearts of the Emirates back in April. Ultimately, Andoni Iraola and his players delivered Arsenal their title in the most fitting of fashions, effective and yet somehow terrifying football.

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— James Benge (@jamesbenge) May 19, 2026

When Michael Oliver blew that final whistle, though, and Arsenal fans could smash out of their glass case of emotions, they delivered a party easily worth waiting 22 years for. A 20-minute walk from the stadium, you could hear cheers in every direction. Then silence. Thirty seconds, a car horn pierced it. Then another. Then a cacophony. City players were still filtering off the pitch in Bournemouth as the ca