Arsenal

Here is the uncomfortable truth about Arsenal: they are a club that has spent the better part of two decades convincing themselves the next season will be the one. Thirteen league titles and a record fourteen FA Cups tell you this is a serious football institution. But the gap between what Arsenal believe they are and what they have actually won since 2004 remains the defining tension of English football’s most impatient fanbase.

Founded in 1886 as Dial Square — munitions workers in Woolwich, which is worth remembering when the modern brand talks about heritage — the Gunners have been a permanent fixture in the top flight since 1919. Nobody has been there longer. That longevity breeds a particular kind of entitlement, and Mikel Arteta has been both the beneficiary and the victim of it. Back-to-back runners-up finishes behind Manchester City in 2022-23 and 2023-24 were, depending on who you ask, either proof of remarkable progress or the most expensive near-misses in Premier League history.

The Emirates Stadium, that gleaming 60,704-seat monument to Arsene Wenger’s financial gamble in 2006, sells out week after week. The matchday experience is slick, corporate, and loud enough when it matters. Whether it carries the same menace that Highbury once did is a question Arsenal supporters would rather not answer honestly.

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The 2025-26 campaign is being framed as Arteta’s defining season, and with good reason. The squad is deeper, more tactically flexible, and more ruthless than at any point in his tenure. Academy graduates sit alongside marquee signings in a system that prizes intensity and positional discipline above all else. Arteta has built something genuinely impressive — the question, as always with Arsenal, is whether impressive translates to silverware. For Australian supporters, and there are a staggering number of them, the emotional investment is real. Arsenal remain one of the most followed Premier League clubs in this country, which means the heartbreak, when it arrives, is felt across multiple time zones. Whether 2025-26 delivers the title or another agonising near-miss will say more about this club’s identity than any transfer window ever could.

VS — Chief sports columnist, australiafootball.com