Mikel Arteta was surprisingly cheerful for a man whose dream had just slipped away for another year.
“Want to come with me?” replied Arteta, when asked what he planned to do last night after Manchester City had beaten his Arsenal side to another Premier League title (dinner with family and friends, if you were wondering).
Arteta has had time to accept the probability of City being champions again — by his own admission, the decisive blow was Arsenal’s home defeat by Aston Villa on April 14 — but his positivity also stems from the sheer depth of his belief.
“We’ll win [the league],” the Spaniard said. “When, I don’t know. But if we keep knocking and being that close, in the end it will happen.”
Arteta is surely right.
If Arsenal continue to progress at the same rate, he should lead them to the title and perhaps the most relevant question is whether they can finish ahead of Pep Guardiola’s City — or must to wait for the Catalan to leave English football.
Guardiola, who has a year remaining on his City contract, is certain Arsenal will continue to challenge and, with Liverpool likely heading for a period of post-Jurgen Klopp transition, this is now indisputably the Premier League’s fiercest rivalry.
“With the age they have, the manager they have, the way they are playing the last two seasons, [Arsenal] will stay here for a long, long time,” Guardiola said before yesterday’s matches.
Arteta’s side won 16 of their final 18 league games, only dropping points twice since the turn of the year — in a goalless draw at City and against Villa. Pre-Guardiola, their 89 points would have been enough in most seasons and even last term but, characteristically, City managed to find a way to go further, wrapping up a fourth consecutive title with a 3-1 victory over West Ham, which rendered Arsenal’s 2-1 win over Everton meaningless.
It was in some ways fitting that it took barely two minutes for much of the excitement and tension to drain from the Emirates, as news of Phil Foden’s 79-second opener filtered through.
This was always a title race which felt part-illusory once Arsenal ceded the advantage to Guardiola’s winning machine.
The crowd was briefly lifted when Mohammed Kudus made it 2-1 at the Etihad with a spectacular bicycle-kick, shortly after Takehiro Tomiyasu cancelled out Idrissa Gueye’s opener, before a rumour spread that West Ham had equalised.
And, really, that was the peak of the expectation in north London, with City adding a third on the hour before Kai Havertz’s late winner for Arsenal.
For Arteta, the off-season at his holiday home in Mallorca will be spent planning how to take Arsenal to “a different level” and he acknowledged that they may need the 100 points City amassed in 2017-18 to be certain of the title in future.
The club will have to be ambitious in the market, with a top-level centre-forward and midfielder to play alongside Declan Rice and Martin Odegaard likely to be among their priorities.
Arsenal also need more depth and Arteta can reflect that his side struggled during the pressure points in the calendar. They suffered over the hectic festive schedule, losing consecutive games to West Ham and Fulham at the end of December, and then again in April, when the Champions League knockouts coincided with crunch league fixtures.
Arsenal are still too reliant on Bukayo Saka — although Gabriel Martinelli deputised impressively on the right yesterday, with the England winger missing with a slight muscle problem but not considered a worry for the Euros — and most of their back five.
William Saliba was one of only two outfield players in the Premier League to play every second of the season, while Rice, Odegaard and Gabriel Magalhaes all racked up more than 3,000 minutes (Ben White was just short). No City player, by contrast, featured in more than 3,000 minutes, illustrating the superior depth of Guardiola’s squad.
Jurrien Timber, who made his long-awaited return from injury yesterday, should boost Arteta’s options going forward but Arsenal were luckier with injuries than most clubs this term, never suffering the kind of crises which hit Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United, Tottenham and Newcastle.
Arteta will now reflect but he should not have any regrets, and the message from the manager and Odegaard, who addressed fans on the pitch after the game, was clear: Arsenal will go again next term.
“The evolution [is] so quickly happening, I haven’t seen it before,” said Arteta. “So, we’re on the right trajectory and now we need really to pull the teeth and bite into it because we really want more.”
