"Only a person who understands the frustration and disappointment we have suffered in recent seasons can understand why our players were so intent on keeping that lead." Don Revie said that after Leeds won the 1968 League Cup playing suffocating, cynical football. Fifty-eight years later, Mikel Arteta could say exactly the same thing — and probably wouldn't bother.
Arsenal are Premier League champions for the first time since 2004. Twenty-two years. Three consecutive second-place finishes before this — 84 points, 89 points, 74 points, each time not enough. The drought is over. The question now is what kind of champions they'll be remembered as.
The short answer: not the romantic kind.
Corner kicks, long throws, and 'not football'
Brighton's Fabian Hurzeler watched Arsenal grind out a 1-0 win at the Amex in March and said flatly: "That's not football, what Arsenal did there." Peter Schmeichel, never short of an opinion, called them "ugly." Emmanuel Petit — an actual Arsenal Premier League winner — admitted "I get bored sometimes" watching this team. Even the club's own podcast, Handbrake Off, has gnawed at the style question all season.
Arteta's response to the criticism? "What. A. Surprise." He's not pretending to care.
They effectively clinched the title with a header from a corner against already-relegated Burnley. Twelve days earlier, neutrals were incensed over a 1-0 win at West Ham built around a controversial VAR call at — yes — a corner. The 'Set Piece FC' label isn't going anywhere. Arsenal's last four Premier League results read 1-0, 3-0, 1-0, 1-0. Functional. Mechanical. Theirs.
The parallel with Don Revie's Leeds is uncomfortable but fair. Leeds won the 1969 title by going to Anfield and drawing 0-0 to take the point they needed. They were booed and mocked. Yet the Kop stayed behind at the final whistle, and when Revie sent his players toward them, the stand erupted: "Champions! Champions!" That complexity — the grudging respect amid the distaste — is exactly what Arsenal will navigate now. Except nobody's confidently predicting a similar moment at any ground this season.
Revie's teams collected trophies and collected enemies in equal measure. History compressed it all into two words: 'Dirty Leeds.' Arsenal's version — 'Boring Arsenal', 'Corner-kick Champions' — is already set in concrete.
The players who could change the narrative
Here's the tension, though. Arsenal actually have footballers. Not athletes playing a system — footballers. Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard, Eberechi Eze, Leandro Trossard, Myles Lewis-Skelley. These are players capable of the kind of moments that make neutral fans stop scrolling.
Eze's volley against Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League was so good it briefly overshadowed Declan Rice's equally excellent second goal in the same match. And then there was Max Dowman — 16 years old — bursting down the pitch to score against Everton in minute 97, the Emirates erupting like a crowd watching a Tour de France stage on a mountain climb. Arteta called it "one of the best moments we lived together at the Emirates." He wasn't wrong.
The Athletic's Amy Lawrence had noted, before that Everton game, that Arsenal possess players capable of special moments but there's "a level of inhibition" preventing them. She added, almost prophetically, that maybe "Max Dowman could come on and change the temperature." He did, 48 hours later.
So the DNA for something more expressive is there. The Carabao Cup final defeat to Manchester City in late March, however — joyless, toothless — was a reminder of how quickly the handbrake comes back on. The quadruple talk evaporated that afternoon.
Cruyff once said: "There is no medal better than being acclaimed for your style." Arsenal 2025-26 have the medal. The acclaim is going to take considerably longer — if it comes at all.
