The Victoria Line train sped south from Seven Sisters. It was full of Spurs supporters, who did not know whether to laugh or cry after their last-gasp relegation escape. At Highbury & Islington, the platform sped past in a flash of red until the Tube came to a halt.
The carriage doors opened. Arsenal fans, who had been watching the title celebrations from Selhurst Park in the pubs and bars of N5, flooded on. They saw the white of their rivals’ shirts. There was no emotional dilemma for them. They started to laugh.
That is the way the season is ending for Arsenal. There is only good news. Even their shot at winning the Champions League for the first time in their history, against Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest, at the weekend feels like a free hit now.
They have won the Premier League for the first time in 22 years, all the weight has fallen from their shoulders, no one can call them chokers again and they will go to Hungary knowing that they are underdogs and that they have a puncher’s chance of causing an upset.
The good news stretches beyond the weekend, though. Because when the tears from the farewells to Pep Guardiola, Mo Salah and the rest dry and you look at the landscape of the English game, it appears unlikely Arsenal’s dominance is going to end any time soon.
Partly, that is because of their own strength. Under the ownership of the Kroenkes and the management of Mikel Arteta, Arsenal have become a coherent, cohesive, aligned, smoothly functioning club very much at odds with the chaos of fools and egos that reigns elsewhere.
Arsenal already have a squad of impressive depth that allowed them to absorb injuries to Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard, Jurrien Timber, Kai Havertz, Riccardo Calafiori, Ben White, William Saliba and Gabriel this season. If they strengthen from their position of strength, there is no reason why they should not be even more formidable next season.
And the truth is that most of their rivals are in disarray. Liverpool are deep in transition. The departures of Mo Salah and Andrew Robertson were the final signs that Jurgen Klopp’s last great team has broken up. There is hardly anything left.
Whether Arne Slot is given time to work with the new squad that has been assembled but which was wracked by injuries this season, is still open to question. Whether he stays or goes, Liverpool have too much ground to make up to be realistic challengers to Arsenal next season.
Chelsea achieved a coup in the appointment of Xabi Alonso as their manager but their structure suggests that it does not matter who is the manager or the head coach. Whoever it is will be subsumed by the mess of five sporting directors and two over-involved co-owners.
Chelsea say they have seen the error of their ways but the sporting directors are still there and they are saddled with a toxic dressing room and poisonous players on long contracts. Even if Alonso starts to turn things around, Chelsea are also too far back to be challengers.
Manchester City are harder to read but Enzo Maresca is no Pep Guardiola. This is a guy who was so triumphant at leading a Chelsea team to fourth place last season that he said his message to anyone who had doubted him was to ‘f*** off’. Good luck with telling his new bosses at Manchester City that fourth place is a triumph.
Maresca will have the benefit of a stable hierarchy behind him at City but whether he has the personality and the ability to make a success of following Guardiola is more open to question. Maresca appears unusually sensitive to criticism and uncomfortable in the spotlight. Following Guardiola will not provide any place to hide.
History tells us that there is almost always a significant dip in a club’s fortunes after the departure of a great manager and even if City have a strong structure, they have other issues to address. Bernardo Silva, who has also left the club, may have been 31 but he was still City’s best player. Rodri, their other standout midfielder, is not the player he once was.
Which leaves Manchester United. Michael Carrick did a fine job at Old Trafford when he took over from Ruben Amorim. There are no caveats to that. He richly deserved getting the job on a permanent basis. There is no reason to think that United will not continue to make progress under him.
But they need to have a good summer in the transfer market and their record is sketchy. Elliot Anderson would be a fine signing but the suggestion is that City have stolen a march on them in the pursuit of the Nottingham Forest midfielder. There are still too many players in their side nowhere near good enough to fuel a run at the title. They have to be upgraded.
United made progress in the league this season but they did it without the additional weight of Champions League fixtures. Carrick will have to cope with more fixtures next season and the pressures that will bring to bear on a squad that may not be able to cope with it. United, too, are at least a season away from being viable challengers.
There may be surprises. Few foresaw Liverpool’s collapse this season after they won the league so comfortably in 2024-25 but Slot was coping with a changing team and a raft of new players, like Florian Wirtz, who struggled to adapt to the Premier League in their first season.
Arsenal have no such issues. They have a manager who has transformed the club and will now be hungry to reap more rewards after the lean years. He has learned at the hand of the master. He was Guardiola’s assistant. He knows how a great leader manages success.
That’s the bad news for those Spurs fans who saw Arsenal supporters gloating as soon as they got on the Tube at Highbury & Islington. For Arteta and his club, this season’s title triumph was not an ending. It was a beginning.
Brady deserves criticism for leaving sinking ship
I’m sorry but I still find it hard to join in with the paeans of praise lavished upon Karren Brady in the wake of her departure as West Ham United vice-chair a few weeks ago.
It is a strange kind of leader who leaves a sinking ship just before relegation. It is almost as if she thought that by jumping before it disappeared beneath the waves, everyone would forget her role in the whole sorry affair.
‘You sold our soul for this s***hole,’ the West Ham fans sang at owner David Sullivan at the London Stadium during the futile victory over Leeds United on Sunday. That is Brady’s legacy, too.
Sadness to England squad omissions
There were many good things about Thomas Tuchel’s England squad. It is packed with talent and fine players.
But it is sad that three of England’s four most naturally talented players – Cole Palmer, Phil Foden and Trent Alexander-Arnold – are not even on the plane. That says a lot about what our game has come to value.