When the time comes for looking back, Mikel Arteta will find himself reflecting on moments — moments when Arsenal had their destiny in their hands and fell just short, like the night Manchester City turned the tide at the Emirates Stadium on February 15.
Or the moment his defence switched off at a corner away to Everton on February 4. Or the moment when, 2-0 up and cruising against Liverpool at Anfield on April 9, they were pegged back just before half-time, which in turn could be traced back to other moments: not just Granit Xhaka's much-discussed shove on Trent Alexander-Arnold, but Martin Odegaard's failure to track Diogo Jota's run and then the misfortune, from an Arsenal perspective, of Jordan Henderson's touch falling perfectly for Mohamed Salah three yards out.
Or the moment Bukayo Saka missed the target with a penalty when Arsenal were 2-1 up at West Ham United on April 16. Or the moment, a couple of minutes later, when a patched-up defence suffered a collective lapse and allowed Jarrod Bowen to equalise.
Any football season can be boiled down to a collection of moments. In Arsenal's case, that series of jolts turned a 2022-23 campaign of huge progress and rich promise — challenging for a first Premier League title in 19 years, setting a pace which at the halfway stage had them on course for a record-equalling total of 100 points — into one that looks like being tinged with regrets; so near, yet so far.
If only they had held firm at that corner at Goodison Park. If only Odegaard and Saka, their two outstanding players this season, had not suffered those momentary lapses away to Liverpool and West Ham. If only William Saliba hadn't been injured on that arduous Europa League night at home to Sporting Lisbon. If only Aaron Ramsdale hadn't gifted possession to Carlos Alcaraz in the opening seconds of what became a nerve-fraught evening at the Emirates against Southampton. If only, if only…
But however much Arsenal felt glory was within their grasp — and at times it was — they haven't really been undone by moments. On a micro-level, yes, but the bigger picture is that an emerging, captivating, slightly fragile team has been hunted down, reeled in and ultimately eaten up by Manchester City, an unstoppable force that combines the vast wealth of Abu Dhabi ownership with an unrivalled talent pool and an utterly brilliant, utterly insatiable coach.
Even the mighty Real Madrid had no answer, outclassed and overwhelmed in the Champions League semi-final second leg on Wednesday. Carlo Ancelotti, too, could focus on moments if he wished to — the way his players allowed Bernardo Silva to drift into space for both the first and second goals on the night — but again it would be missing the point. The European champions were emphatically beaten by a much, much better side.
The modern Manchester City are many things — a world-class team, a world-class sports project, a proxy brand for Abu Dhabi and, in the words of Amnesty International, the subject of “one of football's most brazen attempts to 'sportswash' (…) a country that relies on exploited migrant labour and locks up peaceful critics and human-rights defenders”.
It says so much about English football (and indeed British life) in the 21st century that the Premier League's dominant force is a sportswashing project for an oil-rich Middle Eastern state.
It also speaks volumes about English football governance that City were only recently charged with allegedly breaching 115 Premier League financial regulations between 2009 and 2018 — the period in which Abu Dhabi's wealth transformed them from a downtrodden, success-starved club into a modern-day superpower.
Any kind of resolution to that case seems a long way off. Until then, the club continues to deny the allegations and the Premier League maintains the most awkward silence imaginable.
To rivals such as Liverpool, who have appeared exhausted by the effort of trying to compete with them over the previous four years, Arsenal and the rest of the 'Big Six' clubs, Manchester City are none of these things. They are simply a massive problem.
At least Arsenal have pushed them hard this season. In the five campaigns between 2017-18 and 2021-22, they had finished, on average, 27.8 points behind City. To have reduced the gap so substantially this season is a sign of real progress under Arteta.
Tottenham have not come within 20 points of City over the same period and, unlike Arsenal, they will not do so this season.
The closest Chelsea have got to them was a 15-point deficit in 2019-20, the year when Pep Guardiola's team suffered a significant dip and finished 18 points adrift of champions Liverpool. Manchester United? Runners-up under Jose Mourinho in 2017-18 and then Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in 2020-21, but neither season saw a sustained challenge and both were followed by a dramatic implosion as they finished at least 30 points behind their neighbours the next season.
Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, only Liverpool came within 10 points of City in the Premier League. In fact, they did rather more than that, breaking the 90-point barrier three times in five seasons, but they had only one Premier League title to show for their efforts, such was the excellence of a City team which beat them by a single point on two occasions.
English football has never known sustained excellence like this. Yes, there have been periods of hegemony before — Liverpool won seven out of nine league titles from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, as did Manchester United in the first nine years of the Premier League era — but no team has won anything like as many points as this City side. They are setting the bar so incredibly high that the margin for error is now vanishingly thin for any aspiring challenger.
Jurgen Klopp touched on this in December 2018, approaching the halfway stage of a campaign in which his Liverpool team finished with 97 points (30 wins, seven draws, just one defeat) but still came second.
“I can't say that City are lucky here and lucky there. They aren't,” he said. “Every matchday, they are spot on. They were last year (2017-18) when they get 100 points and they stay in that mode. Chapeau (Hats off). I have to say it, there's no sign of weakness.
“They are the current champions, and they still play like champions. We are all the challengers. That's why we should concentrate on every game and not take any result for granted. We are all judged on that because they are the champions, they can do it, so it should be possible for us as well.”
Klopp and his players certainly rose to that challenge, pushing City so hard in 2018-19 before winning that long-awaited Premier League title a year later. Arsenal have embraced the challenge this season, even if ultimately they look like falling short. But United? Spurs? Chelsea? They have been drifting.
Do these clubs know what a title challenge looks like in the Guardiola era? Do they know what it feels like? Do they realise the expansive playing style and the unstinting effort required to break 90 points? Perhaps not.
If United win their three remaining games this season, a total of 75 points would be their second-highest since Sir Alex Ferguson retired as their manager a decade ago. But even that would be nowhere near enough to challenge for a title these days, just as 81 points wasn't in 2017-18.
United don't score enough goals. In the first nine seasons of the post-Ferguson era, they averaged just 62 in the Premier League. This season, they are on course for 55. Again, that is nothing like good enough in an era when City seem intent on scoring in three figures for the fourth time in a decade. A new centre-forward should make a significant difference at Old Trafford next season, but if they are to compete with City they need to find a more dominant, more assertive way of playing, particularly away from home against top-half opposition.
Chelsea have hovered between 66 and 74 points over the past five years and while that might sound perfectly acceptable next to this season's calamitous underperformance (they will finish somewhere between 43 and 52 points), again those numbers are nowhere near enough. Since winning the 2016-17 Premier League they have made nothing resembling a title challenge.
Sure, Chelsea cannot possibly be as bad again next season, but the scale of the improvement required is enormous. We are talking about a team that has taken 24 points from 26 matches — relegation form, basically — since mid-October. Chelsea made a huge leap from 50 points in 2015-16 to 93 points to win the title under Antonio Conte the next season, but for those players it was more a case of rediscovering old habits. For this squad, talented but dysfunctional, it will have to be about developing new ones and finding a new direction under a new coach, presumably Mauricio Pochettino.
Arsenal have shown it is possible for a team to make huge strides forward — not just over the course of this season but dating back to the chastening midway point of 2020-21 — by establishing and adhering to a clear vision of exciting, attacking, energetic football with a young, hungry group of players. But it is easier said than done. It takes smart recruitment, inspired coaching and, above all, the mentality to keep battling against an opponent which, as Klopp said, shows no sign of weakness.
That is significant. Klopp has often spoken in awe-struck terms about his Liverpool team's mentality. The thrill of fighting City for the biggest prizes always brought the best out of his players, the two teams appearing to push each other to even greater heights. But there is a flip side to that dynamic; when those big prizes drifted out of reach, like in early 2021 and for much of this hugely disappointing campaign, Liverpool's much-lauded mentality became a source of weakness rather than strength.
A sense of resignation seemed to take hold of Klopp's men almost from the start of this season, a hangover from the previous campaign compounded by the realisation they were going to be competing for a top-four finish at best this time. They cannot afford to spend the opening months of next term feeling sorry for themselves, struggling to find their focus and their purpose. Nor can Arsenal if this season is to be seen as the start of something big rather than the end of a dream.
It is an enormous challenge, even bigger than that of trying to topple the Liverpool of the 1970s and 1980s or the United of the 1990s and 2000s. It is not quite as extreme as the situation in Germany, where Bayern Munich are closing in on their 11th consecutive title — and this season has been a rarity there in that Borussia Dortmund are still pushing them with two games to go — but it is in danger of getting that way for as long as Guardiola is in charge of City, potentially beyond.
Klopp has said through gritted teeth a couple of times this season that “nobody can compete with City” in the transfer market, such is their ownership model — or rather their funding model, which has meant their commercial revenue has overtaken that of Liverpool, United, Real Madrid and Barcelona thanks largely to deals with companies in Abu Dhabi.
“You have the best team in the world and you put in the best striker on the market (Erling Haaland),” the Liverpool manager said in October. “No matter what it costs, (they) just do it. We cannot act like them. It's not possible.”
Klopp said City were one of “three clubs in world football who can do what they want financially” (the other two seemingly being Paris Saint-Germain and Newcastle United, who are owned by the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and Saudi Arabia respectively).
The truth is slightly more nuanced; there are financial regulations these days, even if a) both UEFA and the Premier League have failed to police them effectively and b) City have not always done everything they wanted in the transfer market, as seen in the cases of Virgil van Dijk, Jorginho, Harry Kane and a few others.
Could they have spent as extravagantly as Chelsea have over their first 12 months under the ownership of the consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital? Perhaps not. Would they have wanted to? Almost certainly not.
What sets City apart is less the size of their budget but the strength of the foundations they have built, both on the pitch and off it, over the past decade. The suspicion — asserted by UEFA, denied by the club, partially rejected by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, raised again by the Premier League, denied once more by the club — is that their empire has been built in defiance of the financial regulations.
But their rivals can't do anything about that. Well, they can petition for the authorities to come down heavily on City — and they haven't been shy about doing that in the past, the off-pitch equivalent of players swarming around the referee and brandishing imaginary red cards — but experience will tell them not to spend too much time fantasising about potential outcomes.
And experience will tell them City will be right up there again next season, and for as long as Guardiola is there. This is a project backed by supreme wealth, for geopolitical purposes, but, in stark contrast to its Qatari equivalent at PSG, it has retained a firm focus on sporting excellence. Quite apart from being extremely talented, Guardiola and his team are proving as restless and as relentless as any of the great sides of the past.
It took something spectacular from Liverpool to challenge them and then, three seasons ago, briefly topple them — and it is going to take something spectacular for any club to do so over the next few years.
That could be Liverpool again if they can be reinforced and re-energised by a summer rebuild. It could be Arsenal again if Arteta is allowed to keep building on this season's progress. It could be Manchester United, particularly if they are emboldened by a change of ownership. It could be Chelsea or Tottenham under new management. It could be Newcastle if they can become more aggressive in the transfer market without losing the quiet, diligent approach which, under Dan Ashworth and Eddie Howe, has been an unexpected feature of their new regime.
Arsenal have returned to the Champions League under Mikel Arteta but their title challenge has faltered (Photo: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
But it could easily be none of the above.
Even if several of those clubs are stronger next season than in this one, as is likely, it is not easy to assume any of them will have what it takes to keep pace with City, stay the course, smash the 90-point barrier and fight them to the bitter end.
As Arteta will testify, like Klopp before him, it is exhausting to try to live with them, knowing there is rarely such a thing as a “good point” away from home in the Premier League these days because the margin for error is so small — and knowing that even if you match their results against the other 18 teams, it is so difficult to beat them in those all-important head-to-head matches.
Klopp admitted as much at the end of last season, saying Liverpool's pair of 2-2 draws with City felt like positive results at the time but that ultimately those two matches had cost his team. Yes, he could look back ruefully on moments in those games, but again it really wasn't about moments; against this City side, it is about trying to cling on for dear life during those long periods of pressure and then seizing your opportunities when they arise.
Arsenal have taken 81 points from their 34 “other” games this season, while City have 79 from 33. The problem is that even that record left them with little margin for error when they took on the defending champions. In both those fixtures, ultimately, they were overwhelmed, losing them by an aggregate score of seven goals to two.
Yes, you could focus on moments if you wanted to — the Takehiro Tomiyasu backpass that played in Kevin De Bruyne for the opening goal at the Emirates in February, Rob Holding's struggle to get to grips with Haaland in the return game in Manchester last month — but all these moments merely underline the difference between a high-performing but slightly fallible team and a supreme team which is as close to infallible as English football has ever seen.
As for how a team in Arsenal's position try to close that gap, the next step is arguably even more difficult than those they have taken to this point.
Liverpool won one Premier League in four seasons of almost unremitting excellence. Three years later, that solitary triumph is starting to look like a blip in recent history — not in terms of their own performance level at the time but in terms of an interruption to what now feels like English football's new order.