Arsenal’s recurring nightmare is playing out once again.
After sitting on top of the Premier League table since October 4, Manchester City are now in pole position to claim the title following their 1-0 win at relegated Burnley on Thursday morning.
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Pep Guardiola’s men have won three matches in a row, and sit level on points with Arsenal (70 points) as well as goal difference (+37) but their superior goals scored tally (66 to 63) has them in first place.
For Arsenal, City’s ascent to top spot has come after months of nervy slip ups.
The warning signs that a fourth straight runner-up finish could occur were there.
January was soured by a draw at battlers Nottingham Forest and a loss at home to a resurgent Manchester United.
February was spoiled by a 2-2 draw at last-placed Wolves – where Arsenal became the first team at the top of the Premier League table to cough up a two-goal lead against an opponent in the relegation zone.
The Gunners won all three of their league matches in March, won an FA Cup fifth round tie against third-tier Mansfield Town and advanced from the Champions League Round of 16 against Bayer Leverkusen.
But that month was tarnished by a 2-0 loss to City in the final of the League Cup at Wembley.
Despite other setbacks, it felt like the entire momentum of the season shifted that day.
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After the international break, their chances of another trip to Wembley were ended by second-tier Southampton with a 2-1 defeat in their FA Cup quarter-final.
The downward spiral has carried over to the league this month with a 2-1 loss at home to Bournemouth – which would have temporarily put them 12 points clear of City.
That was followed by a 2-1 defeat to Guardiola’s side at the Etihad.
The only thing stopping all of the alarm bells going off was Arsenal scraping past Portuguese outfit Sporting 1-0 across two legs in their Champions League quarter-final.
Fingers are being pointed in every direction.
The players, manager Mikel Arteta and Arsenal’s fans are all in the gun.
While some pundits are remaining buoyant about their chances of still winning the title, or perhaps they are trying to mozz the north London club.
Arsenal missing out on the title again – having not won it since 2004 – in the same season that Tottenham face relegation is the stuff of dreams for banter merchants.
WHERE HAS IT GONE WRONG?
In crunch time, the buck always stops with those in charge.
And Mikel Arteta is under more scrutiny than ever before right now.
The Spanish manager has maintained a defiant stance in interviews, but former Chelsea star Jon Obi Mikel believes Arteta has shown he is “rattled” with erratic behaviour during the week.
“‘I’m on fire. Bring it on.’ That’s the quote, isn’t it? Every week he’s coming out with a quote,” the two-time Premier League winner said on his podcast.
“One week, they’re playing with a pen in the training ground, they have TikTok music playing. It’s all going off with ‘bring the lunch, bring the dinner’.
“Just calm down, mate, enjoy it, relax. You’ve worked so hard to be in this position, don’t be rattled; he is rattled.
“I’m looking at the man, I’m looking at both sides, both managers, and you can tell. When you look at both managers right now, you can see who’s been there, who’s done it, the experience, the know-how, how to play down situations, how to control situations.
“Both managers are dealing with it very, very differently. On one hand, you have a manager who’s absolutely rattled. Who’s lost his s***, who’s lost the control of his dressing room. He looks tense. He looks, even when he tries to be calm, he’s faking it, it’s not natural.”
Arteta has also been ridiculed for his defensive-minded approach that has gone to new levels this season.
Arsenal have regularly been branded ‘Set Piece FC’ by opposition fans for leading the league in goals scored from dead ball situations.
The Gunners have scored 23 times from corners and free kicks, accounting for a little more than third of their total goal tally for the season.
They have also benefited from four own goals as a result of their corner dominance.
Their title rivals Manchester City, on the other hand, have scored 11 set piece goals, ranking them 17th in the league.
There is a clear ideological divide in play style between Arteta and his former mentor Pep Guardiola, whose tactics inspired lots of teams around the world to play tiki-taka.
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Neutral observers are often finding non-Arsenal games more easy on the eye as Arteta allows the contest to turn into a scrap.
Liverpool great Jamie Carragher believes he has gone too far and it has squandered points this season.
“Arteta has led his team to the brink by sticking to a pragmatic, broadly defensive formula,” Carragher wrote in The Telegraph earlier this month.
“For seven months, Arsenal supporters have tolerated increasingly unconvincing victories more than they have embraced them. There has been an “end justifying the means” mood at the Emirates ever since Arteta shifted strategy to follow a path to become more like José Mourinho’s Chelsea than Guardiola’s City, under whom he honed his craft as a coach.
“His problem is that failure will be received so unsympathetically, Arsenal’s supporters would make their team the most criticised runners-up in history,” Carragher continued.
“My worry for Arsenal throughout this season has been the lack of strike power. I cannot recall considering a Premier League team of the year which did not have a single attacker from the eventual title winners. If Arsenal are champions, none of their forwards will be under consideration above City’s.”
Perhaps Arteta’s willingness to stifle attacking flair comes from a lack of faith in his forwards.
City boast Erling Haaland (23 goals) and Antoine Semenyo (15 goals) in the top three in the golden boot – even though Semenyo moved to Manchester from Bournemouth midway through the season.
While Arsenal’s Viktor Gyokeres has netted 12 league goals in his first season in red.
Their next best goal scorers are fellow recruit Eberechi Eze and Bukayo Saka with six goals apiece – five of Eze’s goals have come in north London derbies against relegation-threatened Tottenham.
The underwhelming numbers led The Observer’s Rory Smith to pose whether Arsenal went after the wrong signings leading into this campaign.
“There is a legitimate argument to say that instead of signing Noni Madueke and Viktor Gyokeres, should Arsenal have gone for Alexander Isak?” he told BBC Radio 5 Live.
“That has always been the ‘what if’ around Arsenal this season.
“I think the club were spooked by what happened to Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard a couple of years ago. They knew they were reliant on individuals to stay fit.
“That hasn’t been the case this season, they have lasted the course. It’s just that in those really fine margins, maybe they do need someone who is on the amount of money Erling Haaland is on.
“It’s just that you can’t do that and have that depth.”
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WHY THEY WON’T WIN THE TITLE
Those attacking concerns are only one reason why many believe Arsenal will not win the title.
Another has emerged not from what some have seen on the pitch, but in the stands.
Bournemouth’s Tyler Adams recently told the Men In Blazers podcast that the Cherries fed off the stress within the Emirates created by the title race.
“You could tell early on when they’re trying to play out from the back that there was a sense of nervousness,” Adams said.
“In the first five, ten minutes they played some of their best football. You saw they were confident, but it just takes one little error, one little mistake, and the fans get a little bit nervy. And that’s a difficult atmosphere to play and thrive in.
“I’m no psychologist. I’m not going to sit here and tell them what’s going wrong. But I think you can feel it.
“It’s the best thing to hear when you’re playing in an away game and all of a sudden it feels like the momentum is swinging and it feels like almost like a home game. Like at certain moments of the game, I heard our fans, celebrating or cheering, and it was like, why is it so quiet in here right now?
“Do you know what I mean? Like they’re trying to chase the title. We’re trying to chase potentially finishing in a European position, but it feels like we’re playing for a little bit more in these circumstances. So, I think it’s difficult. I think it can be really difficult when you’re in an environment like that.”
Arsenal fans are used to be the brunt of the joke.
Photos and videos have gone viral of Manchester City fans drinking from bottles labelled ‘Arsenal tears’ at their last two games against Chelsea and then the Gunners.
But many believe Arsenal fans bring it up on themselves.
“The Arsenal fans need to be better,” Manchester United great Wayne Rooney said on his own BBC show.
“I saw them boo the team off the other day. Arsenal have been brilliant all season, they are in a bad run of form, and they need to understand how much the fan support means to the players and how much it can help you.
“Those players would have put so much hard work into being in a position where they are now so to lose a game and get booed off, that would have hurt the players, 100 per cent.
“For Arsenal to win the league, the fans need to play their part. They need to get behind the team. They want to win the league, and they are desperate to do that, but they have a role to play.”
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WHY THEY CAN WIN THE TITLE
It is not all doom and gloom for Arsenal, however.
Legendary manager Arsene Wenger has kept the faith, saying it is “common sense” that his old club will prevail.
“I like Eze, Odegaard, Havertz and Madueke’s attacking (intent). Manchester City will not make the perfect run-in,” Wenger said.
On paper, it is clear that Arsenal have the better run home.
Before the Premier League title is decided, Arteta’s men only leave London for the first leg of their Champions League semi-final against Atletico Madrid next week.
In the league, they welcome 14th placed Newcastle and 12th placed Fulham to the Emirates before a trip to East London to face relegation-threatened West Ham.
They then play 19th placed Burnley at home before going to south London for a date with 13th placed Crystal Palace – whose focus is on their UEFA Conference League campaign – on the final day of the season.
“It couldn’t be better. West Ham away is tough because of where West Ham are right now,” Manchester United great Gary Neville told Sky Sports.
“If you’d have said, let’s pick five fixtures, you might change one. But honestly, you could not pick a better five games than that, really. You’d snap your hand off all day if you got offered those five as your last five games of the season going for a title.
“They’ve got no complaints, no excuses.”
While City’s five games in May begin with a trip to Everton – the 10th placed Toffees’ European hopes were effectively dashed in the Merseyside derby.
They then welcome seventh-placed Brentford to the Etihad before travelling south to eighth-placed Bournemouth – where they lost last season.
Two more home games are also on the billing with a postponed clash with Crystal Palace still yet to confirm its new date, while fourth-placed Aston Villa await on the final day.
Those run of fixtures even have former Tottenham player and manager Tim Sherwood believing his old club’s fiercest rivals will lift the trophy.
“I still think Arsenal are going to win it,” Sherwood said on Sky Sports.
“I think Man City have a tougher run-in than Arsenal and I think now the pressure is off. They need to start throwing haymakers.
“The pressure of being at the top has taken its toll. It’s taken its toll for a couple of seasons now.
“The momentum is with Man City. But I was impressed with Arsenal yesterday. I thought they should’ve got a draw from the game.
“I think they might just pip them.”’
Arsenal’s leaders are certainly not throwing in the towel with footage of star midfielder Declan Rice telling his teammates “it’s not done” after the loss to City going viral.
Guardiola even addressed it in the lead-up to his side’s win at Burnley, telling Sky Sports: “I love that. I love that. That’s why Arsenal is there.”
“I saw it (on Monday) and it shows what Declan Rice means. That’s the Arsenal mentality, we’ve faced it in the Premier League these (past) seasons and in the Carabao Cup, how competitive they are,” Guardiola continued.
“Otherwise they can’t have done the season they have done in the Premier League being there and being unbeaten in the Champions League, as you have Mikel (Arteta) but also these type of players that follow the message.
“And in the bad moments, they have the resilience (to say) we are there, we are there. That is a good example for us what we’re going to face in the six games, five games (for them) in the title race.”
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WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE WASH-UP
Unlike the past three seasons, it feels like a second-place finish would be less acceptable this time around.
Fans may disagree but Jamies Carragher believes the fact that have been perennial contenders has been impressive.
But times have now changed given they have been in the box seat to end their 22-year drought this season.
“Arsenal fans will not like to hear it, but finishing second for the last three years represented success,” Carragher wrote in The Telegraph.
“Arsenal were the second best in the country behind City and Liverpool. They finished where they deserved to be. When Arteta took over in the era of Guardiola versus Jürgen Klopp, it was correct he found a different way to win.
“Finishing second in 2026 will undoubtedly be a failure. This is supposed to be Arsenal’s time, but the final push to win a major trophy is always the toughest. Football is full of examples of teams who suffered a near miss and put on a positive spin about the next season. More often than not, that next step is backwards.
“Arsenal have managed to avoid that so far. Psychologically, it would be tougher to recover this summer and there is a greater chance of longer-term consequences if trust in the manager begins to evaporate.
“Whether Arsenal get the job done this season or not, Arteta will be under the most severe pressure of his reign to have a tactical rethink over the summer.
“As a winner, he can do that by design and with absolute authority. If he and his players are licking their wounds once more, changes in tactics and personnel will be due to public demand and from a position of weakness.”
There have also been plenty of suggestions in English football circles that Arteta might be shown the door if he comes up short.
There would certainly be fans baying for blood after they began the new year dreaming of a quadruple with their team leading the league, alive in both domestic cups and performing strongly in Europe.
But former Liverpool and England midfielder Danny Murphy told BBC Sport that sacking Arteta would be a ridiculous move.
“I understand success is based on trophies, but ultimately let’s say Arteta lost the Premier League on goal difference and lost the Champions League final, you have to give perspective,” he said.
“He’s there or thereabouts. They are getting closer and closer. I know it’s been a couple of years of finishing second. The squad is as good as it’s ever been. There is talk if he doesn’t win anything he should go, I think that’s crazy.”