Manchester City under Pep Guardiola can carry an air of inevitability at this time of year. For Son Heung-min’s rare one-on-one miss this week, see Vincent Kompany’s collector’s item goal against Leicester in 2019. So as Arsenal prepare for Sunday, knowing only a slip by the serial winners could open the door to a title win, how do their fans assess the season?
Pride would best capture the prevailing mood. Faisal Khan, who hosts the YouTube channel Latte Firm, says Arsenal “are on a steep upward trajectory” and is refusing to give up hope that his team will win at home to Everton and City will fail to match that against West Ham at the Etihad Stadium.
“If we were to win the league, I was telling my mate I’m not going home,” says Khan, who has watched Arsenal for 35 years. “I would sleep outside the Emirates till the next day and wait for the parade. I imagine it would be carnival scenes.”
He is picturing how West Ham could spring a surprise. “A James Ward-Prowse set piece or a Jarrod Bowen breakaway. Maybe some sort of referee disaster. But we live in hope.”
Akhil Vyas, a board member of the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust, says the “finer margins” have so far told against Arsenal, with back-to-back losses against West Ham and Fulham in a damaging December coming to mind, but he believes every club in the league bar City are envious of Arsenal’s position.
“With Declan Rice, we signed a player that all the big clubs would’ve wanted,” Vyas says. “We can pick who we want as long as they want to come. We’ve probably moved on from [Oleksandr] Zinchenko and [Gabriel] Jesus, who helped us get established in the top four. If we went back to City it would be for a player the level of [Erling] Haaland because that’s what we’re competing for.”
Arsenal need to get better at competing for the domestic cups, according to Laura Kirk-Francis, a season-ticket holder for the past decade. “In this era of Man City being so dominant, you can’t measure success on whether you win the Premier League title or not,” she says.
“If I look back on the season they [domestic cups] are not the trophies you focus on but ultimately they are where you practise having to win. Those knockout games are the type of pressure Arsenal need to be used to and it’s what City are so good at.”
Kirk-Francis notes a difference in mood from when she got her season ticket in the 2013-14 season, at the end of which Arsenal ended a nine-year trophy drought. “All of what’s changed is from the players and manager giving us joy and we feed off it. They play football we appreciate and that’s where the atmosphere comes from.”
She believes the unity will be strengthened by the move to make the Emirates Stadium the main home for the women’s team next season. “They are leading the way by selling out the Emirates multiple times. It creates a real bond between the fans and the club.”
Guardiola said this week that Arsenal were one of three teams, with Manchester United and Chelsea, who had spent more than City over the past five years and “should be there” winning titles. It marks a sharp contrast with what some Arsenal fans think.
“They’ve just got a very smart way of constructing their squad,” Clive Palmer, a contributor to the ArsenalVision podcast, says of City. “That’s purely the football side of things. What bothers me about Man City is that people don’t look closely enough at how they’ve arrived here. They arrived here in a financially advantaged way which allowed them to build a squad and build an infrastructure, with the best people in the game.
“John Stones on the bench the other day, and no one says anything. You think he would be on our bench? There would be articles about what happened to Stones if he was on our bench. He will be holding England’s defence in the summer. That’s the aura and the level they’re dealing at.”
Palmer hopes that regardless of what happens on Sunday, the public and media appreciate the “alignment” of Arsenal’s story. “They’re missing a connection story,” he says. “They’re missing the community story. They’re missing the diversity story. There’s no other ground like it when the TV cameras pan into the crowd. There’s no other club like Arsenal.”
Fans of other clubs would doubtless disagree, but there will be positivity at Arsenal regardless of how Sunday plays out.
