<\/p>\n
Arsenal fans know exactly the XI in question. <\/p>\n
You know, that <\/i>car crash team \u2013 the one with 11 obscure names, from infamously impotent striker Maroune Chamakh, to Barcelona academy reject Ignasi Miquel. <\/p>\n
Watch the biggest Aussie sports & the best from overseas LIVE on Kayo Sports | New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.<\/a><\/b><\/i><\/p>\n Who, you say? <\/p>\n Who could blame you?<\/p>\n But, as Arsenal finally lifts the Premier League trophy this weekend<\/a>, achieving greatness its younger supporters haven\u2019t witnessed in their lifetimes, it\u2019s an XI to remind us of how this club once looked, and how far it fell.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been more than 14 years since, on a wintry night in North London, Arsene Wenger rolled out his worst-ever XI against the might of Manchester City and, predictably, lost. <\/p>\n If Arsenal didn\u2019t look further away from winning a Premier League title over City, it\u2019s because it wasn\u2019t. Ahead were still Wenger\u2019s darkest years, a botched succession with Unai Emery, and Mikel Arteta\u2019s run of near-misses. <\/p>\n This weekend, however, on a warm afternoon in South London, Arteta will roll out one of Arsenal\u2019s best-ever XIs, before lifting the Premier League trophy having vanquished City. <\/p>\n For Arsenal fans who lived the downward spiral from Invincible to Vulnerable, from feared to jeered, the moment closes the book on a painful 22-year narrative. <\/p>\n The triumph deserves to be heralded as the remarkable success story it is. <\/p>\n And yet, though cathartic the experience may feel, it may not qualify as the total release many of its tortured faithful have prayed for. <\/p>\n Arsenal is a Premier League champion once more, but it took painfully shredding its tether to the past to become so. <\/p>\n READ MORE <\/b><\/p>\n INSIDE WILD ARSENAL PARTY:Star\u2019s perfect two-word mic drop; tortured legend goes off: Inside wild Arsenal party<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n CHAMPIONS! Arsenal end 22-year PL drought as City slump in sad Pep surrender<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n \u2018NOW IS THE MOMENT\u2019: Pep\u2019s elusive response to exit talk as City boss pays tribute after title defeat<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n \u2018LIBRARY\u2019 TO BLOODLUST <\/b><\/p>\n Impossible to know at the time, but a line in the sand was about to be drawn soon after that miserable Wenger XI took to the field in late 2011. <\/p>\n The line would separate the dignified Arsenal of old to whatever it is today. <\/p>\n It would be drawn in large part just months later when a former reggae DJ with a microphone had an idea. <\/p>\n Robbie Lyle would stand in front of a statue of Tony Adams and film fans\u2019 raw reactions after games, upload them to YouTube, and feed them to the gawking masses who dined on Arsenal\u2019s struggles. <\/p>\n Arsenal Fan TV they\u2019d call it \u2013 and it would alter the club\u2019s external image, and culture, entirely.<\/p>\n Fans would come on, pop off until they were red in the face, direct fury in any direction they possibly could \u2013 the players, the coach, the owners, each other \u2013 and walk away light-headed, drunk off the 30 seconds of fame.<\/p>\n And people would click. They\u2019d share, they\u2019d laugh. Laugh at Arsenal, of course, not with it.<\/p>\n Some views would tally in the millions. The contributors became celebrities themselves, like Wenger dissident Claude, or \u2018Troopz\u2019. The show became its own melodrama with public Arsenal spats becoming the weekly diet of its voyeuristic rivals. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, Arsenal\u2019s trophy drought \u2013 notwithstanding FA Cup success – fed the content machine for more than a decade. <\/p>\n Through meandering results, a couple of bursts, but ultimately no long-lasting glory, Arsenal and Arsenal fans formed their identity.<\/p>\n Deluded. Rattled. <\/p>\n And what of the title tilts? <\/p>\n Bottled. <\/p>\n Scenes as Arsenal celebrate title win | 01:45<\/p>\n What made AFTV\u2019s presence all the more unsettling was how it flipped the relationship between club and fan on its head. <\/p>\n Arsenal struggling undeniably made AFTV successful, allowing its influence to seep and embed itself into the wider surrounds of the Emirates. <\/p>\n Fans were once so restrained that they called their former home the \u2018Highbury Library\u2019.<\/p>\n Suddenly, they were routinely booing their own team, calling for Wenger and Emery to be sacked with a vicious bloodlust, and exuding an entitled energy that suggested Arsenal mysteriously deserved more. <\/p>\n That\u2019s just what Arsenal fans do, no? <\/p>\n Awkward then, for AFTV, that Arsenal under Arteta has started doing a lot of winning. <\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to do explosive, nonsensical reaction when your club is successful, so it\u2019s little surprise that AFTV has taken a downward dive, with none of its most-viewed videos coming from the last five years.<\/p>\n TRUTH ABOUT THE ARSENAL OF OLD <\/b><\/p>\n Will anyone bother to tune in this week? <\/p>\n Arsenal is finally top of England. In a week\u2019s time, it could be where it\u2019s never been \u2013 the top of Europe. <\/p>\n But despite Arsenal returning to winning ways, it feels wrong to label this surge as a complete vanquishing of the ghosts that haunted the Emirates in its earlier years. <\/p>\n The club is unrecognisable to the one that was languishing. <\/p>\n Rewind to 2006, and Arsenal was plunged into a financially precarious position to move to the Emirates. <\/p>\n The stadium cost about A$750m to build at a time when broadcast revenue for Premier League teams was but a fraction of what it is today, when even Everton can cash-in on swanky new digs. <\/p>\n When Wenger committed to overseeing Arsenal\u2019s transition from Highbury to Ashburton Grove, he did so knowing a failure to qualify for Champions League would be catastrophic \u2013 and that he would have to do so year after year on a budget. <\/p>\n In turn, diamonds in the rough were found, made to shine, and then shipped off for below market prices. Barcelona snapped up many, buying Cesc Fabregas, Alex Hleb and Alexandre Song for \u00a325m, \u00a312m and \u00a315m respectively \u2013 all modest fees, even for the time. Others that were turned around leading up to 2011 included Emmanuel Adebayor, Gael Clichy, Mathieu Flamini and Samir Nasri. <\/p>\n Arsenal\u2019s performances invariably rose and fell. Wenger, like a captain going down with the ship, took the blame and was unjustly accused of being stingy in the market by choice. Only when he eventually walked away in 2018, and wrote an autobiography, did it become clear how tight his purse strings had to be.<\/p>\n Even so, Arsenal remained scintillating, if not with a weak underbelly. <\/p>\n The football was often exquisite with Wenger somehow making players like Jack Wilshire or Aaron Ramsey look like prime Xavi and Iniesta. <\/p>\n There were nights of utter delirium. Oh boy, were there nights. Nights when Wenger made Arsenal fans truly believe that this was it. Nights like beating Barcelona 2-1 at the Emirates <\/a>in 2011. \u201cStill Nasri \u2026 looks for ARSHAVIIIIIIN!\u201d <\/p>\n This wasn\u2019t just Arsenal arriving again. This was football. This was what it was all for \u2013 the grim nights in Stoke, the humiliations at Old Trafford. It was here. It was now. <\/p>\n That car crash XI later in the year? Even that pushed City before Sergio Aguero scored at the death. <\/p>\n \u2018UNDIGNIFIED WEIRDOS\u2019 <\/b><\/p>\n You can\u2019t find that Arsenal today. The Arsenal that came from unfashionable, yet dignified, roots. The one that learnt to truly upgrade from the marble hallways of Highbury it had to finally draw that line in the sand and upgrade its football, too. <\/p>\n It\u2019s why this title doesn\u2019t feel like a full circle moment in its purest form, even if it\u2019s still a glorious achievement. <\/p>\n Starting with the football; Arsenal is now routinely lambasted for being dour, overly methodical, and relying heavily on set pieces. <\/p>\n The club is also funded by an American billionaire family, and had a higher net spend than anyone for the 2025-26 season. <\/p>\n While Wenger had to scour the continent for bargain buys, Arteta could sign Declan Rice for a record fee of \u00a3100 million. Two years later, he could still splurge on Eberechi Eze, Viktor Gyokeres, Martin Zubimendi and Noni Madueke all in the same transfer window. <\/p>\n The other massive shift has come in the stands. <\/p>\n As the generations have shifted, what has developed is a desperate yearning to look like a club that somehow represents more, as if it\u2019s some cultural or political force unto itself, like Barcelona.<\/p>\n Tifos hang from the roof before home games. North London Forever<\/i> \u2013 released just two years ago – is sung before games as if it\u2019s You\u2019ll Never Walk Alone<\/i>. <\/p>\n Underneath the iconic Highbury clock at the south end are a group of young, wannabe ultras dressed in black, and beating drums. Never mind that ultras are a subculture formed out of far-left or far-right ideologies \u2013 this is Arsenal! <\/p>\n \u201cIt has been a strange journey for Arsenal supporters to go from fans of a venerable old club to a bunch of insufferable pearl-clutchers,\u201d wrote senior columnist for The Telegraph<\/a><\/i>, George Chesterton, in February. \u201cThey have been called entitled, hysterical, arrogant and paranoid. Often with good reason.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom embarrassing tifos to the groundbreaking Arsenal Fan TV (AFTV), the club\u2019s supporters are increasingly regarded as undignified weirdos. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a far cry from Highbury\u2019s Marble Halls and an identity built around tradition and class \u2013 not mass anxiety fuelled by psychological woo-woo.\u201d<\/p>\n And so Arsenal\u2019s drought-breaking title comes with an uncomfortable truth: It arrives hand-in-hand with everything this club once detested. <\/p>\n Does it matter? <\/p>\n If your name isn\u2019t Arsene Wenger, Mikel Arteta, perhaps Tony Adams or Ian Wright, it\u2019s probably not for you to say. <\/p>\n Arsenal is far from the only club that had to sell out in the modern era to stand a chance of winning the Premier League. <\/p>\n Certainly City, backed by a bottomless pit of Saudi money and accused of 115 financial regulation breaches, can\u2019t judge. <\/p>\n Furthermore, so influential has Pep Guardiola\u2019s style been on English football that the only way to beat him was to join him, adopt an uber-structured approach, and wait for an opening. <\/p>\n Guardiola understudy Arteta waited seven years for that opening and is, at last, reaping the rewards. <\/p>\n \u201cArsenal thoroughly deserve to be (champions). They\u2019ve waited so long for this, they\u2019ve worked so hard for this, withstood so much frustration and so many jibes,\u201d wrote former chief football writer for The Times Henry Winter. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve put up with 22 years of title hurt, going close, drifting back, fighting back, building the squad, building the team, building the momentum. Believing in the process, believing in Mikel Arteta. And now, to the Gunners, the glory.\u201d<\/p>\n WHAT IT TAKES TO BE KING <\/b><\/p>\n Yet despite those cultural betrayals \u2013 necessary or not \u2013 if there is at least one string of familiarity to the bygone era, it is this one: <\/p>\n Arsenal is a team people desperately want to trip up now, as it was then.<\/p>\n Arteta\u2019s side, and the manager himself, have been constantly ridiculed for their style of play, behaviours and processes, even though they are the polar opposite of what Arsenal was criticised for before. <\/p>\n The knock on Arsenal was that it was fragile, lacked tactical nous, and certainly lacked a ruthless edge \u2013 none of which can be said about the new champions. Players have been derided for passionately celebrating winning corners, or executing successful tackles when they were once scolded for supposedly not caring enough. <\/p>\n But the criticism still comes. <\/p>\n Even the BBC, funded by the British taxpayer, felt the need to promote a rant from UFC fighter Paddy Pimblett talking about how much he \u201chates Arsenal fans\u201d. <\/p>\n When City overtook Arsenal at the top of the table late in the season, the BBC posted a photoshopped image of Guardiola pouring out Arteta\u2019s \u201cfire\u201d \u2013 a nod to the Spaniard\u2019s infamous speech when he said he wanted to win so badly, he was \u201con fire\u201d. <\/p>\n Then there was the \u2018bottle guy\u2019 – a middle-aged City fanatic who would go to games with an Arsenal-branded water bottle and pretend to drink Arsenal tears. <\/p>\n He somehow was rewarded with a man-of-the-people persona on social media \u2014 but you can just imagine the collective fury if the shoe was on the other foot. <\/p>\n Questions towards players were sometimes strangely skewed, too, like when Arsenal progressed into the Champions League semi-final and Rice was forced to answer a question about whether only just scraping through was \u201cfrustrating\u201d. <\/p>\n \u201cFrustrating? No, we just got to a semi-final, positivity all the way. Who cares what people think?\u201d he responded. <\/p>\n \u201cAll that matters is what this group thinks, what the manager thinks \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll keep going. Keep playing well. Keep getting over the line and bring it on. Bring on everything.\u201d<\/p>\n It must be said that some moves deserved to at least be questioned. Such as, why did Arteta have his team train in front of TikTok edits of themselves? How to explain why the league\u2019s premier defenders were balancing pens between themselves at training?<\/p>\n Bizarre indeed. But if Arsenal couldn\u2019t take Arteta at his worst then it didn\u2019t deserve him at his best.<\/p>\n One story to emerge this week tells the story of the curious way in which Arteta landed one of its biggest transfer targets of recent years.<\/p>\n