ARSENAL 26/27: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE NEARLY MEN STOP BEING NEARLY 

Published: 18/08/2026 | By: Alex Courbat 

For twenty two years, Arsenal supporters spoke almost entirely in the conditional tense. If we sign a proper nine. If Saliba stays fit. If City ever actually slip. It became a dialect, handed down in the pubs off Blackstock Road and in group chats that have been running since the Emirates still smelled new. An entire generation grew up fluent in it without ever getting to use the past tense properly. Then May happened, and the whole vocabulary went obsolete overnight. 

Eighty five points. Seven clear of Manchester City. Two hundred and thirty three days spent at the top of the table, more than any of their previous title wins. David Raya taking the Golden Glove with 19 clean sheets while the back line conceded like they were being invoiced per goal. Arsenal are champions of England for the first time since Wenger's Invincibles, and if you've watched a title parade video more times than you'd admit to a colleague, nobody here is judging. 

And then Budapest, which is where this season actually begins. Kai Havertz put them ahead after six minutes of the Champions League final. Every one of the previous eleven teams to lead that fixture had gone on to lift it. Then Ousmane Dembélé from the spot, half an hour of extra time nobody enjoyed watching, Eze wide, and Gabriel's fifth penalty gone. PSG retained it. Arsenal flew home with the league title in the hold and a hole in the chest, which is a genuinely strange way to finish the best season the club has had this century. 

So the question for 26/27 isn't whether this group can win. They've won. The question is what they do with the very specific, slightly haunted energy of a team that got most of the way there. 

The Arsenal Transfer Window: Champions Who Refused To Sit Down 

The headline's Bruno Guimarães. Seventy-five million, four years with an option on a fifth, the number 39 on his back, lifted out of a Newcastle side who've been dismantled for north of £240m this summer. On paper it's borderline rude. Arsenal already had Declan Rice, Martín Zubimendi and Mikel Merino, the last two back from Spain's World Cup summer with medals in their hand luggage, plus Myles Lewis-Skelly, who started a Champions League final at nineteen and looked mildly inconvenienced by the occasion. Adding Bruno on top of that isn't squad building. It's a statement about how many fixtures Mikel Arteta expects to still be involved in come May 2027. 

The rest has been tidy rather than theatrical, which is what winning does to a recruitment department. Piero Hincapié made his loan permanent for around £34.5m after 39 appearances in his first year. Christos Tzolis arrived from Club Brugge for £34m with 22 goals in Belgium behind him. Illan Meslier came in free from Leeds to sit behind Raya. Out went Leandro Trossard to Beşiktaş, Christian Nørgaard to Everton, Jakub Kiwior to Porto and Karl Hein to Werder. There's still noise around Gabriel Martinelli and Ethan Nwaneri before the window shuts on 1 September, and that noise is the difference between this reading as a top-up and this reading as a genuine reshape of the front line. 

Cardiff Was A Message, And The Whole League Heard It 

The Community Shield went to the Principality Stadium this year because Wembley was busy hosting The Weeknd, which might be the most 2026 sentence ever committed to print. Arsenal didn't seem to mind the change of postcode. Riccardo Calafiori scored after twenty four seconds, slipped in by Lewis-Skelly, and it finished 3-0 against a Manchester City side taking their first competitive steps under Enzo Maresca. Martin Ødegaard ran the game and then lifted the thing. Joleon Lescott, watching his old club get pulled apart, reached for the word concerned and then reached for the word gap, which is the kind of August punditry that ages either beautifully or horribly with absolutely no middle ground. 

Curtain raisers are curtain raisers, and we've all seen an August trophy tell us precisely nothing by October. But the manner of it matters. Arsenal came out at full tilt against a direct rival with Saka, Rice, Saliba and Timber all missing, and still had enough to make it look routine. That's not a side easing itself back in. That's a side that's decided pre-season ended somewhere around 30 May in Hungary. 

The Fixture List, And The Bit Everyone Underrates 

It opens on Friday 21 August under the Emirates lights against Coventry City, back in the top flight for the first time in a quarter of a century with Frank Lampard in the dugout. Lovely scheduling for absolutely everyone except Coventry, who have to walk out into a title party while the ribbons are still going up. Then it's Villa Park, where the Europa League holders are waiting, then Xabi Alonso's Chelsea at the Emirates in early September. 

You don't win a league in August, but you can absolutely spend the rest of the year apologising for it. Arsenal's opening three fixtures are the sort that get filed under "tricky" in June and "why did we drop four points there" in May. The wider calendar's deceptive too, because the Premier League has restarted with an almost entirely new cast on the touchline. Maresca at City. Andoni Iraola at Liverpool. Matthias Jaissle at Newcastle. Alonso at Chelsea. Nobody has the faintest idea what any of those teams are yet, and that uncertainty cuts in both directions. City come to N5 in late November, the north London derby lands at Tottenham a week later, and then Arsenal spend the festive stretch playing eight league games almost entirely inside the M25. That's either a gift or a trap, depending entirely on the state of the treatment room by mid-December. 

What it actually means 

Here's the uncomfortable bit about defending a title. The first one is a release. The second one is a job. The first is powered by twenty two years of stored-up want, and want is rocket fuel. Once you've spent it, you're running on something far less romantic, which is habit, depth and a willingness to grind out ugly 1-0s in February on pitches that look like they've been resurfaced with gravel. 

Arsenal are better set up for that than they've ever been. The spine's in its prime rather than approaching it. The bench changes games instead of just protecting them. Andrea Berta has built a squad that can lose four starters in a week, turn up in Cardiff and win 3-0 anyway. That isn't sentiment, it's arithmetic. 

But the thing that'll define this season isn't the league. It's Budapest. Arsenal have never won a European Cup in 140 years of trying, and they've now lost two finals having led in both, which is the sort of statistic that either calcifies into a complex or sharpens into an obsession. The league phase draw is on 27 August. There's no third option here. 

Arteta has spent six years turning almost into eventually. He's got one conversion left, and for the first time he's going after it as the champion rather than the challenger. That's a different job, a different pressure and a very different sort of season. 

Just don't let anyone tell you Arsenal are the nearly men any more. That one's finally been retired.