All season, you could hear the complaints.
Arsenal is boring. Arsenal's exclusive source of goals is the corner kick, which they treat as something between an offensive-rebounding exercise and a defensive line trying to get the quarterback. Arsenal is lucky, living free and easy thanks to down years from the other big clubs, who otherwise would have mounted stiffer challenges. Arsenal plays ugly, cynical anti-soccer, an aesthetic betrayal of the man who made the modern Arsenal. Arsenal is unworthy, barely scraping past the worst teams in the league instead of blasting them to hell. Arsenal is the apotheosis of all the worst trends in the game, a club by center backs, for center backs, dedicated to squeezing the very heart out of the game as part of a cold, rationalist approach. There's no match Arsenal won't try to win 1-0, no attacker Mikel Arteta won't try to coach the joy and creativity out of, no spontaneity the club won't kill.
I found some of these points reasonably valid and some of the defenses offered by Arsenal supporters thin. But more than anything, I found the whole exercise pointless. Both complaints about the supposedly ugly soccer played by the Premier League champions and attempts to defend it on the merits assume that the title carries with it some sort of moral weight, as if a champion has to justify themselves on something other than competitive grounds. The point is not to play beautiful soccer, to win hearts and minds, or to prove the doubters wrong. The point is to win. A title justifies itself. After 22 years, a botched transition out of the Arsène Wenger era, several full cycles of promising young players' ultimately title-free careers, and three consecutive, variously agonizing second-place finishes, the Gunners are now champions of the Premier League. That's all that matters.
The process itself was not a smooth one. Arsenal seized the league lead after the seventh matchday, and though they would hold their edge all the way through, they seemed trapped in an eternal cycle of collapse and rebirth. They endured a rotten January, with two scoreless draws and a last-second loss to United, they watched as a 2-0 lead against the already-relegated Wolves became a 2-2 draw thanks purely to them playing like shit at the worst possible time, they coughed up multi-game points leads three times, and lost to Manchester City one month ago and clearly looked like the lesser team in doing so. Their fragility, seeming disinterest in scoring goals, and penchant for wilting in the big moments made them an object of scorn for the neutral. That's not what a champion looks like. A champion gets out there and scores goals.
And yet. And yet! As long as William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhães were back there, I felt unwavering confidence. It is not a beautiful thing to watch Arsenal defend, but it is quite impressive. The team conceded zero penalties and earned zero red cards in the league. Earlier this season Billy brought up the analogy of soccer as a short-blanket sport with regards to the Gunners, and Arsenal's choice to cover their feet was ultimately the correct one. Defending as Arsenal did all season, tirelessly and with pristine organization, is extremely difficult. There is the physical toll, for one. You can only play like this with a team of huge, athletic psychos who are willing to grind themselves and the opponent into fine powder at the expense of the more glorious stuff.
In exchange for shouldering the physical burden, Arsenal both imposed and accepted a psychic tax of sorts. More than any other team I've watched this season, and certainly more than any Arsenal squad of recent vintage, this particular team dictated the terms of engagement. You were going to have to play an Arsenal match, no matter how badly you wanted to avoid that particular punishment. This meant no free space to operate, crunching physical assaults, and a slow restriction of open play, in both directions. Not everyone is comfortable playing this way, but Arsenal surely was, despite rarely playing with multi-goal leads. Some teams induce panic. Not Arsenal. They induce helplessness, like a big bully allowing you to freely punch them in the head as hard as you wanted, only to shrug off the blows and deepen their grin.
Is that a fun sort of team to root against? Absolutely! Arsenal were not quite dominant enough to dodge critiques of their anti-style, which were especially stinging given the contrast with the way they used to play in the Wenger era. Those Arsenal teams almost regarded style as its own end, puffing their chests and telling the world, Frenchly, "Yes, we may have finished fourth again, but nobody else brought forth as much beauty." That was the Arsenal I fell in love with. Frankly, I loved that they were gorgeous losers, capable of getting into the Champions League but incapable of winning the games that mattered because they insisted on winning 4-2 instead of 1-0. I loved the struggle, the extra weight of trying not just to win but to do so with grace and swagger. In contrast, this Arsenal clinched the title after beating one of the worst teams in the league 1-0 off a corner-kick goal, then watching as City drew 1-1 with Bournemouth.
Santi Cazorla didn't die for this! Mesut Özil didn't die for this! Per Mertesacker di—OK yeah he died for this. You can complain about these guys all you want, you can decry what they've sacrificed to reach the mountaintop, you can lament the state of the game, you can call Arteta a terrorist, whatever works for you. Arsenal has won the league. Nothing else matters.
