Four in a row? Arsenal’s title race is starting to feel very familiar
Arsenal are three points clear of Manchester City with City holding a game in hand, and they are the better team in almost every number that matters. They still look like a side who might finish the Premier League season as runners-up for a fourth straight year, and if that happens they will be the first club in English top-flight history to do it.
Sunday’s 2-1 defeat at the Etihad is the kind of result that leaves a mark on a title race even when the maths still tilts your way. Arsenal did not lose because they were poor. They lost because Rayan Cherki scored in the 16th minute, because Kai Havertz levelled less than two minutes later after a Gianluigi Donnarumma error, and because Erling Haaland finished off a Nico O’Reilly cross in the 65th minute. That is how title-deciding matches tend to turn.
Three seasons of finishing second
Arsenal finished as runners-up in 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25. No side has ever ended a Premier League season second four years in a row. The only comparable run in the English top flight came, strangely, from Arsenal themselves between 1998-99 and 2000-01. Even they broke out of it, winning the league the following year on the way to the Invincibles side of 2003-04. Doing it for a fourth time now would be a record nobody at the club would want on their honours list.
What makes this season different, at least in argument, is that Arsenal have been the most convincing team in the league for long stretches. They hold the best defensive record in the division for the second year in a row. They have built up a lead that has survived two bad months. They have just lost their first league match since the turn of the year. By every feel test, this is supposed to be their title. That it still might not be sums up the problem Mikel Arteta has been trying to solve since he arrived.
City keep finding the extra half-yard
Pep Guardiola’s team have not been their best this season either. They have drawn games they would normally have won and looked, for spells, like a squad transitioning out of its peak. Then they play Arsenal, and something clicks back into place. Sunday was the clearest example. City were the faster, braver, more clinical side for the first 45 minutes. The second half was essentially a game management exercise by a team who have done the hardest part of winning a title many, many times.
Arsenal, by contrast, still look like they have not quite worked out how to win one of these games at the end of April. A small detail going wrong, a set piece missed, a finish that would have gone in with a different player, and a match tips against them. Guardiola said beforehand that a City loss would end the title race. He was right. A City win has not ended it either way. It has simply put the pressure back on Arsenal to hold their own nerve for five more games.
What second place would actually mean
Second is not a disaster. Most clubs in Europe would take it with relief. For Arsenal, though, the problem is what a fourth runner-up finish would do to the feeling around the project. It wouldn’t be the worst Arsenal side to miss out, or even the closest to winning. It would just be the most recent in a pattern that has started to look like the defining story of Arteta’s tenure.
There is a straightforward answer to all of this, which is that Arsenal could still win the league. They still lead it. They have the better squad depth in almost every position and the easier run-in on paper. A couple of their rivals still have to play each other. A champion would look like this with five matches to go. That is also how each of the last three seasons has felt at this stage, and each of the last three has ended the same way.
Arteta’s season is about these five games
It feels unfair to judge a season on five matches when the first thirty-three have been better than almost anyone else’s. That is what the Premier League does to teams who spend enough years near the top, though. Arsenal under Arteta have built everything towards winning one of these. If they do, the last three seasons become the warm-up years. If they don’t, the conversation next summer is much harder.
I don’t think this Arsenal team deserves to finish second again. I also think it might. The Etihad result doesn’t prove anything yet, but it rhymes with too many previous nights for the mood not to have changed a little, and City are moving with the sort of late-season momentum that has decided these races before. A three-point lead with a better goal difference is still a lead. It is also a lead that, in this fixture history, has not held.
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