ARSENAL

Youthful, bold, often brilliant and – whisper it – even very British, Arsenal’s exciting new era has left Gooners dreaming of Champions League nights again. Now, FFT hears from key figures past, present and (they hope) future for the inside scoop on their thrilling reboot. Buckle up, it could be quite a ride...

Words Joe Brewin Additional reporting Nicolas Puiravau, Dani Gil Illustrations The Sporting Press

Edouard Mendy didn’t see it coming. As the ball looped over his right shoulder and thudded a post on its way in, his teenage antagonist was already turning away with a devilish glint. Bukayo Saka had just put Arsenal 3-0 up against Chelsea on Boxing Day 2020, en route to three Premier League points that could hardly have been more welcome had they been slapped on the table by Santa Claus himself.

That week, West Brom boss Sam Allardyce had fired an irresistible dig at the Gunners by suggesting they were relegation rivals for his doomed Baggies, following a miserable run that left the north Londoners 15th – their worst start to a season since 1974-75. A year into his tenure as manager, Mikel Arteta needed drastic action.

Up to that point, Saka, Emile Smith Rowe and Gabriel Martinelli had only ever started one Premier League match together: a tepid 0-0 draw against Everton under caretaker manager Freddie Ljungberg one year earlier, which did little to stir the senses. But this was different. Back came Smith Rowe for only his second league start, Martinelli for his seventh, in a changing of the guard that felt like something. Together, the three youngest starters on the pitch did Arteta proud in an unlikely battering of the Blues, dazzling an eerie COVID-closed Emirates Stadium. Seven days later, Smith Rowe and Saka combined in a whir of youthful limbs as Arsenal won 4-0 for their third successive win in a week. The opposition manager could only lament another game where his team “learned an awful lot about what we can and cannot do”. Life came at Sam Allardyce fast.

Arsenal didn’t know it, but they were offering signs of things to come – if not definitive proof at that point, then at least the first green shoots of growth. Fourteen months later, as Arteta’s revamped side muscled their way into a 3-1 advantage at Vicarage Road in March, Saka, Martinelli and 23-year-old old-timer Martin Odegaard were running riot as the Gunners snatched fourth place from Manchester United.

Now, with the Premier League’s youngest team, Champions League football is in their sights for the first time since 2016-17. It’s taken humiliation, painful exits, boardroom upheaval and battered egos to make it this far, but finally bedraggled Gooners have that uneasiest of feelings: hope...

ARSENE: THE END

January 22, 2016. Unless you’re nudgewinking towards the opening weekend of the 2020-21 campaign, then this was the last time Arsenal led the table at the end of a Premier League matchday. It’s not easy to pinpoint a moment when things truly began to spin out of control in north London, but this might just be it.

In that freakish 2015-16 campaign, Arsene Wenger’s Gunners toppled title-winning Leicester twice and still wound up finishing 10 points adrift, despite their ecstatic, lastgasp Valentine’s Day victory which left them snapping only two points behind the Foxes. While Claudio Ranieri’s champs won eight of their last 12 and went unbeaten, Arsenal lost their next two and fell apart. Even after securing their highest Premier League finish for 11 years, and a top-four spot for the 20th consecutive season, it began a downward spiral which seemingly had no end.

In 2012, Wenger had been ridiculed for suggesting that finishing in a Champions League position was something of a trophy in itself. By 2018, though, not even the cups could spare him an emotional exit after two years of clinging on, and the lowest points total of his legendary 22-year reign.

“I loved everything he did for the club, the football we had, what he did for Arsenal’s reputation,” says Andrew Mangan, behind popular fansite Arseblog. “But by the end, it was obvious things had gone quite stale. There were issues of inconsistency that weren’t being solved. The scouting was all over the place. The signings were all over the place. And it got to a point where, realistically, the only way that Arsenal could move forward was to go in a different direction.”

For over a decade, paying for the Emirates – Arsenal’s £390 million, space-age arena built in Wenger’s image back in 2006 – had weighed the club down while nouveau-riche rivals powered on without them. Though necessary for a better future, it represented another turning of the screw to those within.

“The following years were complicated to manage financially,” ex-midfielder Gilles Grimandi, Wenger’s chief scout in France from 2006-18, tells FFT. “You don’t build a stadium in the heart of London like you can in Sheffield or elsewhere. This obviously impacted our recruitment and blocked part of the sports project. It was tough because we didn’t have the necessary means to buy some targets. We had to give up players whose requests we couldn’t meet. When Eden Hazard left Lille in 2012, for example, we couldn’t position ourselves.”