We have reached the moment of looking back and reflection on the year. I have found that the older you get, the less likely you are to remember what you wrote the previous week, never mind months ago. I therefore read back over my 2025 pieces with a certain thrill of discovery.
I soon discerned a standout theme, which was my growing obsession with all the things I feel are breaking up what used to be a game of flow and improvisation, and turning it into a series of discrete set-piece-like events that can be prepared in advance.
Whether it be corner routines that take 90 seconds to execute, featuring choreographed fouls designed to incapacitate the goalkeeper and orchestration from the egomaniac set-piece coach who has come out to run the play from the sideline.
Whether it be the towels left at the side of the pitch so players can dry the ball for long throws that cause constant delays and hardly ever result in a goal. Whether it be the kick-offs booted directly out near the opponent’s corner flag so you can open the game by pressing the opponent’s build-up rather than by playing what we used to call football, or the endless VAR reviews in which players must stand around waiting for officials to deliver a decision that turns out to be wrong anyway.
The latest is that Fifa has announced the 2026 World Cup games will include three-minute quarterly “water” breaks, which everyone knows are really ad breaks. This, according to me, is the story of football in the mid-2020s: the game being broken up into smaller and smaller bits to give all these off-field people more of a chance to stick their oar in.
Given these preoccupations, it’s no surprise that Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal loom over the year like a Terminator crunching human skulls beneath their titanium jackboots. Throughout 2025 I have repeatedly indicted the Premier League leaders as the exemplars of the negative trends that are ruining the game.
When they lost in the FA Cup to Manchester United in January I was accusing them of sending their own fans and players to sleep with over-elaborate corner routines. “Arsenal’s ‘cleverness’ broke up the flow of the game ... Nobody wants to watch this and it is hard to believe the players enjoy playing it either ...”
I seized the opportunity to contrast that game unfavourably with the chaotic 1999 classic that United won 2-1 after extra-time: 25 years on, I said, we have more control, but less quality.
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta gestures on the touchline. Photograph: Bradley Collyer/PA
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta gestures on the touchline. Photograph: Bradley Collyer/PA
The death of Denis Law in January provoked a similar kind of lament on how the corporatisation of football has “purged the chaos from the game, creating the smoothly optimised, homogenised sports content of today ...” Players, I complained, “are increasingly subject to the influence of forces that never appear on the pitch.”
A sad contrast to the era of Law, when the game was a way for players “to escape the mines or other gruelling jobs in industrial society. The pitch, above all, was a place of freedom ... Few represented that spirit of freedom more gloriously than Law ...”
Who would not have enjoyed playing for Mikel Arteta, if my account of what’s going on at Arsenal is to be trusted. In March I was again complaining that Arsenal have “a heaviness about them ... as though they are concentrating too furiously to be spontaneous or creative ... a fixation on marginal gains, an obsession with organisation that has stifled the element of self-expression ...”
In August I accused them of playing with “the usual iron control over their own attacking impulses ...” as they lost to Liverpool, “patiently executing an endless series of five-a-sides in their own half ... while displaying absolutely no urgency on the question of scoring a goal.”
“Arsenal’s regrets can all be traced to the “first, do not lose” mentality of their coach,” I claimed.
Well, Arteta could point to the current league table and say things seem to be going okay. The fans are on board: “Set piece again Olé Olé” is the anthem of Arsenal’s title charge. That’s fine: I just happen to believe that what Arteta is doing is a plague on the game and it would be better for the world if his approach were not vindicated with success.
But ... do I really even believe that? Arsenal fans who have not yet given up reading this column might have noticed a jarring contradiction between how I talk about Arsenal and how I talk about a certain other team, who try to play a similar type of game, only worse.
Comparing the pieces about Arsenal to the ones about Ireland reminded me of the Gordon Ramsay meme: “Oh dear, oh dear ... Gorgeous” vs “You f***ing Donkey”.
Ireland's manager Heimir Hallgrímsson and Séamus Coleman. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
Ireland's manager Heimir Hallgrímsson and Séamus Coleman. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
Talking about Ireland’s Nations League win in Bulgaria back in March, I praised their simple methodical approach of diagonal balls and knock-downs. “It would be a mistake to see this as a phase of crawling before we can walk. The plan is to get very good at crawling.”
By September, before the World Cup qualifiers began, I was openly lauding Heimir Hallgrímsson for recognising football’s trend towards set-pieces, pressing and physicality, favourably comparing the style he was aiming for and the one Arsenal were already using.
Initial Ireland-optimism instantly gave way to despair after the shambolic defeat in Armenia: “If this is what a Hallgrímsson team looks like after a year of whipping them into shape you shudder to think how bad they might be after another year.” A narrow defeat in Portugal restored something I described as “dignity”. “Yes it was anti-football, naked and unashamed, but to everything there is a season.” Anti-football is apparently okay as long as it’s not Arteta doing it.
But the subsequent victory over Armenia, on a night when Hungary seemed to have stolen a march by drawing 2-2 in Portugal, did not restore actual confidence. “It’s pretty clear which of these teams deserves to finish in the playoff space; luckily for Ireland, ‘deserve’ has nothing to do with it.”
Then Ireland beat Portugal, Ronaldo was sent off, and a couple of days later I was having an imaginary argument with Marcelo Bielsa, who once claimed “There should be a penalty for those who ignore the beauty of the game in order to win.”
Few could claim that Ireland had beaten Portugal with “a lot of beautiful football ... Ireland played 5-4-1 and hit balls over the top.” But ... “You know what else was beautiful? The look on Séamus Coleman’s face as he ran beside Troy Parrott celebrating Ireland’s second goal.”
That was before Parrott’s hat-trick winner in Budapest and the celebration that gave us the most incredible images of Irish football joy, which, if we’re honest, will probably have to sustain us for the next 20 years ...
And there I go again ... if we’re honest ... let’s not get carried away ... cautious, cautious ... I noticed reading back that those Ireland wins were practically the only times I allowed myself to sound openly happy. After spending most of the year complaining about all the things going wrong in the game, it was nice to be reminded that football is actually fun. I’m always having a pop at Arteta for being so buttoned-up and repressed. Maybe I should listen to my own advice.