The weekend that saw Arsenal anointed as the next Premier League champions was also theweekend that nothing really happened. What a stirring tribute to our champions-elect to see therest of the division lay down their swords, shuffle around with their hands in their pocket, and let
time wither away.
There were 12 goals across the nine Premier League games. Just six in five on Saturday, and then aglut at Old Trafford to spoil the theme before an impossibly dull 1-1 draw at Anfield provided the
topper; a celebration of the most unforgettably forgettable Premier League season in a generation.
Arsenal will be worthy champions, then. They are scoring goals at the lowest-rate (1.96 per game) ofany title winner since Leicester City a decade ago and most of them seem to be from set-pieces thattake an age to set up. The 2025/26 Premier League season is Declan Rice traipsing towards the
corner flag, forever.
Except that just isn’t true. In most areas of culture there is implicit acknowledgement that fashiondictates over any kind of objective reality, that a herd mentality sculpts our preferences to a certaindegree, but we don’t seem to take the same approach to sport, where the concrete form – results,
league tables – is often conflated with there being an absolute truth.
But we are just as prone to collective myth-making and selective amnesia as in any other facet oflife. In fact we are probably doubly susceptible by being oblivious to the influence of others, to thereality that our opinions are mostly moulded for us by a pundit class who tend to find a line andparrot it, either to cover for their imposter syndrome or through sheer laziness, or both. Thegroupthink is only made worse by the ubiquity of punditry these days. You can still watch a filmwithout having your opinion warped by reading the reviews. There is no such buy-out option with
football.
And the path of least resistance is to follow their lead, is to shrug at a division so many of thesemiddle-aged commenters are watching with fading joy, is to hear that colour has drained from theexperience and find oneself repeating the refrain, detaching from the spectacle without questioningwhether this boredom and dissatisfaction might reflect a deeper malaise that has very little to do
with football.
For a decade or so football has half-heartedly reckoned with how to survive the degradation of ourattention spans, the essential question being whether our algorithm-eaten minds can reallywithstand 90 minutes of a low-scoring sport. Or, to put it another way, whether in 2026 we can cope
with the fact that football is and always has been mostly boring.
Go back and watch extended highlights from the early 2010s and see Premier League footballerschugging about: defenders scrambling to make up for their poor positioning, attackers failing to seethe creative pass and punting pot-shots over the bar. We look back with nostalgia because we wereyounger and life felt more urgent – and maybe because we had a greater capacity to just sit, engage,
be present.
But the reality is that football is considerably more exciting than it used to be. It might not be at theabsurd peak of the Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola years – a high against which it would be unfair tojudge 2025/26 – but this really is a matter of perception, of refusing to be worn down by the world-weary men falling prey to a dopamine-rush society and falling over each other to repeat the lines
that keep them safely employable in the centre ground.
Because the lines really are bogus. There is no room for individualism in English football anymore,unless you watch Max Dowman, Eberechi Eze, Jeremy Doku, Antoine Semenyo, Rayan Cherki, Cole
Palmer, Mohamed Salah, Bruno Fernandes, Matheus Cunha, Morgan Rogers… I could go on.
It’s all too systematised now, unless you care to recall how many screamers have been scored thisseason, enough to fill a highlights reel that could rebrand the 2025/26 Premier League season all onits own. There aren’t any stories to keep us engaged this year, unless you look at Sunderland’s surgein the first third of the campaign, Liverpool’s dramatic autumn collapse, Manchester United’s
stunning fall and rise again, or Tottenham Hotspur’s epochal struggle against relegation.
In fairness Arsenal scoring set-piece goals is memorable and unusual – at 39% of their total, it will bethe highest ever proportion of a Premier League champion – and with Man City never quite being attheir fluid best it is understandable that, without a particularly scintillating title race, people are
formulating a kind of trickle-down opinion of the league’s overall health.
But this is a choice – and we can choose to see it differently.
Even in a dud weekend like the one we’ve just had we can choose to focus on the magic of thoseDowman moments on Saturday, on Arsenal moving close to ending a two-decade wait, on the
brilliance of Fernandes to open up Aston Villa, or on West Ham’s heroics to hold off Manchester City.
With eight games left in the Premier League there’s a relegation battle and a Champions League raceset to go to the wire, plus an Arsenal trip to the Etihad that could pull Mikel Arteta’s side out of
retirement for one last bottle job.
There is still time to shake ourselves out of a mid-season funk; to remember that Jose Mourinho orAntonio Conte never got criticised for their efficiency in the way Arteta is; to look at the numbersand decide that, actually, a 7% rise in set-piece goals across this Premier League season is pretty
negligible when you think about it.
Football culture never accurately follows the contours of what’s really happening. Instead it isdictated and curated by the average take, which just happens to be getting more jaded and cynical
as the pundits age and as the outside world encroaches.
But if we capitulate to second-screening, to the auto-response of fondly misremembering the goodold days, to allowing the median opinion to seep in unchallenged, then we are doomed to theapathy of the infinite scroll – and we are doomed to miss a Premier League season that’s accelerating
towards a finale worthy of our full attention.