Arsenal’s season, then. Has it been any good? Feels like this is a more complicated question to answer for the Gunners than just about anybody else in the league.
We must still acknowledge the possibility that Mikel Arteta and his strikerless sensations may yet uncomplicate things by winning the Champions League, but working as we must on the balance of probabilities that suggest this will not in fact happen, we’re left still with that same question.
Has this Arsenal season been any good? To quote Tim Lovejoy (not that one): short answer ‘yes’ with an ‘if’; long answer ‘no’ with a ‘but’.
We’re deeply sorry to inform you that you will be receiving the long answer.
This has to go down as a disappointing season for Arsenal even if, as seems extremely likely, it concludes with another second-place finish.
The difference is one of expectations and starting points and, to be brutally honest, which other clubs have shuffled around in which direction around this water-treading Arsenal.
READ: Ten reasons why this has been the worst Premier League season ever
Arsenal have finished second in each of the last two seasons and it has been entirely straightforward to conclude that those have, in the round, been successful campaigns. Finishing second at all in 22/23 was a huge achievement for a team that ended the 21/22 season bottling fourth place to Antonio Conte’s Spurs.
Sure, they blew up on the home straight of the title race but they had put Arsenal back into a conversation from which they had been absent for far too long.
And then last season – despite the ultimate disappointment of finishing second to Man City again – still contained obvious, measurable development. Arsenal couldn’t reel City in during the run-in, but they did succeed in matching them. There was no bottling here and no amount of desperate banter-narrative construction could make it so.
Arsenal came up short again but the curve on the graph remained upward. The sense remained that Arsenal were on a journey towards their destination, with some by this stage even suggesting that arrival at said destination at some point in the near future was now inevitable.
We can only assume those people are not football fans and thus not possessed of the nagging voice in the back of the head that even in the good times is still telling you everything is going to go horribly wrong any minute.
Of course it wasn’t inevitable that Arsenal would win the league under Arteta, and now absolutely nobody is any longer pretending that is the case.
They absolutely could still win the league one day, but there is also now the very real possibility that 2023/24 was the peak for this side and that the title-winning train has sailed.
There are reasons to be positive. For one thing, City are just about the only team in recent Barclays history who have managed to sustain three title-challenging seasons in a row. It is punishingly hard on the body and mind – of players and manager – to do so. Jurgen Klopp never did it, we shouldn’t be astonished that Arteta couldn’t.
What Klopp’s sides could do was challenge again after a fallow season, and that will be the challenge for Arteta and co. in next season’s Premier League. It is a season that remains rich with potential. There are multiple reasons to suspect Liverpool will not be quite so good as they have been this year, and no certainties whatsoever around City or Newcastle or Chelsea or Villa. United and Spurs will almost certainly be less wretched than this season, almost by definition, but are surely way too far off to instantly mount any kind of meaningful challenge at the top end.
Next year may yet very well prove to be Arsenal’s year. We told you this was ‘no’ with a ‘but’.
But what if it isn’t? What if this was the year. The year when City faltered, when Chelsea tried and failed again to marry world-class spending with world-class football, and when Liverpool were in year one of a new project with a new manager.
We’ve said this before, but it really does feel like the way Arsenal have had the rug pulled from beneath them by Liverpool this season makes it far harder to swallow.
At a simplistic level, the excuses and explanations – many of them valid – Arsenal fans said to soothe themselves about losing out specifically to City are all blown out of the water when it is Liverpool under a new manager who have blown Arsenal away.
There is no 115-charges comfort blanket here.
And there is also no escaping the fact Arsenal’s football has become less attractive, more prosaic and worst of all more cynical this season. Injuries have played a huge part here, of course, with Martin Odegaard missed in the early part of the season but Bukayo Saka showing just why Arteta could never countenance being without him.
It turns out Saka wasn’t just the thing that made Odegaard and everyone else good; he was the thing that made Arsenal watchable. It’s no secret that Arsenal are a better side with Saka – this would be true of almost any football team on earth – but the extent to which any and all joy in their football appears to require his presence remains nevertheless alarming. Not every opponent is going to be PSV.
It’s not always true to say second place is first loser. But it’s not always false, either.