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“It is reassuring to know that if your performances are right, you do not need bad results from somebody else,” Arsène Wenger said after watching Arsenal leapfrog surprise package Leicester to go top of the Premier League a few days after Christmas in 2015. “That is one less stress. Once you are first, you can just focus on your performance.”
Arsenal were quickly installed as hot favourites to win the title for the first time since 2004, but things did not work out that way, the team spending just 26 nights at the summit before being overhauled by Claudio Ranieri’s 5,000-1 miracle workers.
It is a feeling Arsenal supporters have had to get used to since they were last champions 21 years ago. Across that period, which started with the post-Invincibles season in which they led for the first 10 weeks before being derailed after Manchester United ended their 49-match unbeaten run and has included a record of being top for 248 nights and finishing second in 2022-23, they have spent 773 nights (as of Saturday morning) – the equivalent of more than two years – in pole position without taking the chequered flag.
Arsenal are top again after Liverpool, champions last season following a record 234 nights as leaders, suffered two successive league defeats before the international break and look much better positioned to take advantage than at any time over the past two decades. Although they have not won on their past two visits to Saturday’s opponents, Fulham, cathartic victories in successive matches: Newcastle, Olympiakos and West Ham – sides Arsenal have struggled against under Mikel Arteta – have created a growing sense of optimism at the club that this could be the year they finally get past the post.
“We cannot pay too much attention to that because the feeling was: ‘You go to Newcastle, if you lose in Newcastle, the Premier League is over,’” said the Arsenal manager on Friday. “And one week later, you are where you are. So, honestly, it’s focus on what we can control, focus on our performance, focus on delivering and achieving what we want to achieve daily and the rest, it’s 30 games, it’s still too early. So many things are going to happen. Emotionally, we cannot be dragged into these things because we have much more important things to do.”
Such is the depth of their squad after spending more than £250m on reinforcements in the summer that even the likely absence of the captain, Martin Ødegaard, for another six weeks with a knee injury picked up when Arsenal comfortably saw off West Ham should not have the same impact on results as last season. The Norwegian missed almost two months with an ankle injury and, combined with long-term injuries to the key attackers Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz and Gabriel Jesus, it meant they were never able to properly sustain a challenge to Liverpool despite finishing as runners-up for a third year in a row.
Eberechi Eze is likely to continue to fill in for Ødegaard against Fulham, and Arteta has top-quality cover in every position in a squad that unusually has the same number of players who predominantly use their left foot as their right. “Balance,” he said simply when asked what the benefits were.
Arsenal head to Craven Cottage at the summit for the time since May 2024, a season when they led for 76 nights before being overhauled by Manchester City after a home defeat by Aston Villa – the only league game they lost after the turn of the year.
In 2022-23 an injury to William Saliba proved their undoing, their lack of defensive cover ruthlessly exposed by City. But rather than regarding the past three campaigns as a negative, Arteta is hoping his players can draw on those experiences.
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“It’s a very new changing room,” he said. “We have brought in the last two seasons various new players, so they haven’t experienced that. For some of them, it will be unconsciously there but as a learning and hopefully a really positive learning as well because that’s sport and that’s football in general to do that. And then you do have microdoses of that: what happened at Newcastle for a few years, what happened against West Ham, what happened against City when we could not beat them. It’s a lot of situations and we have learned from that. And then the ultimate goal, if we do a lot of the small things well, it will come.”
Before Arteta’s appointment as manager in December 2019, Arsenal had not been top since losing out to Leicester the season after the Spaniard retired from playing. He was captain of the team that Wenger described as having “won the stamina league” after they spent 128 nights top in 2013-14 before losing out to City. That still was not as many as in 2007-08, when Arsenal were at the summit for more than two-thirds of the season – 142 nights – yet ended up third.
Arteta, whose side are favourites to win the title according to Opta’s supercomputer, must sense there is a real opportunity to finally banish those unwanted statistics for good.
