February again. The month when the league table starts to harden, when the pretenders fall away and the contenders dig in, when every football writer in the country reaches for the same tired metaphors about business ends and home stretches. I should know — I have been writing about Arsenal in February for the better part of fifteen years, and the emotional range has been considerable. There have been Februaries of despair, Februaries of defiance, and at least one February where I didn’t write anything at all because the alternative was screaming into a pillow.
This February feels different. Arsenal sit top of the Premier League with sixty-one points from twenty-eight matches. I checked the table this morning over coffee, as I have done every morning since September, with the superstitious precision of a man who believes that looking away might cause the numbers to change. Four points clear of Manchester City. The Champions League campaign has been flawless — first in the league phase, seeded for the round of sixteen, the draw still to come but the confidence palpable. The squad is the strongest it has been since the early 2000s, arguably the strongest in the club’s modern history. Everything points in one direction.
And yet. I am an Arsenal supporter. The words “everything points in one direction” fill me not with certainty but with a very specific kind of dread. The dread of the informed optimist. The dread of someone who has been here before.
The weight of nearly
Arsenal’s relationship with “nearly” is long, painful, and extensively documented — not least on this very blog. The 2022/23 season: top for 248 days, finished second. The 2023/24 season: eighty-nine points, finished second. The 2024/25 season: runners-up again, this time paired with a Champions League semi-final defeat to Paris Saint-Germain that still stings like a paper cut in winter. Three consecutive years of sustained excellence, three consecutive years without a trophy to show for it.
Before that, the longer history. Twenty years since the last league title. The 1989 championship — Thomas charging through the Anfield night — remains perhaps the greatest single moment in the club’s history, and it happened because Arsenal went to the most intimidating ground in England on the last day of the season and did the impossible. Before that, eighteen years without a league title. Arsenal, for all their grandeur, have always had a complicated relationship with winning. It arrives in bursts, separated by long periods of yearning. The agonising near-miss of 2023/24 still stings.
The question that hangs over this season — the question that no amount of points tallies or defensive records can answer — is whether this generation can break the cycle. Whether they can go from nearly to actually. Whether they can take the accumulated pain of three consecutive second-place finishes and transmute it into something golden.
The squad
Let me tell you about this squad, because it deserves to be written about with something approaching awe. The summer of 2025 was transformative — Viktor Gyökeres arriving from Sporting to provide the elite number nine Arsenal had been searching for since the departure of Aubameyang, Eberechi Eze adding creative depth and flair, Noni Madueke providing competition and cover on the flanks, Martín Zubimendi finally bringing that deep-lying playmaker profile alongside Rice. The investment was enormous — close to £250 million — but the logic was impeccable. This was a squad that needed not revolution but refinement, and every signing addressed a specific tactical need.
The maturity of this group is remarkable. Saka, at twenty-four, plays with the authority of a seasoned veteran. His consistency this season has been extraordinary — double figures for goals and assists, performances in the biggest matches that confirm his status as one of the finest players in the world. He is Arsenal’s heartbeat, the player around whom everything revolves, and he carries the responsibility with a grace that belies his age.
Ødegaard’s leadership has evolved into something quietly magnificent. The armband sits on him naturally now, and his influence extends far beyond the technical brilliance that first made his name. He organises, he cajoles, he demands standards from those around him. On the pitch, the passing remains sublime — those disguised through-balls that arrive at a team-mate’s feet like a letter slipped under a door. Off it, he has become the emotional centre of the dressing room, the player who sets the tone in the tunnel before every match.
Rice continues to be the defensive fulcrum, but his game has expanded again this season. More goals, more forward runs, more moments where he receives the ball in his own half and carries it forty yards before anyone can react. The partnership with Zubimendi has given Arsenal a midfield axis that can control matches at the highest level — the Spaniard’s metronomic passing complementing Rice’s dynamism in a way that feels like the missing piece finally clicking into place.
Saliba and Gabriel remain the immovable objects at the heart of defence, now joined by Piero Hincapié to provide depth and versatility. Gyökeres has brought the goals and the presence that the front line needed. This is not a squad with weaknesses. This is a squad that has been built, patiently and deliberately, to win.
The Arteta question, revisited
When I returned to this blog in the summer of 2023, I wrote about Arteta with cautious admiration. Now, approaching his sixth full season in charge, the caution has largely evaporated. What Arteta has built at Arsenal is one of the most impressive managerial projects in recent Premier League history. From eighth place and no European football to three consecutive title challenges and a Champions League semi-final — the trajectory is not just upward but accelerating.
His tactical evolution has been fascinating to watch. The early Arsenal was functional, pragmatic, built on defensive solidity and set-piece efficiency. The current version retains that defensive excellence but has added layers of attacking sophistication — the fluid positional rotations in midfield, the overloads in the half-spaces, the relentless pressing that suffocates opponents in their own third. Arsenal under Arteta play football that is both aesthetically pleasing and ruthlessly effective. It is the combination that every manager aspires to and few achieve.
The comparison with Wenger — inevitable, unfair, but irresistible — has shifted. For years, the question was whether Arteta could match Wenger’s achievements. Now it is whether he can surpass them. A league title this season would place him in the conversation. A league and Champions League double — ambitious, improbable, but not impossible — would elevate him to the pantheon.
The blog as chronicle
I have been writing about Arsenal, in one form or another, for close to fifteen years. The early posts were raw and excitable, full of the naïve conviction that next season would be the one. The middle years grew darker, more cynical, tinged with the bitterness of a supporter who felt the club he loved was sleepwalking into irrelevance. The recent posts — since the return — have been cautiously optimistic, the hope tempered by experience, the excitement moderated by the memory of past disappointments.
This blog has always been, at its core, a chronicle of hope. Not the blind, unthinking hope of the new supporter, but the battered, weather-beaten hope of someone who has watched Arsenal lose Champions League finals and bottle title races and sell their best players to rivals. The hope that persists not because the evidence supports it but because supporting a football club is, fundamentally, an act of irrational faith.
And here we are, in February 2026, with that faith more justified than it has been in two decades. Top of the league. Flying in Europe. A squad built for sustained success. A manager who has earned the right to be trusted. The pieces are in place. The story is being written. The question is only how it ends.
Still believing
I think about that piece I wrote in 2017 about fight and soul, about the intangible qualities that make a football club more than the sum of its parts. I wrote it during one of the darkest periods in modern Arsenal history, when the team had neither fight nor soul and the future looked bleak. Reading it now, from the vantage point of a squad sitting top of the league and competing on every front, feels like reading a letter from a different lifetime.
I took my nephew to his first match at the Emirates last month — Wolves at home, a cold Tuesday evening, the kind of fixture that used to attract thirty thousand and a sense of duty. It was sold out. The atmosphere was electric before kick-off. He turned to me with eyes the size of saucers and said: “Is it always like this?” I wanted to say yes, but honesty required me to say: “It is now.”
The fight is back. The soul is back. The quality, the depth, the tactical intelligence, the sheer bloody-minded refusal to accept anything less than the highest standards — it is all back, and it is better than anything I have witnessed in my years of writing about this club.
Will we win the league? I don’t know. The honest answer is that I have been hurt too many times to say yes with any confidence. Four points is not an insurmountable lead, and Manchester City — even a City without the invincible aura of the Guardiola peak years — remain the most formidable opponents in English football. There are twelve matches to go, and in twelve matches anything can happen. I have learned that lesson the hard way, repeatedly, over many years.
But I believe. Not with the certainty of knowledge but with the conviction of faith. I believe in this squad, in this manager, in this club’s capacity to rise to the moment when the moment demands it. I believe that the years of nearly — the 2023, the 2024, the 2025 — were not wasted but were preparation. That each near-miss has added a layer of steel, a grain of resilience, that will prove decisive when the pressure reaches its peak.
Still here. Still writing. Still believing. That is what this blog has always been about, and that is what it will continue to be about until the story reaches its conclusion — whatever that conclusion may be.
February again. Arsenal top of the league. The nights are drawing out, the pitches are softening, and the run-in beckons. I would not want to be anywhere else.