Why Arsenal winning their first Premier League title in 22 years matters so much

All season long, Arsenal fans have been sweating out the 2025/26 Premier League title race.

The Gunners have led nearly the entire way, first establishing themselves atop the league standings in late August and falling as far as seventh in late September before leap-frogging back to the top for good in mid-October. They have been there ever since, aside from one mid-matchweek wobble in April.

Arsenal haven't made it easy on themselves, with multiple chances to pull away from the pack for good passing them by, making the finish to the season excruciating for fans at Emirates Stadium. Manchester City made them sweat down the stretch, as Pep Guardiola gunned for his fifth consecutive Premier League title.

Finally, the wait is over and Arsenal supporters can celebrate.

How did Arsenal win 2025/26 Premier League title?

After Manchester City dropped points to Bournemouth on Tuesday, May 19, Arsenal now sit five points clear at the top of the table with just one match to go.

Thus, it is mathematically impossible for anyone to catch them on the final day of the season, rendering Arsenal's match against Crystal Palace a formality.

Mikel Arteta's team sit on 82 points, holding a +43 goal differential with 69 goals for and 29 goals conceded. They have won 25 of their 37 matches this season, drawing seven and losing five.

Their 82 points would be the lowest title-winning haul since Leicester City's 81 in 2015/16, and would be the seventh-lowest in Premier League history.

Known for their defensive approach, Arsenal's 29 goals conceded would actually not even crack the top 10 fewest allowed in Premier League history. The record is 15 by Jose Mourinho's Chelsea in 2004/05, and Arsenal have even conceded fewer in a campaign themselves, coming back in 1998/99 when they allowed just 17, the second-most in league history.

En route to the title, Arsenal managed to beat 17 of their 19 Premier League opponents at least once, failing to beat only Liverpool and Man City, against whom they drew once each and lost once each.

Why Arsenal ending a 22-year wait matters so much

Arsene Wenger's historic Invincibles season, when Arsenal went through the entire 38-Premier League campaign in 2003/04 without suffering defeat, followed a 2001/02 title success and a 2002/03 race where the Gunners had their pockets picked by Manchester United. Wenger's team were giants of the era and it was implausible to think at that stage that they would spend so long out of the winners' enclosure.

But Jose Mourinho's arrival at Chelsea, along with their London rivals' newfound spending power under Roman Abramovich came at a dreadful time for Arsenal, who were operating within stringent means financially due to the cost of their move to the state-of-the-art Emirates Stadium in 2006.

Sir Alex Ferguson was in the process of building his last great team with Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez in attack. By the time he won the last of three titles in a row in 2008/09, all the old bitterness had gone from the Ferguson-Wenger rivalry. In August 2011, Arsenal were hammered 8-2 at Old Trafford. That season ended with new-moneyed Manchester City as champions and Arsenal dutifully scrapping away for the Champions League places.

Wenger managed a restorative FA Cup final win in 2014 to end 10 years without a trophy. Two more followed in 2015 and 2017, but the final years of his dwindling reign became regrettably poisonous. The days of fans chanting "We've got our Arsenal back" under Unai Emery did not last, so when Mikel Arteta was plucked from Pep Guardiola's Manchester City coaching staff in December 2019, he inherited a club at a very low ebb.

An early FA Cup win bought Arteta time, and his vibrant young team were ahead of schedule when they took a remarkable 50 points from their first 19 games of the 2022/23. Arsenal were hauled in on that occasion by a treble-bound City and pipped on the final day by Guardiola's men in 2023/24. Last season felt particularly wasteful as Arteta's team let the draws pile up to the extent they never put any real pressure on Arne Slot's Liverpool.

It was still a third consecutive second-place finish, providing more ammunition for rivals to torment them with while the feeling that second-best was their lot in life continued to grow.

Thus, as Liverpool fell away this time around, City undertook a season of transition, United and Chelsea once again sacked managers and Spurs embroiled themselves in a comedic relegation fight, it just had to be this season to end the wait. It's not been straightforward, or pretty to watch at times, but none of that matters now, because this is officially Arsenal's season.

How many Premier League titles have Arsenal won?

The 2025/26 crown is Arsenal's fourth Premier League title and 14th overall top-flight league championship. It is their first since the 2003/04 Invincibles squad, which won the championship in unbeaten fashion.

Their total number of top league titles is the third-most of any English club, behind the 20 held jointly by Liverpool and Manchester United.

The 22 years is the longest distance between top-flight titles in England since Blackburn's triumph in 1994/95 ended an 81-year wait.

Interestingly, this is also the first time in Pep Guardiola's entire managerial career that he has gone two straight domestic seasons without a league title.