Just before the international break, Arsenal were on course to do the unthinkable: the quadruple (winning the Premier League; FA Cup; Carabao (League) Cup and the Champions League). However, post this break and that quadruple has been slashed in half.
They lost the Carabao Cup final to Manchester City, 2-0. This past weekend, they were knocked out by Championship (2nd tier) side, Southampton. The latter result hassparked a debate as to whether the club are starting to crack under the pressure.
Mikel Arteta refused to criticise his players after defeat at Southampton but challenged them to "look in the mirror" and make sure the season will still be a successful one for Arsenal.
In their first game since losing the Carabao Cup final, Arteta's team put in another tame performance as the Saints sensed and took their opportunity with goals from Ross Stewart and substitute, Shea Charles.
The Gunners are currently nine points clear at the top of the Premier League ahead of second-placed Manchester City, but their title rivals have a game in hand and host Arsenal at the Etihad in a few weeks' time, live on Sky Sports.
Mathematically, it is very much still in Arsenal's hands but with so many players out of form and injuries mounting again; the noise around Arteta's side and questions about their title credentials will only grow louder.
Arteta said: "I love my players, what they have done for nine months. I'm not going to criticise them for losing here. What they are putting their bodies through, some didn't have to be here today. I'll defend them more than ever."
"If someone has to take responsibility, that's me. We have the most beautiful period ahead of us. Normally you have two or three moments like this in a season, this is the first moment with a level of difficulty. Let's stand up and make ourselves count."
"No excuses about players that are missing or that are here with issues. Let's look at ourselves in the mirror, accept the situation, rebel against it and go forward with clarity."
Asked what his message is for the players, Arteta added: "Give them clarity and conviction. Trust in our players and believe in what we do. Continue to do that with little tweaks that every game demands."
"We must maintain the attitude and energy at the highest possible level. That is critical to perform at the level we need to win matches."
Arteta's injury disrupted Gunners arrived at St Mary's as overwhelming favourites a fortnight on from their final defeat to City but suffered more injury issues during the game when Gabriel limped off with a knee issue.
Arsenal's nervousness about taking the final step to glory seems to be playing out in individual errors being made at key moments. At Wembley, it was Kepa Arrizabalaga spilling a cross for Nico O'Reilly to score Man City's opener. At St Mary's, Ben White mistimed his jump to allow Ross Stewart to power in the first for Southampton.
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That's now eight goals from Arsenal errors in the past 23 games, according to Opta. There was just one in the 28 games before that.
"We didn't manage the long balls well enough, which is something very strange," Arteta told the BBC after the loss at Southampton. "In the first half, we just let the ball through us and they were one against one. The way we concede the second goal was very similar."
Whether it is down to a change in centre-back personnel, with William Saliba on the bench on Saturday or disruption with David Raya not playing behind the backline against City or Southampton; it is an issue opposition sides will be zoning in on.
Arsenal's list of injuries isn't as long as it may have been, given the extent of their international withdrawals. Key players are either unavailable or lacking full fitness.
Former Arsenal man, Theo Walcott, has claimed that Mikel Arteta’s "nervous energy" on the touchline filtered through to his players during their disappointing FA Cup exit at Southampton. The Gunners saw their trophy dreams further diminished as a late Shea Charles strike secured a 2-1 victory for the Championship side on the south coast.
Speaking to the BBC in the aftermath of the St Mary's upset, the former Arsenal forward pointed the finger directly at the managerial staff's frantic behaviour as a primary catalyst for the squad's disjointed performance.
Walcott said: "Visually watching Mikel on the sidelines, it was elements of previous years where that energy reflected into the team. It was a nervous energy, it was very tense. Not just Mikel but a lot of the staff were out there at times. It was like too many cooks in the kitchen, too many messages. Play your best team was the right thing to do tonight. It's easy if I say that now, but you want a reaction off the cup final and it wasn't that tonight, it was worse."
Walcott shared this prevailing anxiety, urging his former club to move past the Southampton result before it ruins their entire campaign. "They have to not let the season run away from them. Everything they have built this season, don't let it affect them. They have been in this situation before and they don't want to relive that," he concluded.
For moments like Saturday’s surprise FA Cup defeat to Southampton, Mikel Arteta now has a set process. The Basque has even been witnessed privately forcing a changed facial expression before speaking to media or his players; to radiate a desired mood.
Arsenal’s many critics would quip he’s had to get used to such moments.
It is precisely because of such noise around the club, however, that Arteta seeks to immediately shape the responses. He knows criticism will already be scathing and any mockery will be, well, quadrupled, so there’s little need to make his players further dwell on that.
"Feel that pain, feel that emotion, and use it to be better and to improve," Arteta said. The intention is, instead, to shut out any doubt and remind them how much there is to aim for.
"We worked so hard to be in this position," Arteta reminded his players. Four trophies may have quickly become two but there’s still only one that matters.
Arteta and the entire club are fully aware that this entire season ultimately comes down to the Premier League title. Win it and nothing else will matter. Fail and it will feel like everything comes crashing in worse than ever… with the possible exception of Europe.
The Champions League now suddenly occupies a strange place in Arsenal’s season. This most prestigious of club competitions is known to be one that Arteta really wants, since his greatest ambition is to be the manager who finally brings that grandiose trophy to Arsenal.
"It doesn't get bigger than this," he said in Lisbon. There is yet the possibility that Arteta does a version of what Liverpool managed in 2018-19 and wins the Champions League after faltering in the Premier League.
No one currently wants it like that, though, especially amid the awareness of how emotionally intertwined all of these competitions feel. "Momentum," as one squad figure repeatedly says, "is everything in football."
Arsenal appear to have lost theirs or have certainly had it slowed down since the Max Dowman goal against Everton. The Carabao Cup final defeat to Manchester City currently looks like it represents an emotional swing.
Pep Guardiola’s side are again scoring for fun and enjoying themselves, as Arsenal can once more feel the angst growing. All of a sudden, a nine-point lead with a game more played doesn’t feel like that, despite it remaining the same as three weeks ago.
It is into this emotional maelstrom that a trip to Sporting falls.
Arsenal won’t think like this but it’s hard not to see this as a relatively forgiving tie; especially when their last two Champions League quarter-finals were against Bayern Munich and Real Madrid. There’s an obvious opportunity, especially with how those two European giants – as well as four others in Barcelona-Atletico Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain-Liverpool – will be seeking to knock each other out now.
This first leg in Lisbon might consequently have allowed a more measured approach – where even a narrow defeat isn’t a disaster – but it now has a greater emotional significance.
For one, after three poor displays in a row – including that 2-0 over Everton – Arsenal could do with reasserting their quality. Any further drop-off and Saturday’s huge game at home to Bournemouth will only ratchet up in tension.
For all the relentless focus on Arsenal’s mental state, though, training-ground figures argue that their physical state is much more important. Or, rather, that is what really shapes the psychology.
They point to how the squad have only had two midweeks without a match since August. That has an increasing cost.
Favourable cup draws end up becoming burdens and not just for the humiliation of failing to win them. They are invitations to push further, at periods when the squad could actually have done with easing off.
It is the old Leeds United problem of the late 1960s and early 1970s but for the modern age. Some sources are adamant Arteta should have played even weaker teams in both domestic cups, so that as much energy as possible could go into the league.
The Basque can’t really help himself, though and there are many who have expressed similar concerns about the constant intensity of training.
That’s also why the much-discussed international withdrawals weren’t some Sir Alex Ferguson tactic. National team staff could see that so many Arsenal players were close to the red zone.
Declan Rice nearly missed the Carabao Cup final. Bukayo Saka has had a problem that required rest for a while.
If such players aren’t close to 100% or if a few are missing, it starts to break crucial connections in Arteta’s intensively drilled pressing. Hence, the team don’t play in the same way, and those psychological doubts build.
Arsenal sources believe that if the team was in some way fresh or able to prepare for each Premier League game from week to week; they would just perform in a way that would negate angst.
Actual title-winners would, of course, counter that that’s just not how they are secured. You have to fight through such problems, no one has the luxury of flying.
The wonder now is whether a break of more than two weeks without a game will offer rest that players like Rice and Saka needed.
Martin Odegaard stayed home during the international break and one positive being felt from the Southampton game is that it showed the Norwegian is in his best shape for months. It is hoped Eberechi Eze will be back for the second leg against Sporting and Jurrien Timber possibly that same week – just before the big one away to Manchester City.
What happens between now and then will dictate so much of that showdown.
By the same token, there is a feeling that the Southampton defeat may have been more a consequence of complacency – or at least an inability to raise the same intensity as so many recent big games – rather than a perpetuation of deeper performance problems. David Raya hasn’t played either of the last two games and is essential to how Arsenal build.
Arsenal can still achieve something unprecedented this season. No English side has won a quadruple. Nobody has surely ever blown a quadruple quite like this, either. Six games to lose them all. Carabao Cup final. Check. FA Cup exit at Southampton. Got it. We’re two from two right now.
Lose at home against Bournemouth on Saturday. Lose against Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium a week later. That’s the nine-point lead in the league all but gone. Chuck in a stumble against Sporting Lisbon (past three games: three wins, 13 goals scored) and this is pretty much your lot in 16 days of active club football. From quadruple to nonruple. From quadruple to quadlapse. This, this is football heritage.
Take a breath resist the doomer-ism and it is also unlikely Arsenal’s season will play out like that. Winning everything never really happens. Losing everything probably won’t either. Good teams have setbacks, even while they’re winning trophies. Channel the fury, get the first 11 out there and the league title in particular is well within reach.
More to the point, it is already a significant achievement just to get so close. This is not a team of ready‑made galacticos clumped together in a rule-busting splurge or an all-time head coach bolted on as a trophy guarantee. It’s a coherent attempt to build something. Southampton are a good team. The message here is that it is still brutally difficult to win, and this can only ever be a good thing.
The question remains, though. Why is the prospect of Arsenal not winning things so much more of a story than a shot at a first league title in 22 years? Why is there so much hunger for this? Why does it feel like watching one of those disaster-juggernaut moments in a Hollywood movie, where the Rock or similar stares at the horizon and sees the wall of water rising, the tsunami about to break?
In part, this is because we live in a banter-verse where every stumble must be played out in peeled-eyeball super slow-mo. So much of football is consumed now as schadenfreude (literally: harm-pleasure) that we don’t really need a special German word for this any more, as though it’s an obscure subset of actual pleasure. Joy in your own achievements? That’s the minority act now. We need to start talking about the weird niche pleasure of plain old freude, those rare moments where public enjoyment does not involve mockery, gloating, the taunt reflex.
There is already something iconic about Mikel Arteta’s weekly rictus of pain, the faded gardening coat; the look of a brave, sad, highly intelligent hamster watching his burrow being washed into the brook. By late Saturday night, the key imagery from Arsenal TV had already begun to do the social media rounds, a clip of a man so angry he can barely un-grit his teeth, shouting things like HE HAS TO WIN THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE BECAUSE HE’S THROWN THIS AWAY (narrator’s voice: Arsenal have never done this in their history).
Harm-joy isn’t the whole story. It is the nature of Arsenal’s struggles that makes them so gripping. The way this team has won and the way it has now wobbled: both of these feel like a model that expresses something not just about modern football but also, if we may go down the balloons of hope route, about modern life too.
This is not about bottling It, which is a description of an outcome, not an analysis of why it has happened. Cowardice, fraudery and moral collapse are attractive ideas. There is no such thing as a pure bottling at this level. Being part of a properly balanced team doesn’t make you brave. Winners are not innately wiser or more noble. They’re just better at sport, for complex reasons.
The current Arsenal is an unusual team. Across his five seasons, Arteta has built an extreme model of systems play and controlled movement. Sequences in and out of possession are minutely planned and grooved. The ideal is sustained intensity, constant positional cover, attacks that follow an overwhelming pattern.
There is also a natural fascination in seeing those formulas interrupted, the way pressure in key moments and the countermeasures of other managers can throw a system. At times, like these, Arsenal can look like a team that has been aggressively overcoached, that has taken the post-Guardiola, data‑heavy method of breaking the game down into moves and moments, and lost, or suppressed, or forgotten something along the way.
At times like these, it's important to remain calm and collected. Everything is still in their control. Panicking can be dangerous. It can cause eradicted behaviour that can have disastrous results.
It seems like Arteta needs to adjust his behaviour. Having an emotional boss can also cause problems. It can bring uncertainty and confusion as to what approach to take.