Mikel Arteta speaks to the players in a meeting after winning the Premier League… ❤️🏆
🗣️ “You have sent a message to sport, to football, to a lot of people, how you win & how you deserve to win something. It’s in your heart, your soul, your values.” 😤
Been privileged to cover this club for over a decade, to live in the area for a decent wedge of that time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that pre-match.
The UCL is hard to win. It’s always been.
That loss yesterday it 11 years since Barcelona last made the finals. Before 2006, they went 14 years. They won it for the first time in 1992, thirty-seven years after the first European Cup game was played. Their best period remains 2006 to 2015 when they won it four times.
That competition is so wicked that they may not win it again for another decade. It’s possible.
Real Madrid went 32 years without a UCL trophy. Between 1966 and 1998. In that period, they won the league 16 times. Between 2003 and 2011, they made the semifinal only once.
For context, Pep Guardiola didn’t make a single UCL final at Bayern Munich. It took him five years or so to make his first at Man City. He spent a truckload of money to achieve that feat. Consecutive quarterfinal exits in the hands of teams you’ll expect them to steamroller.
Jose Mourinho won and became everything he could at Chelsea but he never made a UCL final with them. You know who did?
Avram Grant. Roberto Di Matteo. Two coaches who can’t be heard near Mourinho’s level.
If Arsenal make it to the semifinal, they’ll be the only English team in the semifinal for the second year running.
Same Arsenal didn’t even qualify for the UCL for seven years. They’ve seen a final once. They’ve only gone as far as the semifinal three times. In Wenger’s 22 years at Arsenal, they made the semifinal only twice. The first didn’t come until nearly a decade after he joined.
The Premier League had six teams in the UCL this season. Only one of them is likely to make the semis. Only two made the quarters.
And that’s a league that spent £3.4bn in last summer’s transfer window alone.
Diego Simeone has made the final twice and he hasn’t won it. He’s spent 15 years at Atletico Madrid. In that period, ATM have only gone as far as the semifinals four times. Simeone may yet leave ATM without winning it.
It’s why Zidane’s achievements sits gently and pretty. He lived a charmed life. That achievement is rare.
A league title rewards consistency, the UCL rewards a combination of too many factors, some of which are outside your control.
My name is Rilwan, I love and write about football systems, memories and the depths behind the game. Follow me and repost if you want more of this.
Two things bother me about the narrative building around Arsenal.
First, we're told constantly that the Premier League is the most competitive league in the world. Fine. So what does it mean to be consistently fighting for the title in that environment? You can't celebrate the league's brutal competitiveness and then dismiss sustained title challenges as not good enough. Pick one.
Second, and IMO this matters more, failure in elite sport is not losing. Luis Enrique said it. Many others have said versions of it. Failure is not trying again. It's accepting the ceiling. It's going through the motions. Arteta has never done that. Every setback has been fuel for the next attempt.
The problem is social media runs on binary outcomes. Win or fail. Hero or fraud. No room for nuance. No room for the manager who rebuilt a club into genuine title contenders and is still hungry for more.
Simeone has been at Atlético for over a decade. Two league titles, two Champions League finals. Still no European Cup. Nobody serious calls that failure. They call it one of the great managerial tenures in modern football. And I'm convinced that given 14 years like Simeone, Mikel will win more leagues than him.
Arteta may or may not win the league this year. He may not lift the Champions League this year or next. But as long as he keeps pushing, keeps trying, keeps competing at this level, failure isn't what this is.
Find another name for it
By the way, if City wins the league, the achievement would of course be enormous.
This is the first time in all of human civilization that the rules of money became stronger than the rulers of money.
And what’s crazier is that Satoshi did it anonymously, without ego, without profit motive, without political ambition, without personal gain.
He built something that transcends every individual, every company, every government, every era.
Humanity has never had a form of value that is:
Borderless
Permissionless
Scarce
Immutable
Self-verifying
Self-securing
Defended by global thermodynamic expenditure.
Owned by no one, controlled by no one.
This is alien technology compared to the legacy financial system.
Satoshi solved double-spending.
He solved sovereign capture.
He solved trusted third parties.
He solved monetary corruption.
He solved time theft.
He solved asymmetrical power.
He created the first system where the individual finally has more monetary sovereignty than the state.
Unfuckwithable is exactly the right word.
You’re witnessing the discovery of a financial constant, like the economic equivalent of discovering zero or calculus.
This is why you feel it so deeply.
This is why people get religious about it.
This is why every centralized institution on Earth is terrified.
Satoshi created the most important invention since the internet.
And the world is still pretending it’s a “risky asset.”
Our open play xG in the Premier League is only low because every other team is scared to attack us - even to the point where Pep went low block and 5 at the back.
In Europe, where teams don’t sit back as much, Arsenal have the 4th best Open Play xG out of all 36 teams. Levels.