Cruyff’s Ajax, Messi’s Barcelona, Rice’s Arsenal. Stein, Michels, Ferguson, Arteta. The Dark Side of the Moon, The Very Best of The Beatles, Arsenal 2025-26 highlights DVD. Total Football, tiki-taka, hugging the goalie at corners. Get ready. Make room among the greats. It may just be coming.
And yes, you can laugh at this on the internet. You can pull-quote excerpts with mocking emojis. Throw in some Niles from Frasier has really lost it stuff. You can point, with justification, to the fact these other people, the actual greats, did it for a long time, not just one year.
But the fact is we are now very close to a reckoning up. And should this happen, it will be impossible on the basic numbers to exclude the current Arsenal team from a list of the greatest to have played the game.
It has been a stealth attack to this point. Here are the facts as they stand. Right now Arsenal are 19 games from all-time status. They don’t have to win them all. They may need only repeat their results of the past 19 games: one defeat and 14 wins. At which point Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal would become the first English winners of the quadruple.
Most things don’t happen. This one could, just as it could also fall apart completely in the next seven days. For now basecamp has been captured. That peak is in sight. Sauron has fired up the plume of power. Nineteen games to rule them all. Just reaching this point is significant. What does it mean?
There are two remarkable things about this Goat-curious Arsenal team. First, the basic arc. Arsenal have won one domestic trophy since 2017. They have to this point been cast as anti-winners, mental-block merchants, although this may change very quickly now. Second, and most hilariously, nobody out there seems to think they’re any good.
The table-topping team, favourites in the Champions League, are widely considered to be some kind of abomination, an oversight, not just unlikely quadruple winners, but a thing to be corrected. The tone of the discussion, often unchallenged, has been: what is wrong with us? Why have we been Arsenaled like this? How do we fix it?
The obvious twin point here is that Manchester City can also win the quadruple. City are mild second favourites to do the undoable because of points tallies and tougher draws. On the other hand they have a muscle memory of recent triumph. They also have many winnable games. But they are also considered a work in progress. A few weeks ago the discussion around this team was collapse, declining standards, Pep Guardiola leaving. And now we have this, one concerted push from a moment of history.
First up, what is the running order? And we are going to look at Arsenal only for now. From here they will play the following teams. Premier League: Everton (h), Bournemouth (h), Manchester City (a), Newcastle (h), Fulham (h), West Ham (a), Burnley (h), Crystal Palace (a). Champions League: Bayer Leverkusen (twice), then potentially Sporting or Bodø/Glimt (twice), plus the semis and the final. Carabao Cup final: Manchester City. FA Cup: Southampton, plus any semi and final.
With all due respect to the elite talent in their path, to the randomness of events, to the mental strain involved, a lot of these are objectively winnable games. Twelve of 19 are either against teams Arsenal should expect to beat, or against good teams with not much to play for.
In outline the hardest dates are City in the Carabao Cup final, City in the league, and the semis and finals of the other cups. It represents a brain-frazzling slog. But this is, repeat, to win a first English quadruple. Most likely it’s going to come down to moments, fine margins, control, executing a plan. Hmm. Who do we know who’s good at that?
At which point reality must cough politely and enter the room. There are compelling narrative reasons why this is massively unlikely. First, the added complication of Arsenal defeating Arsenal. This is a team with no grooved history of winning. Going from are-you-actually-any-good status to marching along with the Arc of the Covenant on your shoulders laser-beaming the world: this is another major jump, beyond even the usual jumps.
Second, Arsenal got to this point by being pragmatists. Arteta likes to apply the data on player minutes, recovery and prioritising targets. It feels less likely he’s going to shoot for the moon and risk it all trying to win it all. There will be hard choices. Cup ties will be juggled. From this perspective City are perhaps more likely to go for the whole bag. Guardiola has been here before. He knows what winning is, seems to feel less pressure at the idea of falling short.
For now this is of course just keyboard fantasy, basement-dweller drool. Arsenal are probably as likely to win nothing as they are to win everything, which would in itself be a fascinating narrative (of pain) for those outside.
The most interesting point at this stage is the strangeness of having two teams in this position.
The Premier League has been getting closer. City lost to Southampton in the Carabao Cup in January 2023, but it would have been no surprise had they won it all. And that team did seem to be an ultimate expression of the age of Pep. It was also stacked with A-list talent. Liverpool were theoretically 12 games from a quadruple on 16 April 2022. They beat City the same day. They lost only one of those 12. Net haul by the end: two domestic cups, and a season nobody really talks about now.
It seems reasonable to conclude, all things being equal, that someone from the Premier League will do this at some point. Someone is going to reboot Sergeant Pepper. Someone is going to make our own Godfather 4: Ultimate Godfather. That circle will be completed. Why is it happening?
To some degree the nature of winning has changed. Financial stratification has made it more routine at the top to hoover up trophies. The economic power in England has ironed out every other domestic league. There are fewer unexpected obstacles. It is much, much harder to construct an exceptional team outside the main cartel. But a so-so Spurs can reach the knockout stage of the Champions League.
On a more positive note, the Premier League has exceptional strength in depth. It is a constant proving ground. Unprecedentedly deep squads at the biggest teams mean you will keep steamrollering on. But money is also hugely disruptive and this is where Arsenal, in particular, have been smart.
A major part of winning now is the avoidance of a macro-level ballsing up. A rising tide doesn’t carry all boats. Just the ones that aren’t sinking. Most of Arsenal’s rivals are in a state of transition on the pitch or a confusion of finance, greed and doomed ambition.
Money is confusing. Not everyone can manage these things. At peer-level clubs such as Chelsea, Manchester United and even Barcelona, speculative ownership has led to a state of self-torpedo. This is where Arsenal have made some massive gains. Same manager for five years. Same system. Same core players. Carefully built teams are rare. In an age of stupid maybe you just have to be less stupid than everyone else.
Two last points. The real star in the current landscape is Guardiola, king of systems-ball, modern-day football-dad and basically the background Yoda to both these quadruple chasers, just as every other leading team in Europe bears something of his imprint.
And finally all this structural chat is unfair on Arsenal’s players and manager, who keep beating the teams in front of them, who have a genuinely all-time defence and a wonderful midfield. If the qualities required to win have changed, then Arteta has simply ridden ahead of the tide.
Maintaining identity, chemistry, will, in the face of a wildly distracting landscape; still looking like a team when the billion-dollar projects around you often resemble random celebrity aggregations. This is a massively underrated achievement. It remains very likely nobody is winning a quadruple this year. But just getting to this point is still a rare – albeit slightly less rare – feat of sporting ultimacy.
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