Forget about Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United; history might be Arsenal‘s most formidable opponent as they attempt to become back-to-back Premier League champions this season.
Think it’s going to be easy, Arsenal fans, as each of your rivals attempts to dethrone Mikel Arteta’s champions while adjusting to life under new head coaches? Think again.
“Once you get that gold champions badge on your sleeve, everything changes,” Danny Simpson, a title winner with Leicester City in 2016, told ESPN. “Everybody wants to beat you, and Arsenal will find that out quickly.
“We lost our first game of the season away to Hull City, and it was a strange feeling because we had got out of the habit of losing and we never really recovered. When I was at United, Sir Alex Ferguson always told us that the second year was the toughest, and he was right.”
Arsenal have been crowned English champions on 14 occasions — only Liverpool and Manchester United (20) have more titles — but not since the 1934-35 season have they been able to keep the champions’ trophy in their possession. Prior to last season’s title triumph, Arsenal had won the title nine times since 1935 and never once managed to defend it. Even Arsene Wenger’s “Invincibles” were unable to go back-to-back after winning the Premier League undefeated in 2003-04.
Retaining the title will be a reversal of a recent trend for Arsenal, but Arteta has already laid down the challenge for his players to do it.
“We want to go straight again,” Arteta said after Sunday’s 3-0 Community Shield win against City. “The desire comes because I want to live that moment again. I want to live other moments, even bigger than them.
“We know what it’s going to take. We know the difficulty of the task. We’ve never done it at this club, to win it again. We know that it’s going to demand something special, and we are ready for it.
“If we drive the standards at this level, I’m sure that we’re going to be really, really competitive.”
Arsenal’s 3-0 win against promoted Coventry City in their season opener on Friday was a clear declaration of intent by Arteta’s side and the unconvincing performances of their title rivals – only Manchester City won, with a late fightback at home against AFC Bournemouth – showed that they remain the team to catch.
With Liverpool drawing at Newcastle and Manchester United and Tottenham beaten convincingly by Hull and Brentford respectively, Chelsea will need to claim an impressive win at Fulham on Monday to give Arsenal even the slightest cause for concern.
But since the Premier League began in 1992-93, only Ferguson, Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola have guided their teams to a successful title defenses, and since 1960, only Liverpool, Man United, Chelsea and Man City have achieved the feat. So why is it so tough, as the best team in the country, to win the title for two seasons on the bounce?
“It’s definitely harder to win the title as champions,” Wes Brown, a five-time title winner with Man United, told ESPN. “There’s no doubt that opponents want to beat the champions, they want to say they have beaten the best team in the country, but it’s also about the mindset of the players.
“You have to remember what got you there in the first place — the determination, the willingness to run more than the man you are up against — especially when you think it will be easy because there will always be a defeat that can come out of nowhere.
“That’s when the character of the manager comes in. Sir Alex would never let us rest on our laurels, whether it was by motivation or signing a player or two to keep everybody focused, and I do think that Arsenal have an advantage in that area because Arteta has built this team and he won’t allow anyone to take their foot off the pedal.”
When Ferguson ended United’s 26-year title drought by winning the first Premier League in 1993, he believed that complacency was the biggest threat to his players retaining the title, so on the first day of preseason training, he gave a speech to his team.
“I’ve written three names down and I’ve put them in an envelope,” Ferguson said. “Those are the three players that are going to let us down next season.” Ferguson would later admit that they were no names and no envelopes, but he wanted to ensure that each of his players was motivated to avoid being one of those names at the end of the season.
“It was just a challenge to them,” Ferguson said. “Because dealing with success is not easy.”
It is a story Arteta is likely to know. The Arsenal manager has never been shy when it comes to quirky motivational tricks — remember the training ground dog named “Win” to get his players using the word on a daily basis? — but the challenge of going back-to-back is as much on his shoulders as the players.
Ferguson, Mourinho and Guardiola are arguably the three greatest managers in Premier League history, and he must emulate them. Wenger, the man who built the modern Arsenal, won three titles and failed each time to retain it, and Carlo Ancelotti (Chelsea) and Jurgen Klopp (Liverpool) also couldn’t take their title-winning teams to a successful defense.
“When you return for a new season after winning the league, you always turn up thinking everything will be the same, but it never is,” said ESPN FC analyst Steve Nicol, a four-time title winner with Liverpool. “Some guys will be injured, some guys will be out of form, you make a couple of signings that don’t work. But Arsenal are, by some distance, the best team with the strongest squad this season.
“Liverpool made some bad signings when they were champions last year and had a poor season, but I can’t remember the last time that Arsenal signed a player who didn’t make them better, and they have maintained that with Bruno Guimarães this summer.”
As they prepare to start the defense of their title against promoted Coventry City at the Emirates on Friday, it is clear that Arsenal are strong favorites to retain their title. The stability at the Emirates, rooted in Arteta’s longevity in the job, is one significant advantage over all of Arsenal’s rivals. Arteta will mark his seventh anniversary as Gunners manager in December, but the second-longest serving Big Six manager is Michael Carrick, who took charge of United in January this year.
“That’s a big thing for Arsenal,” Brown said. “All of their rivals are starting again, but Arteta knows what works and how to motivate each of his players. And the players also know what to expect from him.”
Xabi Alonso (Chelsea), Andoni Iraola (Liverpool), Enzo Maresca (City) arrived at their clubs this summer, and Roberto De Zerbi took charge of Tottenham on March 31 with the club deep in a relegation battle. All of Arteta’s direct rivals are in a state of flux with new ideas and systems having to be implemented while it is simply business as usual at the Emirates.
Perhaps Aston Villa, with Unai Emery approaching his fourth year in the job in November, would argue that they are best-placed to take advantage of the upheaval elsewhere. Yet they have also had a turbulent summer: with Morgan Rogers (Chelsea), Youri Tielemans (Manchester United), Lucas Digne (Paris Saint-Germain) and Ezri Konsa (Arsenal) leaving Villa Park this summer, and Ollie Watkins (linked to Saudi Pro League) also heading for the exit door, the UEFA Europa League winners are facing even more much turbulence than their top-six rivals — as highlighted by their 4-0 opening game loss at Brighton & Hove Albion.
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It was a different landscape when Arsenal last went into a season as defending champions. Back in 2004, Wenger’s Invincibles looked set to dominate, but the arrival of Jose Mourinho as Chelsea coach changed everything. After a huge spending spree courtesy of Roman Abramovich’s billions, Chelsea won back-to-back titles in 2004-05 and 2005-06 and Arsenal fell off the radar before finally ending their 22-year title drought last season.
There is no such rival this time around, though.
Maybe the rule changes designed to clamp down on time-wasting and grappling at corners will work against Arsenal and force Arteta and his coaches to make subtle tweaks to the team’s approach, but the football rulebook alone is unlikely to be enough to derail Arteta’s side.
“Complacency is the one thing that can trip Arsenal up,” Nicol said. “I don’t see Arteta or his coaches allowing that to happen, but they need to have their eyes and ears open on the training ground.
“I remember one incident at Liverpool when I was doing some training drill runs and I’d just got back in line ready to do the next one when the coach, Roy Evans, walked up to me and said, ‘Was that it?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He just replied by saying, ‘That last run — is that it?’ But that was all he had to say, because it was a little thing to make you realize that the coaches had their eye on you every single second. That’s a big thing.”
Momentum is another crucial element. When a team wins a title, the momentum is always positive, but as Simpson discovered with Leicester, who posted the worst title defense of any Premier League champion by finishing 12th, once the winning feeling goes, it can unravel quickly.
“We lost the Community Shield the week before losing our first league and ended up with four Premier League defeats by mid-October,” Simpson said. “Looking back, our recruitment wasn’t great, and we really struggled with the demands of playing in Europe.
“When we won the league, we just played every weekend — Chelsea will benefit from that this season — but as champions, everything piles up in terms of games, scrutiny and criticism when we started to lose.
“Arsenal have the squad to cope. They have added really well by signing Guimaraes and Konsa, and they’re used to playing in Europe, so they should avoid the issues that we couldn’t overcome at Leicester, but it will still be harder for them, there’s no question about that.”
History is against Arteta and Arsenal, but they bucked the trend by winning the title last season, so perhaps going back-to-back is merely another hurdle they will clear with relish. The opening weekend hinted that they are ready to do that, but let’s not forget that champions Liverpool opened up with six straight wins last season and finished fifth – 25 points behind the Gunners – so there are still plenty of obstacles to overcome.
Many elite teams and managers have failed to defend a title in the past, and the challenge for Arteta’s side is to prove they really are worthy of emulating the greats this season.
