The London Colney training ground sits on the edge of a golf course, which is a sentence you would not have written about Arsenal five years ago. In May 2020, Mikel Arteta’s side finished eighth in the Premier League, twenty-three points behind Liverpool, and the job at hand did not look like a project so much as a salvage operation. The squad that lost to Aston Villa on the final day of that truncated season included Mesut Özil, who was not playing, Matteo Guendouzi, who was not staying, and Shkodran Mustafi, who was not convincing anyone. The conversation around the Emirates was not about Europe. It was about identity.
Arsenal will play Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final on May 30 in MunichT2, ESPN FC. The sentence deserves a breath before it.
Five years is a long time in football and not very long at all. Arteta’s tenure at Arsenal has been the most patient structural rebuild the Premier League has seen since Jürgen Klopp arrived at Anfield in October 2015 and lost 2-0 to Crystal Palace in his first home game and did not flinch. The Spaniard did not flinch either, though the early returns were not kind. Arsenal lost their opening three matches of the 2021-22 season by an aggregate score of 9-0. The youngest starting XI in the division was learning, and the learning was expensive.
The tactical framework Arteta has built is not a single idea but a series of interlocking ones. The inverted full-back, which sees either Ben White or Oleksandr Zinchenko tuck into midfield in possession, arrived in stages rather than as a revelation. Declan Rice’s signing from West Ham United in the summer of 2023, for a reported fee of £105 millionT2, ESPN FC, gave Arsenal the midfield anchor they had lacked since Patrick Vieira left. Rice does not play the way Vieira did. He is quieter about it. He reads the second ball before it becomes the second ball, and he does not give it away when he wins it. That sounds simple. It is not.
William Saliba’s development at centre-half has been the other pillar. The Frenchman spent three seasons on loan after joining from Saint-Étienne in 2019, which is the kind of patience Arsenal do not historically show. He returned to north London in 2022 and made the back line his own inside six weeks. Saliba does not defend with aggression so much as with geometry. He closes the angle. He makes the space smaller before the attacker has decided what to do with it. Alongside Gabriel Magalhães, who defends with enough aggression for both of them, Arsenal conceded fewer goals than any side in the Premier League last season.
The Champions League campaign that has delivered Arsenal to Munich began, in truth, two years ago. Their return to the competition in 2023-24, after a seven-year absence, ended in a quarter-final defeat to Bayern Munich that stung not because of the result but because of the manner of it. Arsenal looked, in those two legs, like a side still learning the language of European knockout football. They pressed too high. They left gaps. They were punished by Harry Kane and by a Bayern side that understood the rhythm of the competition in a way Arsenal did not.
Arteta, characteristically, did not talk about the defeat as a lesson. He talked about what needed to change, which is not the same thing. Arsenal’s recruitment in the following summer reflected that understanding. Riccardo Calafiori arrived from Bologna to give Arteta a centre-back who could also operate at left-back, offering tactical flexibility the squad had lacked. Mikel Merino, signed from Real Sociedad, gave Arsenal another midfielder capable of carrying the ball through a press. The squad was not bigger so much as it was more complete.
The Champions League group stage in 2024-25 was unremarkable, which is the point. Arsenal navigated it without drama, which is how the best European sides tend to navigate group stages. The knockout rounds have been a different conversation. The round-of-sixteen victory over Real Madrid, over two legs, was the night Arsenal announced themselves as contenders in a way the Premier League form had suggested but not confirmed. Bukayo Saka’s performance across the tie was the kind that earns a player the word “elite” without anyone having to say it. He carried the ball. He drew the foul. He scored the goal. He did not celebrate, which was the detail that lingered.
The semi-final against Inter Milan was tighter, and harder, and more instructive. Arsenal won the first leg 1-0 at the Emirates through a Martin Ødegaard free-kick that took a deflection off the wall and wrong-footed Yann Sommer. The second leg at San Siro was a siege Arsenal survived rather than won. David Raya made seven saves, which is a number that tells you what the evening looked like from the away end. Arsenal’s back line held. Saliba cleared one off the line in the 88th minute with the kind of calm that suggests he had been in that position before, even though he had not.
Arteta, in the press conference afterwards, said very little. He said the team had shown “character&rdquo. He said they had “managed the moments&rdquo. He said they had one more game to play. The language was careful, which is the language Arteta has always used. He does not offer his players the satisfaction of completion. He offers them the next task.
PSG will be that task, and they will be a different one. Luis Enrique’s side have evolved into something less star-dependent than the iterations that included Neymar, Kylian Mbappé, and Lionel Messi. This PSG presses, and recovers, and does not rely on a single moment of individual brilliance to decide a tie. They beat Manchester City in the semi-finals, which tells you what Arsenal are walking into.
The Arsenal supporters who will travel to Munich at the end of May will include, in all likelihood, people who were at the Emirates when Unai Emery’s side lost 2-1 to Brighton on Boxing Day 2019 and the ground was half-empty and the atmosphere was not hostile so much as resigned. They will include people who watched the 8-2 defeat to Manchester United in 2011 and the 6-0 defeat to Chelsea in 2014 and the slow, grinding slide into mid-table mediocrity that defined the late Wenger years and the Emery interregnum and the early Arteta months.
Those supporters will arrive in Munich having watched a five-year project deliver a team that is ninety minutes from a Champions League title. Whether Arsenal win that final is a question for the night itself, and predictions are for other desks. What Arteta has built, from the wreckage of that eighth-place finish, is a side that knows who it is, and how it plays, and what the next moment demands.
The London Colney training ground still sits on the edge of the golf course. The difference is what happens inside it.
