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.
