Arsenal Are Premier League Champions for the First Time in 22 Years

Summary

• Arsenal have been crowned 2025-26 Premier League champions after Manchester City drew 1-1 at Bournemouth, confirming the title with one game to spare
• It marks Arsenal’s first league title since the Invincibles in 2003-04, ending a 22-year wait and making Mikel Arteta the first manager to win the championship at Arsenal in over two decades
• The Gunners now travel to Budapest on May 30 to face PSG in the Champions League final, with the chance to complete one of the greatest seasons in the club’s 140-year history

Arsenal are your 2025-26 Premier League champions. After 22 years, three consecutive runners-up finishes, and more near-misses than any fanbase should have to endure, Mikel Arteta‘s side have been confirmed as 2025-26 title winners following Erling Haaland and Manchester City‘s 1-1 draw at Bournemouth on Tuesday evening. The wait is over.

The manner of the confirmation fits the season perfectly: not clean, not comfortable, but ultimately unambiguous. Arsenal beat Burnley 1-0 on Monday to move to 82 points and five clear at the top, leaving City needing a win at Bournemouth to keep the race alive until the final day. When the final whistle sounded on the south coast, the Arsenal squad, watching together at London Colney, had their answer. The club’s 14th English top-flight championship belongs to them, and no one can take it.

To understand what this title means, you have to sit with the weight of what came before it. Three consecutive seasons as runners-up, each one building the case that Arsenal were close but not quite ready — then dissolving that case somewhere in the final weeks. The 2023-24 campaign, when City pipped them by two points, was the hardest to absorb. The 2024-25 finish, behind Liverpool, felt like the moment the project might plateau. Instead, Arteta went back to work. The team that emerged this season was harder, more structured, and more ruthless than any iteration that preceded it: 25 wins, 19 clean sheets, and 35 set-piece goals in all competitions, a figure no club across Europe’s top five leagues has matched in any of the past ten seasons. David Raya wins the Golden Glove for the third year running. The spine of this team has been built to last.

Arsenal led the table for 200 days before City nudged ahead on goals scored in the final stretch of April. A 2-1 defeat at the Etihad in April seemed to tip the momentum. Then Arsenal won four consecutive games without conceding, reclaimed top spot, and held it. That sequence, more than any individual result, is the signature of what Arteta has built: a team that responds to pressure by becoming more itself. He took charge in December 2019, having played for the club between 2011 and 2016, and becomes the first former Premier League player to win the title as a manager. The emotional register of Tuesday night’s celebration at London Colney, players and staff watching a Bournemouth result confirm their season, captures something that the Invincibles era, brilliant as it was, could not: the specific relief of a generation that had to wait.

What comes next is remarkable in its own right. Arsenal travel to Budapest on May 30 to face defending champions PSG in the Champions League final, bidding for the first European Cup in the club’s 140-year history. The league title has lifted that weight. As one commentator noted in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s confirmation, it almost feels like a free hit now.