Who’s Talking Now?
Arsenal are Premier League champions. The players noticed every tweet, every jab, every doubter... and they’ve made sure you know it.
There’s a specific energy coming out of North London right now. Not just the beer-soaked, trophy-kissing, open-top-bus kind of energy – though there was plenty of that last Sunday.
The energy goes beyond parade day and feels more pointed.
Every Instagram post from an Arsenal player in the days since Man City drew 1-1 at Bournemouth and confirmed the Gunners’ first Premier League title in 22 years has carried the same vibe.
Who’s talking now?
Declan Rice, the baller who was filmed after a heavy Etihad defeat saying “it’s not done” – a clip that was rinsed on social media for weeks – posted a photo from the training ground surrounded by Kai Havertz, Eberechi Eze, Myles Lewis-Skelly, William Saliba and Bukayo Saka. The caption: “I told you all... it’s done.”
That’s a celebration on the surface, and a receipt if you’ve been paying close attention. Rice knew exactly what was being said about him and saved the response for the right moment. Haters? Shutdown.
Eze posted two Stories that night. One of Ødegaard drinking from a bottle – the same type of bottle a Man City fan had waved at Arsenal as a ‘bottling it’ taunt weeks earlier. The other of Eze outside the Emirates at 5am, finger over his lips.
Shhhh.
Lewis-Skelly – a teen who wasn’t even alive the last time Arsenal lifted this trophy – added the line that summed it all up better than anything else: “They called us bottlers, now we are holding the bottles.”
Every post and every Story was a bite back. A direct address to the discourse. The attitude wasn’t ‘we did it’ – it was ‘you doubted us’.
The Most Hated Club in the Prem?
Here’s the tea about Arsenal this season: almost nobody outside of their fanbase was rooting for them. To understand why the players are responding the way they are, you have to understand what they’ve been absorbing all year.
Arsenal are one of the most dividing clubs in English football. They’re a historically dominant London club, they have the biggest following in the capital and they’ve spent years being almost there. That combo – prestige, relevance and repeated near-misses – creates a specific, sour resentment from others.
2025/26 saw the hatred take specific shape. It felt less about the title race and more about how they were doing it.
The Gunners presented a defined identity: defensively organised, set piece lethal, winning at all costs. Arteta didn’tcare if it was ugly.
The stats further back up why people found it so easy to hate...
Arsenal scored a Premier League record of 19 goals from corners this season, breaking a record that has stood since 1992/93.
Their Champions League run was built on suffocation rather than spectacle – they conceded just six goals across the entire campaign. PSG’s? They ended the tournament having scored 45 – a record matching Barcelona’s legendary 1999/00 side.
Paul Scholes, back in January, said it plainly: “If Arsenal win the league, this could be the worst team to win it.”
He questioned whether a single Arsenal player deserved a place in a team of the season.
Arsenal Invincible Martin Keown shot back - “they’re better than everybody else right now, that’s all they need to be” - but the narrative had already taken hold.
Actually, upon reflection, we didn’t really hear about Arsenal’s brilliant goals, insane tackles or their most dominant performances. What permeated this season was criticism, boringness, time-wasting, corners and lots (and lots) of bottles.
That’s what fed the cycle.
A decade ago, under Wenger, Arsenal played some of the most beautiful football in Europe. They also never truly challenged for the title. The game has shifted.
The Premier League is more physically demanding than it’s ever been – every team at the top has to grind for it.
Free-flowing football is a luxury English clubs at the top-flight can’t afford. The fight has never been this tight, so the journey to victory looks different.
Hatewatching, FR
If you don’t know, get to know. Hatewatching: watching something you dislike because you enjoy laughing at it or criticising it. In the game, it’s backing Arsenal’s opponents every single game, not because you particularly love the other team, but because you really want Arsenal to lose. Ngl, we saw this with Spurs too... Everyone prayed for their downfall (and it didn’t materialise).
Social media has turbocharged it. This season probably saw the most Arsenal hatewatching in history. Psychologically, it makes sense – research has shown hatewatching actually improves social bonding. Nothing unites strangers online faster than a shared object of contempt.
Arsenal were perfectly cast for the role.
AFTV had already made the emotional landscape of being an Arsenal supporter into content for the best part of a decade. All it takes is one fan to make an eccentric statement and it’s everywhere.
This season, as Arsenal’s victory was quickly approaching, the temperature online exceeded banter and tipped into something heavier: pure, concentrated hatred of Arteta, the squad, the style and the corners.
The hate and the criticism became the soundtrack... and the players were listening.
Chronically Online. Genuinely Fuelled.
The Arsenal players were paying attention to it all. Not just the tactical briefings, highlights or training footage – but to the comments, the threads, the noise. They were in the discourse. They felt it. They used it.
This is a generation of players who are chronically online in the truest sense. The fact that Rice knew what was being posted about him, that Eze registered every ‘can he do it at Arsenal?’ take, that Lewis-Skelly clocked the bottle memes – means that online noise wasn’t background but fuel.
The context in which they were winning was also intense.
Arsenal’s starting XI in the Champions League final had played a combined ~21,500 Premier League minutes this season. PSG’s starters had managed ~15,300 in Ligue 1 – over 6,000 fewer.
The Premier League is relentless. There was no rotation, no easy run-in, no spare capacity. Every point was earned from the same group of players, grinding it out week after week.
That’s the bit hatewatchers missed. The corners, the set pieces, the ‘boring’ wins – they weren’t a philosophy of fear. They were the pragmatic output of a squad running at maximum capacity in the most demanding league in the world. You don’t play the same 11 through a Premier League title race and a Champions League final on penalties and call it lucky.
The Loyal Ones
Football social media is always on but strip back to the roots of football fandom and there’s something deeper.
AFTV became a cultural phenomenon not because Arsenal fans were happy, but because the raw, unfiltered pain of a fanbase watching near-misses stack up was oddly compelling content. 3 consecutive second-place finishes. Years of hope, years of falling just short. For a long time, those fans were the punchline.
The ones who followed this team home and away through the lean years, who wore the heartbreak publicly – they were at the Emirates the night the title was confirmed, still there at sunrise when Saka, Eze, Rice and Timber wandered out to find hundreds still celebrating in the streets.
The parade on 31 May told its own story. An estimated ~1M people lined a 5.6-mile route through Islington. Finsbury Park station had to be closed. Around 75 people were rescued from lamp posts. The Met described it as one of their largest sporting policing operations.
That’s not a casual fanbase. That’s 22 years of pent-up loyalty – inherited or lived – releasing all at once.
Arsenal IS the Culture Rn
Beyond the shiny trophy and the elite ballers, what’s happening at Arsenal right now is worth clocking on a cultural level. This isn’t just a club that won the league but a club that is operating on a different frequency altogether.
The players look like a unit – and not just on the pitch. Gabriel and Saliba are known as one of the most formidable defensive duo in the game, so dominant they’ve spawned their own fan-made merch: a Step Brothers film poster mashup that became so beloved co-chairman Josh Kroenke unzipped his jacket on the parade bus to reveal one. A club owner in a fan-made meme shirt on the open-top bus. That’s culture.
The Eze story deserves its own column. A player who was told no by Arsenal at 14, who cried through training after his release, who climbed back through the lower leagues, became one of England’s most creative midfielders at Palace, then came home – signed by Arsenal from under Spurs’ noses last summer.
He scored a hat-trick in a 4-1 win over Spurs this season, the first in a North London Derby in the Premier League era. He was at the Emirates celebrating the title confirmation. The club’s official Instagram posted a Reel capturing a dedicated, live music rendition of his favourite song to him – one of those details that shows this isn’t a content team posting highlights, it’s a club that genuinely knows its people.
That specifically is what separates Arsenal’s social presence right now. In addition to their fashion collabs, music crossovers, trend setting – they’re living in culture in a way that speaks to the masses. Their aura is authentic.
They’re building lore. ~114M combined followers across major platforms. ~32M on Instagram alone. Meta’s WhatsApp has a partnership with the club. The reach crosses continents.
On the evening of the parade, the Empire State Building in NYC lit up in red and white. The building’s own account announced: “The Empire State Building shines red and white tonight in celebration of Arsenal’s Premier League Title and trophy celebration.”
Arsenal America has members across all 50 states and nearly 100 local branches. A football club from North London, a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. Aura!!!
No Shade. Just Observation.
There’s something slightly ironic about all of this – and yes, we’re aware of the irony of writing about it here. The very thing that fuelled these celebrations, the noise on socials, the hater comments, the Scholes takes, the memes Arsenal players were actually keeping tabs on – is the same ecosystem that would have buried them if they’d fallen short again. The discourse that hurt became the discourse they flipped.
The point isn’t that these players are insecure. The point is they’re human. Playing football at the highest level while every peak and trough gets dissected in real time – that’s the modern game.
What’s interesting is that rather than pretending it didn’t affect them, this squad leaned into it. They let it sting, they remembered and they delivered.
Arsenal isn’t just a club right now, it’s culture. 22 years of waiting has made the volume on that culture absolutely deafening. DJ, turn it up!
Who’s talking now?
Somehow missed that Sampha detail. Absolute class ❤️