The quiet inevitability of Arteta’s Arsenal

There’s a particular moment when a football team stops being exciting and starts being inevitable – and Arsenal may be approaching that moment.

This is not the free-flowing, wide-eyed Gunners of yesteryear, the ones that played beautiful triangles before abruptly remembering that they also needed to defend. Nor is it the tender, fragile Arsenal of Mikel Arteta’s early rebuild.

This is something else entirely: a team that is winning games without ever seeming to hit top gear – the universal warning sign that a dynasty might be germinating.

Manchester City fans know the feeling. Before they were the trophy-hoarding juggernaut we now accept as a natural force, they were something much duller: relentlessly efficient.

They won matches they shouldn’t have, survived moments they had no right to survive, and played like a side that trusted the system more than any single star. And somewhere between the umpteenth consecutive narrow league win and Pep Guardiola explaining inverted full-backs for the 97th time, a dynasty was born.

Arsenal are now entering that intermediate stage of the metamorphosis – the chrysalis of dull excellence, or winning ugly.

They’ve assembled a spine that looks like it could anchor a decade: William Saliba defending like a man who has discovered football’s cheat codes, Declan Rice performing the quiet heroics of a midfielder who always seems to be in the right place, even when he’s not supposed to be, and Viktor Gyokeres the potentially lethal finisher the Gunners have craved for years.

This is how dynasties start: not with fireworks, but with a kind of serene inevitability. With the ability to win 2–1 on a day when everyone plays at 6/10, the resilience to treat setbacks as annoyances rather than omens, and the maturity to recognise that sometimes the only way to win a football match, is simply to be better organised than the opposition.

The league around them is also doing its part.

Manchester City are wobbling in ways that feel less like momentary turbulence and more like the first signs of erosion, with Saturday’s loss at Newcastle United proof of a deeper malaise. Liverpool are in full-blown crisis mode as their mega-bucks summer transfers struggle to find their footing – and Arne Slot doesn’t have the tools to fix them.

Chelsea remain a wonderfully chaotic social experiment despite moving up to second. Spurs, for all their reinvention under Thomas Frank, still seem destined to be the protagonists in a Shakespearean tragedy with extra pressing triggers. Manchester United are also in the middle of a rebuild.

Amid this uncertainty, Arsenal feel unusually … stable. Boring, boring Arsenal? But in football, boring is how empires are forged. The trick is to stay boring for long enough.

They haven’t quite reached the “win even when actively trying to lose” phase that City perfected. And there’s still a sense that if you poke them in just the right soft spot – usually involving a set-piece and a big striker – they can still wobble like jelly.

But dynasties don’t appear fully formed. They accumulate and grow slowly, often forged in adversity. One season of consistency, then another. A series of signings that all seem sensible in hindsight. A manager whose ideas shift from “innovative” to “inevitable”. A run of results that feel less like momentum and more like a habit.

Right now, Arsenal are building habits. Quietly, efficiently, almost un-Arsenal-like in their pragmatism. The team who used to play the prettiest football now look comfortable in trench-warfare games.

This is the Arteta team that Arsene Wenger always needed.

Maybe this Gunners team won’t become the Premier League’s next great dynasty. Maybe it will be another nearly season rather than a new era. But if you ignore the chants of rival fans desperate for the wheels to come off, you can just about see that something bigger is taking shape.

If this is the beginning of a dynasty, it won’t be remembered for its explosions. Such projects tend to fizzle out or lose their spark. It will be remembered for something far more dangerous: Arsenal learning how to win without needing to be perfect.

The only noise is likely to be the sound of inevitability.