Arsenal have reached a stage now where even disappointing days are a reminder of just how far they’ve climbed in recent years, and just how absurdly well-placed they now are.
In a summer of unprecedented Premier League flux, Arsenal are the only thing offering anything close to a predictable, reliable central fulcrum around which everything else can orbit.
If we accept the tentative existence of a Big Eight, Arsenal are the only one where this is true. Six – six! – of the other eight have a manager who only came into the job this year. Four of those managers were only appointed this summer.
And the other team in that group who do have the same manager have suffered the loss of a vital player.
Arsenal are the only team for whom changes have been entirely on their own terms.
Even the ‘disappointments’ of the last 24 hours have to be viewed in comparison to the utter steps into the unknown being taken absolutely everywhere else. Arsenal’s setbacks over the last day or so amount to probably not signing Vinicius Junior, something nobody could have reasonably considered the dealbreaker for the success or otherwise of the summer when it began.
That this crushing low has come in the very week where they complete the signing of Bruno Guimaraes only further cements the point of just how hard you have to try to make things look bleak for Arsenal right now.
But we do admire the effort, especially a particularly concerted one from sections of the press to convince anyone that they should care about a pre-season defeat to Real Betis.
There were actual headlines suggesting it threatened Arsenal’s title hopes. This is, obviously, a hilarious state of affairs.
It is always absurd to get hot and bothered about pre-season results at any time, but especially so when it’s Arsenal – the one team/manager/squad combination among the Premier League’s leading lights who can claim to hit this season with no question marks over their suitability for the challenge ahead.
And that’s before we even consider just how little impact on their title challenge last summer’s defeats to Villarreal and Tottenham had.
Arsenal fans are entitled to feel a tad deflated at the likely demise of the Vini pursuit. It would have been one of the greatest Premier League coups ever, and there is now a slight nagging sense that they might have been played, pawns in a game that always ended with a bumper new Real Madrid contract.
But look around the rest of the nominal contenders to Arsenal’s crown this season. Imagine the biggest issue for any of them being ‘didn’t quite pull off the biggest Premier League transfer of all time’.
The clear and simple fact is that any of them would swap positions with Arsenal right now. They were clearly the best team last season, and are now the only known quantity in a post-Klopp, post-Pep era. Some of their rivals will be better for the change, others will be worse.
But all are playing significant catch-up, and, while retaining Premier League titles has long been a horribly difficult task, Arsenal look tremendously well placed, both in terms of their own development and the doubts that exist everywhere else you look.
Arsenal had the distinct misfortune to become a very good team at the same time Guardiola was almost unstoppable.
How the turntables have… turned. Arsenal now enjoy the potentially trophy-hoarding good fortune to have become the Premier League’s pre-eminent team for the first time in over 20 years at a time when the rest of the big beasts have never looked less certain or less convincing.
