Mikel Arteta left one title challenger to build another from the ground up, with Andoni Iraola, Unai Emery and Regis Le Bris his Manager of the Season rivals.
The big old losers will be along shortly, but first we must praise those who can look back on the 2025/26 season with something at least approaching pride.
It has been quite the ride, hasn’t it?
Arsenal and Mikel Arteta
“Advice?” Arteta said. “What I’ve learned mostly is that you have to be ruthless and you have to be consistent and you have to fit every day the culture of the club to create a winning mentality.”
There was no Klopp-adjacent “doubters to believers” line, no breadcrumb dropped at the beginning that led all the way to a glorious, signposted end point. But in hindsight, no matter how difficult and arduous a journey it has been, it isn’t difficult to see how Arteta similarly managed to restore a fallen giant after being parachuted in mid-season.
Speaking at his first press conference as a manager in December 2019, the Spaniard explained in great detail why he chose to leave his Manchester City “family” behind, and how “we had a dream to do something in England with Pep that people said was impossible to do because we would get bullied in the Premier League”.
Not seven years later, there is no-one of appropriate size left for Arteta or Arsenal to pick on.
It was a monumental gamble on the manager’s part. His final game as Guardiola’s assistant was a 3-0 thrashing of Freddie Ljungberg’s Arsenal, whose on-pitch amateurishness compounded by boardroom inadequacy left them 10th and sliding – where Liverpool found themselves before bringing in Klopp.
The easier option would have been to stay and embrace the obvious path to eventually succeed Guardiola. Arteta did so, but not in a way anyone could possibly have imagined at the time.
He bet on himself instead, leaving to build a challenger from the ground up in what remains his first managerial post, instead of inheriting ready-made champions at some point down the line.
Guardiola stepping down just as Arteta climbs the summit feels fitting. The apprentice has become the master. The cycle no-one but a select few at the Emirates believed in until it was obvious is complete.
This Premier League title win is a triumph of mutual trust, of patience, buy-in and alignment, of a process seen through unwaveringly to a beautiful end. It has required no little investment, but ultimately and crucially investment in the right people at the right time.
Arteta was the most doubted, the most critiqued and the most important of all. And he is a Premier League champion in his own right.
READ MORE: Arteta sack despite no title tip, Man Utd ignored and Delap for Golden Boot – predictions revisited
Manchester United
Only two Premier League clubs have ever improved their position more drastically from season to season than this deeply transitional iteration of Manchester United. And neither of them had to put up with Ruben Amorim being silly.
Bournemouth and Andoni Iraola
And so concludes an absolute masterclass in deciding to twist rather than stick. That ‘bizarre’ and brutal call to trade in the stability and strong government of Gary O’Neil for the beautiful, brilliant chaos of Iraola has been justified tenfold.
“We just felt that if we were going to be as successful as we believe we can be in this transfer market and we’re going to change the style of football we play,” said chairman Bill Foley in June 2023, “we needed to go a different direction”. That being up instead of sideways.
Iraola’s third and final season was his pièce de résistance: more than £270m generated through player sales, five starters moved on for at least £40m each, and, much like Iraola, young, unproven and untested replacements thriving when trusted with the opportunity, platform and structure to do so.
For a sixth successive season, the Cherries have improved their league position; for a third straight campaign, they have increased their record top-flight points tally. Iraola was the perfect project appointment at the best possible time.
“I want Bournemouth to play in Europe – that’s our goal,” Foley said in December 2023. “I certainly think we can be in Europe within five years.” An 18-game unbeaten run – better than anything all but six Premier League clubs have ever put together – has helped deliver on that promise well ahead of schedule.
Unai Emery
There cannot have been many more impressive single-season coaching achievements in the history of British football than taking Aston Villa from a crushing, actively damaging summer transfer window to a five-game winless start, then a comfortable fourth-place finish supplemented by a shiny, drought-ending Europa League trophy.
It might not be Manager-of-the-Year-shortlist-worthy, but it is a remarkable feat and testament to Emery’s genius.
Even just qualifying a team outside the gilded, traditional elite for European football through Premier League position four years in a row is astounding and should be neither underplayed nor overlooked.
Doing so with a free Victor Lindelof as their most-used new signing is absurd. Villa are, somehow, arguably the best-set title challenger next year under Emery.
Sunderland and Regis Le Bris
Their relegation on an xG Premier League table vindicated Sunderland’s status as the only team who didn’t win at least one of the 10,000 seasons the Opta supercomputer simulated, but as Le Bris has said throughout the season, data cannot factor in “the human element”.
It was a point he reiterated at the most pertinent time – after completing the league double over Chelsea to secure Sunderland’s first European season in 52 years.
The fourth newly-promoted team in Premier League history to qualify for continental competition through their league finish have done so in an era of turmoil and strife for clubs coming up from the Championship. But anyone trying to copy Sunderland’s blueprint will likely find they lack those indefinable, impalpable “connections” Le Bris has focused so heavily on building throughout his tenure.
Sunderland themselves have actively decided not to emulate anyone. Theirs has been a deliberately unique path underlined by ruthless upgrades timed to perfection in the boardroom, dugout and dressing room.
“We won’t play like Guardiola or De Zerbi, because we are Sunderland and I’m Regis Le Bris,” the manager said upon his appointment at a bottom-half Championship club two years ago. Europe is about to find that out the hard way.
Brentford and Keith Andrews
A gentle reminder that Brentford had their manager, captain, goalkeeper and two top scorers poached by more illustrious clubs in the summer, and were within a single goal of qualifying for Europe for the first time in their entire history.
The frustration is that said goal could have come in all but two of their games from March onwards and transformed a wonderful season of overachievement into an incredible one with a tangible reward. Brentford drew seven of their final ten matches and lost another 2-1 to miss out on a Conference League place on goal difference, and Europa by a measly point.
Andrews, the set-piece coach in his first year of senior management at any level, “would have snapped your hand off” for that at the start of a campaign in which many tipped them to battle against relegation.
Brentford cleared that pre-season bar with consummate ease and fell just short of an ambitious target they were able to set through their own overperformance. That is a triumph by any reasonable measure.
Brighton
The forlorn, relieved celebrations of Lewis Dunk after a 3-0 thrashing at home on the final day summed things up neatly.
Brighton went into that last game with Champions League qualification ostensibly on the line, and ended it extolling the virtues of the Europa Conference after a deserved defeat was compounded by Sunderland leapfrogging them into the Europa League places, before an agonising wait to see whether Brentford would eradicate their continental dreams entirely.
As Fabian Hurzeler said: “On one side, it was the worst possible timing for that kind of performance. But on the other side, when you reflect on the season as a whole, it’s definitely an achievement.”
After a mid-season run of one win in 14 games, during which they were eliminated from the FA Cup and sent spiralling down to 14th, seven points clear of relegation, it has been a reenergising end with a tinge of disappointment at what could have been.
Daniel Farke
Considering there were two distinct junctures at which it felt eminently possible that Leeds might dispense with Farke, their relative stroll to safety with an FA Cup semi-final detour can only be categorised as a monumental success.
That one of those pivotal crossroads came not only before the season, but before Leeds had actually wrapped things up in the Championship, emphasised how little faith there was in Farke’s Premier League survival instincts from the very beginning.
Yet the former Norwich rabbit in Premier League headlights has knuckled down, sought shelter under the great many giants signed in the summer and sustained himself drinking Anton Stach’s urine.
It is satisfying that this Leeds season can basically be split into two sections: pre-Etihad and post-Etihad. That half-time gamble and the enduring reaction it has inspired in the five months since is overdue proof of Farke’s ability to adapt and evolve at this level. One game helped redefine an entire career.
Farke has earned the right to prepare and plan a second consecutive Premier League season for the first time, probably without fielding questions about his future in between.
Vitor Pereira
The next evolution of Sam Allardyce. Also very funny how his Wolves start has been scrubbed from history.
Roberto De Zerbi
The final evolution of Sam Allardyce.
Crystal Palace
Roy Hodgson was right: those fans have been spoiled. Their usual guarantee of 40-odd points, combined with an actual European final? Ludicrous.
