Arsenal are the most hated club in English football right now. More than Manchester City, backed by a state-owned wealth fund. More than Paris Saint-Germain, owned by a Gulf state. The reason is simple: nobody is frightened of a trophy you can buy.
When City or PSG win something, the reaction is a shrug. The wins feel pre-paid. There's no script to mock, no underdog to humble, just a result that arrived more or less on schedule. You can't wind a City fan up about a title the way you can wind anyone up about Arsenal, because the title never carried any suspense. State ownership drained the outrage out of itself by being so complete. It's hard to hate a machine that was always going to win.
Arsenal have fed the beast, though. The Champions League final in Paris was an exhibition of clock-milking. Arteta's side delayed play for nearly 26 minutes across the 90, dawdled over throw-ins and goal kicks, and strolled out for the second half a full two minutes after PSG while Luis Enrique pointed at his watch. They lost anyway. If you want people to stop calling you cynical, it helps not to hand them 26 minutes of evidence in the biggest game of your season.
Then there's the refereeing grievance, the belief that Arsenal get the whistle. The BBC's end-of-season audit counted 25 VAR errors across the 2025-26 campaign, up from 18 the year before, and Arsenal did gain from three of them, including penalties that should have gone to Everton and Brighton and a missed red card for Kai Havertz's lunge on Lesley Ugochukwu. Chelsea came out best on the net count, with no VAR mistakes against them all season. Arsenal came in behind them. A title rigged by officials doesn't usually leave the champions second in the fairness ledger.
The real engine behind this is older than any of this season. Arsenal spent the better part of two decades as the Premier League's punchline: the club that finished fourth and acted like it had won the league, finishing runner-up three years running before finally getting over the line. This title was their first in 22 years. That ending breaks the joke, and a lot of people would rather keep the joke than rewrite it, so every throw-in becomes proof that Arsenal are frauds who got lucky.
Some of the blame goes to rival fans who built an identity around Arsenal being a laughing stock and can't let the bit die now that it's stopped being true. Some of it belongs to a football culture that has normalised clubs owned by governments so thoroughly that a sovereign wealth fund lifting a trophy now registers as wallpaper. We decided, collectively, that the offensive thing is Arteta prowling the touchline and a nickname like "The Intolerables," while two of the sport's biggest trophies sit in cabinets paid for by nation-states and nobody can summon the energy to be angry.
Arsenal won a league with Saka and Ødegaard hurt for long stretches, playing football plenty of people found a chore to watch, and they earned every point of it. Save your real anger for the clubs that bought their way past the argument entirely. Those are the ones who should scare you.
