ARSENAL’S 22 YEARS AND THE ONE LESSON

Patience, and the willingness to do the right thing, will get you there, reckons

JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA

By the time the referee blew the final whistle as Bournemouth and Manchester City battled each other to a 1-1 draw, I felt grateful for the journey it took to get to that moment. Because I had believed so strongly that this was going to be Arsenal’s league title to win, that moment felt like a déjà vu. Except that it wasn’t. That result meant that Arsenal had become the Champions of England for the first time since 2004.

Arsenal have waited 22 years for this. Their last title was the Invincibles season of 2003/04 under Arsène Wenger. That campaign was so complete, so historically perfect, that it simultaneously became the club’s greatest achievement and its longest shadow. Everything that followed happened under that shadow. The declining years of Wenger’s tenure. The chaos of the post-Wenger period. Unai Emery’s messy tenure. Incidentally, Emery himself won yet another Europa Cup this week with Aston Villa. The Kroenke era had evolved into a squad with a Champions League wage bill on a Europa League budget. The protests. The near-misses.

And then, quietly, something changed.

When Mikel Arteta arrived in December 2019, he inherited a side with an average age of over 26, battered by a crisis of confidence and struggling in the middle of the table. His first move was not to sign world-class players. It was to assert the rules of engagement. Out went Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, the captain and the talisman. Mesut Özil, the most talented player at the club, was left out too. The message was not subtle. The non-negotiables were non-negotiable.  Arteta had laid down the marker.

This is where Nigeria comes in.

We spend a great deal of time in this country talking about what we want. The destination, the promise of what Nigeria could be. We spend considerably less time talking about what Arteta spent six years doing: the unglamorous, politically uncomfortable, privately painful work of removing what is broken before you can build what is needed. The work that does not generate headlines. The work that generates criticism, and the specific frustration of people who can see you working but cannot yet see results.

Arsenal reset their wage structure and dressing-room dynamics in a process that was painful and unpopular. Once the culture began changing, they moved into the second phase; constructing a young and ambitious core capable of growing together. William Saliba, who barely played in his first season, became the best centre-back in the Premier League. Bukayo Saka, developed through the academy, became one of the finest players in the world. That is the sequence. It is neither glamorous nor fast. It is the only way things actually work.  

Coming third for three consecutive seasons between 2023 and 2025 earned Arsenal a reputation as almost-but-not-quite men of ability who failed to deliver under intense pressure. The internet called them bottlers. The pundits wrote their obituaries as title contenders. Arteta sat in press conferences, absorbing every question about whether his project had reached its limits, and said the same things he had always said. Trust the process. We are building something. He was mocked for the language. Who is laughing now?

There is a particular Nigerian tendency to demand results at a speed that the nature of the problem does not permit. We want infrastructure fixed in months. We want institutions reformed in one administration. We want economies turned around before the next election cycle. And when the results do not arrive on that timetable, we conclude that the project has failed, the leadership is incompetent, and the effort should be abandoned in favour of something new. What we rarely ask is whether we have given the process the time that the process actually requires.

Arsenal’s title feels like the payoff for a long, methodical rebuild: smart recruitment, a clear tactical identity, and a manager who learned from setbacks. Arteta lost a final, as recently as March, to Manchester City. He lost title races he should have won. He watched Erling Haaland arrive at Manchester City and understood, without being told, that the gap had just grown wider. He did not panic. He did not abandon the system. He diagnosed where Arsenal had fallen short; mentality, squad depth, the inability to sustain pressure over 40 weeks, and he addressed those specific deficiencies with tailored solutions, methodically, one transfer window at a time.  

Arsenal face Paris Saint-Germain in the UEFA Champions League final in Budapest on May 30. The possibility of a double is real even though PSG are the bookmakers’ favourites. Twenty-two years from nothing to potentially everything, in the space of one spring.

I am aware, as an Arsenal supporter, that I am not an objective narrator of this story. My investment in it is personal and has been expensive; emotionally, economically, and in the particular currency of being an Arsenal fan through the years when being an Arsenal fan meant explaining a great deal. But the lesson I am drawing from Tuesday night is not just a football lesson. It is a governance lesson. An institutional one. What separates the things that actually get built from the things that only get announced?

You need the vision. That part is easy. Everyone has a vision. What you need beyond the vision is the discipline to build the foundation before the structure, the courage to remove what is broken even when it is popular, the patience to trust a process whose results will not arrive before the critics arrive, and the institutional memory to remember what you are building even in the seasons when it looks like you are losing.

Nigeria has everything it needs to build something extraordinary. The resources. The talent. The population. The energy. What it has historically lacked is the Arteta gene; the willingness to do the right thing at the pace that the right thing requires, without abandoning it the moment the crowd gets impatient.

Arsenal waited 22 years. The wait was not the failure. The failure would have been walking away from the process before it finished.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing