Arsenal end the 22-year wait: how the 2025-26 Premier League was won

Twenty-two years after Arsène Wenger's Invincibles last lifted the trophy, Arsenal are champions of England again. Mikel Arteta's side were confirmed as 2025-26 Premier League winners on 19 May, when Manchester City could only draw 1-1 at Bournemouth and left the Gunners mathematically uncatchable with a game still to play. Arsenal closed the campaign on 85 points, seven clear of City - a first league title since 2003-04, the club's fourth of the Premier League era and 14th English championship overall.

Three years of near-misses, finally rewarded

The significance is hard to overstate. Arsenal had finished runners-up in each of the previous three seasons, most painfully in 2023-24 when City edged them by two points. This was the team that kept arriving at the final furlong with nothing to show for months of front-running. In 2025-26 they finally converted the promise, leading the table for a total of 238 days and sitting top almost continuously from matchweek seven onward.

It also extends a remarkable run of competitive balance at the summit. Arsenal are the third different champion in three years, following Manchester City (2023-24) and Liverpool (2024-25). The relentless duopoly of the previous decade has, for now, given way to genuine churn.

How the run-in was decided

For a long stretch this never looked like a procession. As late as 22 April, Manchester City briefly climbed above Arsenal on goal difference, and the familiar questions about the Gunners' nerve resurfaced. The answer this time was emphatic: Arsenal won their final four fixtures while City stumbled into a sequence of draws. The decisive blow landed at Bournemouth on 19 May, City's dropped points there ending the contest. Arsenal then signed off with a 2-1 win at Crystal Palace on the final day and were presented with the trophy.

A summer rebuild that paid off

Behind the result sits a deliberate structural overhaul. After years of a squad that thinned out dangerously in spring, Arsenal spent heavily and well across the summer of 2025, bringing in eight new players. Three reshaped the team:

• Martin Zubimendi, a £51m arrival from Real Sociedad, gave the midfield a metronomic, position-disciplined anchor that let the full-backs and creators push higher.
• Viktor Gyökeres, signed from Sporting CP for an initial fee around £55m, solved the centre-forward problem that had quietly capped previous Arsenal sides, leading the team's scoring.
• Eberechi Eze, secured in a transfer hijacked from Tottenham, added the kind of unpredictable, line-breaking creativity that turns controlled possession into chances.

Crucially, the additions deepened the squad rather than simply upgrading the first eleven - the very quality that had failed Arsenal in their previous near-misses.

Built on the league's best defence

If the rebuild caught the eye going forward, the title was built on the meanest defence in the division. Goalkeeper David Raya claimed his third consecutive Golden Glove, shielded by a centre-back pairing of William Saliba and Gabriel that ranked among the best in Europe. Bukayo Saka and Leandro Trossard supplied the cutting edge, but it was defensive solidity - only five league defeats all season - that turned good runs into a championship-winning consistency. There was a footnote for the future, too: 16-year-old Max Dowman became the youngest player ever to win the Premier League.

City fall short despite Haaland

Manchester City finished second on 78 points, and not for want of a focal point. Erling Haaland plundered 27 goals to win his third Golden Boot in four seasons. But Pep Guardiola's side dropped too many points in stalemates - nine draws across the campaign - and looked, for the first time in years, like a team in transition rather than one imposing its will. Individual brilliance papered over structural questions that Arsenal did not have to answer.

The race behind the leaders

Manchester United enjoyed a notable resurgence to finish third on 71 points, with Aston Villa taking fourth and a Champions League place. The most striking story lower down belonged to the fallen champions. Liverpool, who had lifted the trophy only a year earlier, scrambled to fifth on the final day. Early pace-setters who won their opening five matches, they faded badly across a campaign reshaped by upheaval - a first season without Trent Alexander-Arnold since 2015-16, and without Luis Díaz and Diogo Jota - as a heavy summer outlay failed to deliver.

What it means

It would be too neat to credit Arsenal's title solely to City's draws or Liverpool's implosion; those openings were real, but champions still have to walk through them, and 85 points with five defeats is the mark of a side that earned it. The deeper story is one of patience rewarded. Arteta's project absorbed three years of criticism, a near-miss by two points, and persistent doubts about its ceiling, then answered them with a summer of decisive recruitment and a defence good enough to win a title. English football's old certainties are gone. For Arsenal, after 22 years, that is precisely the point.