Arsenal are top of the Premier League, unbeaten in the Champions League and fresh from their first league win at Anfield in 14 years, and the loudest word being thrown at them this week is “boring”.
Scroll through any comment section after Sunday’s 1-0 win at Liverpool and you’ll find the same lines on repeat: the most boring champions ever, the most boring team ever, a side that can’t play. It comes from rival fans, from neutrals and, every so often, from a few nervous Gooners who wanted the champions to win prettier.
We think it misses the point completely. Mikel Arteta has built a side that is very hard to beat and very good at protecting a lead, and that is not a flaw to be coached out of them. It is the reason they are where they are.
Are Arsenal boring, or just hard to beat?
Look at the numbers first. Arsenal have 24 points from nine league games, the most by any side at this stage since their own 24 in 2022-23, and they sit three points clear of Manchester City. The only league defeat so far came against Brighton.
In Europe it’s seven points from nine: a 1-0 win at Napoli, 3-0 against Lille and a 2-2 draw at Bayern Munich, where Declan Rice rescued a point late on. Two goals conceded in three games is the joint-best defensive record in the competition.
None of that happened by accident. Last season, eight of Arsenal’s 26 league wins finished 1-0 and 14 came by a single goal, on the way to the club’s first Premier League title in 22 years. As we laid out in our piece on Arteta’s 33 wins by 1-0, no Premier League manager has more of them since he took charge, with Pep Guardiola six behind.
Think of it this way. Two people both make a million pounds. One does it in a wild, thrilling way, the other does it slowly and sensibly. Ask either of them a year later whether they wish they’d done it differently. Nobody hands back a title because the route to it didn’t look good on a highlights reel.
What Anfield actually showed
Sunday wasn’t a classic, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Kai Havertz turned in Rice’s low cross on 16 minutes, and after that Arsenal spent long spells inside their own half. Liverpool had 56% of the ball, 17 shots and 28 touches in the Arsenal box in the first half alone, the most by any side against them in an opening 45 minutes since 2008-09.
And yet Liverpool didn’t land a single shot on target. That had never happened to them in a home Premier League game in Opta’s records, which go back to 2003-04. That’s not a team getting lucky for 90 minutes. That’s Ezri Konsa, Jurrien Timber and Gabriel winning almost everything that came their way, with Rice getting stronger as the game went on.
And they did it without Bukayo Saka and William Saliba, arguably the two most important names on the team sheet. Anfield used to be where Arsenal sides went to fall apart. This one held its shape, pressed when it needed to, took its chance and saw it out. If that’s boring, it’s the kind of boring every Arsenal fan of a certain age spent years begging for.
Why change what works?
The demand that Arsenal should open up and entertain never comes with an explanation of why. If you can’t break a team down, you can’t break them down. For years we’ve been told Arsenal are an open book, that Brighton or someone else has found the blueprint. Fine. Then why can so few sides actually cut them open?
Defence wins titles was a saying long before this group came together, and nobody called it boring when Arsenal were on the wrong end of it. This side can win in different ways: it can play you off the park on a good day and refuse to let you score on a bad one. Being able to do both is what champions look like.
It’s also worth remembering that title winners are rarely loved while they’re winning. Very few neutrals enjoyed watching City, Manchester United, Chelsea or Liverpool rack up trophies in real time, and those players and fans didn’t lose much sleep over it. Arsenal won’t get a fair hearing from everyone, and the sooner Gooners stop looking for one, the more they’ll enjoy this.
Where the critics have a point
There is one fair criticism, and Arteta made it himself. He said afterwards: “Very fluid at times. We generated six or seven big chances but we couldn’t break out. When you misplace a pass or clearance these guys are running at you.”
That’s the bit to fix. Arsenal gave the ball away cheaply too often at Anfield and invited pressure they didn’t need. A few more passes into feet, a bit more from Havertz in holding the ball up and winning fouls, and the second half becomes far more comfortable. We made the case in our piece on Myles Lewis-Skelly as Arsenal’s release valve that the answer is already in the squad.
But improving the attack is not the same as changing the identity. If Arsenal can add a higher gear going forward to what they already do without the ball, they’ll be very hard to catch. Throwing away the defensive base to please the people calling them boring would be madness.
The referee row is a sideshow
Part of the noise this week is about decisions. Liverpool had four penalty appeals turned down in the first half, and Timber’s pull on Alexander Isak’s shirt is the one Arsenal fans should be quietest about. Arteta was honest enough to admit it: “Today we had all of that, we had an element of luck as well and we had the quality in the right moments as well to hurt them.”
Fair enough. Arsenal got the rub of the green on Sunday. But referees are inconsistent for everyone, and Gooners have a long memory of afternoons when the calls went the other way and they were told to stop moaning. All any side can do is control what it controls, and Arsenal did that better than Liverpool did.
Verdict: call it boring, it still says champions
“Most boring champions ever” is meant as an insult, but read it again. It still ends with the word champions. Arsenal have only slipped up once in the league, they haven’t lost in Europe, and they’ve just won at the ground that used to break them, without two of their best players.
There’s room to grow, especially on the ball, and the Fleetwood cup exit is a reminder that this squad isn’t bulletproof. Slavia Prague on Wednesday night and Hull City at the Emirates on Saturday are the next tests. If the critics want to keep calling it boring while Arsenal keep winning, I suspect nobody at N5 will mind one bit.
