HUNGER GAME: Gunner give it a go: Arsenal ready to ‘fight’ for more Premier League glory

England’s top-flight Premier League promises another exciting campaign this season.

The good news for Arsenal is that the English Premier League monkey that weighed them down for two decades has finally been flung off. In the 2025-26 campaign, the Gunners claimed the league title for the first time since they were crowned England’s best club back in 2004, under the tutelage of Arsène Wenger.

Last season, Spaniard Mikel Arteta emulated the Frenchman when he handed the London club just its fourth league title in the Premier League era, which began in 1992. The three previous times Arsenal conquered England were with Wenger, although he failed to defend the title after he had led the Gunners to it.

Arteta is hoping to do exactly that this season. If he is successful in orchestrating another winning campaign for the Londoners, the former Everton and Arsenal midfielder will join an exclusive club of managers who have won successive Premier League titles.

Since the inception of the English top flight in its current format 34 years ago, only Pep Guardiola (Manchester City), José Mourinho (Chelsea) and Manchester United legend Alex Ferguson have managed consecutive league titles. In his first two seasons in English soccer, backing up his claim of being the “special one”, Mourinho won the league between 2004 and 2006. Guardiola’s City side then rewrote history when they were crowned the best English side for four successive seasons between the 2020-21 and 2023-24 campaigns.

Before that City and Guardiola quadruple, the gold standard for successive league titles by a manager was Ferguson. The legendary Scottish tactician won the league three times in a row, twice, during his 26-year reign at Old Trafford. In addition, he won the league twice in a row on two occasions to truly set himself apart from the other managers in this exclusive club.

Arteta is hungry to join this elite group of soccer managers after tasting league success for the first time in his managerial career a few months ago. As a player, the 44-year-old’s sole domestic league triumph came when he played for Scottish side Rangers during the 2002-03 season.

“When you win something big like this, where you fight so much for it and you go through that emotion to win it again [after 20 years], you want it again,” Arteta said.

“That’s what we want. We need to push everybody every single day because if the standards are at that level, we’re going to make each other better. And we have an incredible squad, so let’s go for it because you want to go through it again. I want to live that moment again.

“I want to live other moments [like winning the European Champions League]. But we know what it’s going to take [to win the Premier League again]. We know the difficulty of the task – that’s why we’ve never done it before in this football club, to win it again. So we know that it’s going to demand something special and we are ready for it,” he added.

In their quest to retain the league title and win the Champions trophy for the first time, the Gunners have brought in players such as Christos Tzolis.