Naturally, within minutes, Gunners fans were out celebrating on the streets, lighting cheap flares and singing three songs on repeat. Meanwhile, the ever-serious football internet had turned to the big question that's been rumbling on all season: is this Arsenal side the worst team to win the Premier League in history?
This is what 22 years without a league title does to people. It removes all capacity for proportion. Arsenal could have won the title by sealing every opponent in cling film and scoring only from 38 ricochets off Gabriel Magalhaes' left buttock, and the open-top bus would still be booked.
Still, the argument is not entirely imaginary. This has not been a romp. It has not been champagne football. At times, it has barely been sparkling water.
Arsenal went into City's game five points clear after beating Burnley 1-0, their fourth consecutive clean sheet, with Kai Havertz's header enough to move them to 82 points from 37 matches. City, on 77 with a game in hand before Bournemouth, needed to win to keep the race alive. They did not. Arsenal are champions - that part is not up for debate. The quality of the champions, inevitably, is.
The phrase "worst Premier League winners ever" is doing a lot of work here. If it means the lowest points total, then no. Manchester United's 1996/97 side still own that slightly dusty little plaque, winning the league with 75 points, officially the fewest by any Premier League champion. Leicester City finished on 81 in 2015/16. Manchester United managed 80 in 2010/11. Arsenal already have 82, with one match still to play.
If it means the least glamorous, then perhaps the prosecution has something. Arsenal have not won this title as a great attacking side in the traditional sense. They have not produced a Thierry Henry, a Mohamed Salah, an Erling Haaland, a Luis Suarez season.
They have not battered the division into submission with weekly demonstrations of superiority. Their official Premier League numbers before the final weekend had them on 69 goals and 62.81 expected goals, which suggests efficiency rather than overwhelming menace.
But football has always had a strange bias towards beauty in attack and suspicion towards beauty in control. A side that wins 4-2 is thrilling. A side that wins 1-0 four times in a row is accused of crimes against the fixture list.
Defensive by design
Arsenal's title has been built on structure, set-pieces, defensive authority, territorial pressure and the ability to make matches feel as if they are being played inside a narrowing corridor. That is not an accident; it is a choice.
It is also not a very weak choice. Their broader numbers tell the same story. Arsenal have had 1.69 expected goals per match and 0.94 expected goals against per match across the league season, with a clean sheet rate above 50 per cent. That is not the statistical profile of a team falling backwards into history. It shows a team that usually gives itself a platform but denies it to everyone else.
The criticism that they have lacked a pure cutting edge is fair. At times, Arteta's side have looked like a team trying to pick a lock with a pencil.
They can be careful to the point of neurosis. Their attacking spacing can become overly rehearsed. Their reliance on corners and dead-ball pressure has invited the usual sneering, as if set-pieces are not part of football but some sort of municipal planning loophole.
Still, that sneer says more about the observer than the achievement. Set-pieces count. Defending counts. Not conceding counts. In fact, it tends to count quite a lot when the point of the sport is to have more goals than the other lot. Arsenal have won the league because they have been the most reliable side in a season when reliability was a scarce commodity.
Unfair comparisons?
The comparison with previous champions is where the argument becomes more interesting. They are clearly not in the bracket of Manchester City's 100-point side, Liverpool's 99-point machine, Arsenal's own Invincibles, or Jose Mourinho's first Chelsea team, who conceded 15 goals in an entire season and treated opposition attacks like spam emails. Nobody serious should pretend otherwise.
But that is not the same as being the worst. The Premier League has had transitional champions before. United in 1996/97 were not their finest version. United in 2010/11 were a strange old-new hybrid, simultaneously inevitable and quite obviously flawed. Leicester in 2015/16 were a miracle, but their case for greatness rests more on context than on domination.
Even some excellent champions have at some point relied on rivals stumbling into potholes.
Arsenal have benefited from that too. City have not been the steamroller we've seen in recent years. Liverpool's 2025 title defence never really got going at all. Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham have all had their own issues, ranging from tactical instability to full-blown performance art. This has not been a season of multiple elite sides dragging the bar upwards.
But champions do not choose the field. They beat it. Arsenal did that.
Shedding the 'bottlers' tag
What makes this title feel slightly odd is that Arsenal's emotional narrative is bigger than their footballing one. The club's supporters are celebrating an ending: the Emirates austerity years, the banter era, the near-misses, the endless debates about mentality, bottle and whether finishing second to an oil-state superclub counts as failure or evidence of basic numeracy.
The team itself, though, have won in a manner that is more functional than romantic.
That tension is probably why the "worst winners" line has taken hold. People expected catharsis to come with fireworks. Instead, it arrived wearing a hi-vis vest and hard hat, carrying a clipboard, checking passing lanes and attacking the back post from a corner.
Arsenal under Arteta can be hard to love if you are not already invested. They are intense, procedural, occasionally joyless, and forever managing the emotional temperature of matches. They do not always invite the neutral in, but the neutral's boredom is not a metric they need to care about. If it were, half of modern elite football would be in court.
Worthy winners
This Arsenal side are not the worst Premier League winners ever. They are not close. They are a very good team who have won a slightly underpowered title race by being more coherent, more durable and more defensively complete than everyone else.
They lack the shimmer of the great champions, but they have the substance of legitimate ones.
The fairest description is probably the least exciting: Arsenal are worthy champions, not historic champions. That may sting a little in the confetti. It should not (and definitely won't) ruin the parade.
After 22 years, Arsenal have not won the Premier League in the style of their dreams. They have won it in the image of Mikel Arteta: controlled, clenched, occasionally maddening, a touch sociopathic, relentlessly serious and, in the end, good enough.
Worst ever? No. Just not the sort of champions who have figured out how to turn all the external noise off.
