Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal could finish second in the Premier League for a third season in a row, but the Arsenal manager was keen to claim that his team’s final points tallies from the previous two campaigns would have been enough to secure the title this season.
That’s because Liverpool mathematically became champion after accumulating 79 points — five fewer than Arsenal managed last season, and 10 fewer than it managed the season before.
Speaking ahead of Arsenal’s Champions League semi-final second leg away to Paris Saint-Germain, Arteta — who confirmed Arsenal will give Liverpool a guard of honor this weekend — said: “Winning trophies is about being in the right moment, in the right place.
“Liverpool has won the title with less points than we had in the last two seasons. With the points from the last two season, we have two Premier Leagues.”
What Arteta is overlooking is that Liverpool has collected 82 points from 35 games, while Arsenal had 80 points after the same amount of games last season.
Liverpool could still finish the season with 91 points, which would have been enough to deny the Gunners the title in each of the last two seasons.
Arteta was trying to say that his team’s points tallies from 2022-23 and 2023-24 would have been enough to win the league this term, but that would only be the case had Liverpool not performed as well as it has done this season.
The truth is that Arsenal would have been firmly in a title race with Liverpool had it accrued a similar amount of points as it did in the previous two seasons, but it would have still been in Arne Slot’s team’s hands to win the league.
Arteta joined Arsenal in 2019, and while the team has improved significantly under his leadership, the FA Cup in 2020 remains the only piece of silverware that the club has won under the Spaniard.
Last week, Arteta congratulated Liverpool on winning the league. “Yeah, big time,” he confessed when asked if losing out to Slot’s team was a bitter pill to swallow.
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“It was in my tummy [that it hurt], yeah. I understand that it’s a team that’s being more consistent, and it has a lot of ingredients that you need to win it, but it’s very painful, yeah.
“I take the opportunity as well to congratulate Liverpool and what they’ve done, the management they’ve done, how consistent they’ve been. I think they fully deserve to win.
“They were the better team, they had so many attributes, they had a consistent squad available. And we’re going to try again. But up to that moment next season, now we’re going to have to finish the season very strong.”
