'Trust the process' has paid off! Love him or hate him, Mikel Arteta deserves respect for ending Arsenal's Premier League title drought

As Arteta has often brought up, Arsenal were in a bad place before he took over. The frustration that had set in during the second decade of Arsene Wenger's 22-year reign had given way to apathy by the end of Unai Emery's ill-fated spell in charge.

Of course, it could easily be argued that had Emery been given the same level of support as Arteta, it's highly likely that he'd have enjoyed similar success to his successor. As Emery has since shown at Villarreal and Aston Villa, he is very much one of the elite coaches of the modern era.

However, he lost the fans long before he was sacked on November 29, 2019, and not even the appointment of the extremely popular former winger Freddie Ljungberg as interim boss managed to lift the sense of doom and gloom around the club - which Arteta still vividly remembers from his final visit to the Emirates in his capacity as Manchester City coach just five days before his appointment as Arsenal's new permanent manager.

“That image, that feeling of the stadium, the crowd (with) 50 per cent of the stadium empty really got into me,” he recalled. "I said, 'With this, there is no project. This is not going to work.'

"Unfortunately, it got worse very quickly because then Covid hit and then instead of 50% we had zero. So, you make the job even harder. After that we had to rebuild everything."

Nobody could deny that Arteta did a fine job laying the foundations for a potential title-winning team. There was, however, always that nagging doubt over whether he was really the right man to turn Arsenal from challengers into champions.

As club legend Thierry Henry recently admitted on Sky, "I'll be honest, at one point I was questioning all of this 'Trust the process' talk. I wanted to know, 'Where are we going?'"

Even this season, there were fears that they'd finish second for a fourth consecutive campaign - and especially after they were beaten home to Bournemouth on April 11, when the players appeared to be affected by the nervousness of the home crowd.

However, the fans came through for Arteta and Arsenal when they needed them most - and the atmosphere at the Emirates for the league game against Fulham, and the Champions League semi-final second leg against Atletico Madrid that followed, were exhilarating exhibitions of just how much the mood around the club had changed since that 3-0 loss at home to City all the way back in December 2019.

"When it’s harder at the beginning," Arteta said before Monday's clash with Burnley, "then it makes it better to see that transformation and that joy among the people. It’s something that is beautiful to watch."

Of course, the fact that Arsenal haven't been "beautiful to watch" from a purely footballing perspective has become a subject of great debate this season.

As a Guardiola disciple, Arteta was expected to employ a similar style of play to the Catalan coach - and the Gunners initially looked like "Manchester City-light", as Jamie Carragher put it, after signing former City players such as Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko during the 2022 summer transfer window.

However, there's been a noticeable shift in strategy over the past three seasons, which has become even more pronounced since the start of the current campaign, with Arteta unexpectedly embracing a win-at-all-costs attitude that's provoked more comparisons to Jose Mourinho than Guardiola.

Arsenal have essentially become as effective at wasting time from set-pieces as they have scoring from them, David Raya regularly goes to ground in order to allow Arteta to give in-game team talks on the touchline, while the Gunners also seemed to exploit the protocol around concussion this season to make a defensive substitution in a game against Wolves in January - which rather neatly sums up their manager's newfound cynicism.

Arsenal's mastery of the dark arts hasn't exactly endeared them to opponents or neutrals. Brighton boss Fabian Hurzeler was extremely critical of Arteta's tactics after the Gunners' 1-0 win at the Amex Stadium in March, with the German declaring in his post-match press conference, "I will never be that kind of manager who tries to win in that way.

"Of course, every team will manage and waste time, but there has to be a limit and the limit has to be set by the Premier League and the referees. At the moment, Arsenal just do what they want.

"Where will this go in the future? That's my question. In one game you play 60 minutes net and then you play against Arsenal and it's only 50. It's 10 minutes of difference and this is what the supporters are paying for.

"If I would ask everyone in the room, 'Did you really enjoy this football game? I'm sure if maybe one person raises his arm, it's because he's a big Arsenal fan, but besides that, no chance [anyone would]."

What's interesting is that even Henry, the face of Arsenal's 'Invincibles', has admitted that he doesn't appreciate Arteta's approach from a coaching perspective. However, the former France international was quick to point out that, as one of the club's long-suffering supporters, all he really cared about was seeing his former club get over the line.

"For a very long time, we've been accused of being boys, of not being able to keep a lead, getting bullied," Henry pointed out on Sky. "The question was, 'Can you win ugly?' But now that's exactly what the team is doing, and actually mastering that. And now that you are doing it, other people are not happy with it.

"So, I don't have to like it, but I certainly respect it. That's the most important thing. After 22 years, no matter how we're going to do it, I'm going to respect it."

Henry also correctly pointed out that Arteta's shift in style is hardly a betrayal, as there is no such thing as 'The Arsenal Way', given Wenger's title-winners were the complete antithesis of George Graham's, who were renowned for their 1-0 wins. Both teams' triumphs were rightly and raucously celebrated by the club's supporters even though they were achieved with very different footballing philosophies.

Arsenal will, of course, be remembered as 'Set Piece FC' by many neutrals - but also the team that ended one of the most infamous droughts in English football history. They've done that by standing firm in their support of Arteta, who has been repeatedly ridiculed for his undeniably bizarre motivational methods and yet has managed to claim the title with a group of players that many felt were going to throw another one away when they lost at the Etihad just last month.

However, Arteta has also proven himself ahead of the curve by creating a well-drilled, defensively solid, physically strong, hard-working and cynical side united in its willingness to do whatever is required to win. In that sense, they are the perfect Premier League champions for 2025-26, the ultimate illustration of the attritional nature of English football right now.

The process may not have been pretty, but it has been effective. As Henry said on Sky, "We asked Mikel to find a way. And he did." For that reason alone, he deserves our respect.