Safe is Death

Reflections on Arsenal Football Club's 2025/26 season

The 2025/26 season was, by all accounts, a success for Arsenal Football Club. The team, located in North London and playing in the English Premier League—the world’s most prestigious national football (soccer) league—finally won the competition after three successive years as runners-up. It was their first title since 2004. Arsenal also competed in the UEFA Champions League, a tournament which allows for the best teams from the top European leagues to play each other in a knockout tournament. Clubs you may be familiar with, like Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, Manchester United and AC Milan, face each other in matches that are considered the highest level of world football. Arsenal have never won this competition, but this year, on May 30, they came as close as a team can, losing in a penalty shootout to Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). Had Arsenal won, it would have been only the sixth time in history that an English team had won their domestic first division title and the top European competition, establishing them as one of the best teams in English footballing history. And yet, as an Arsenal fan and supporter, I felt little joy watching my team this year, and my celebrations upon winning the league were muted. Watching the Champions League final a week later, I experienced, at times, feelings of shame and disgust—if these words are not too strong—with the state of my team. To explain why, we have to go back to why I became an Arsenal fan in the first place.

My support for the team has nothing to do with geographical proximity. I am not English, let alone a Londoner or a North Londoner; I am American, and like many Americans, I became a soccer fan when European soccer began to be televised regularly in the US. If I remember correctly, at some point in the 2000’s, you would wake up on a Saturday morning, turn on ESPN or maybe NBC, and all of a sudden you would be greeted with the sight of a lush, green rectangle—an image that over the years would become a sort of beacon for me, calling me to come and sit before it. When I started watching soccer and began to understand its various competitions and rules, I naturally began to gravitate toward certain teams and reject others. The teams that were televised most often were Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Arsenal, and of those teams, Arsenal played the most attractive football, although they were not the most successful. Their manager at the time, Arsène Wenger, was French, and as I would learn later, had at one time been a foreign anomaly in the English game, but had helped to internationalize and thus, revolutionize, English soccer, which had the reputation for being stodgy, physical, and brute, but which would become, partly due to Wenger’s influence, beautiful, artistic, and creative. What astounded me as I began to follow European soccer was that contrary to American sports, winning at all costs was not the goal; just as important as achieving success was how you achieved it, and even a manager who won matches could be fired—or sacked, to use the footballing term—if his team did not play in a style that was pleasing to watch. Arsenal always played in a style pleasing to watch, even if this was sometimes to their detriment.

They featured players—Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry, Cesc Fàbregas, Mesut Özil—who did things with the ball that others couldn’t. When you watched them, and here I’m thinking especially of Özil, my favorite player during the 2010’s, you saw, in the way they played, a vision of life where you could move through the world with grace and style, rather than strength and force, and you could be successful in doing so. Özil never looked like he was trying out there, yet somehow, while the others were huffing and puffing, he’d glide past them with the ball; while everyone was running one way, he’d spy something that no one else had seen, finding an open teammate with a pass for an easy goal. In Özil, and in Arsenal as a whole, I felt a resonance with my own way of being, or at least with the way I wanted to be—if they won, and if they won in their style, it proved that the way to live was not through power and grit, bending the world to your will, lording over nature, but by being one with the world, letting things come to you, achieving unity and harmony with your surroundings. Somehow, Arsenal’s football expressed all this to me.

In the 2023/24 season, Arsenal had come up short for the second year in a row to Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City team, letting an early season lead slip away, just as they had done the previous season when City overtook them in the final weeks (the league title goes to the team with the best regular season record; there are no playoffs). There was an inevitability to this outcome, as City had dominated the Premier League ever since the arrival of Guardiola in 2016. Arsenal had to do something different, and so at a preseason dinner before the 2024/25 season, Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, hired a group of pickpockets to circulate among the players. By the end of the dinner, many players no longer had their wallets. The message, apparently, was that the team had to remain constantly vigilant; if you didn’t, another team might snatch the title at the last minute. Arsenal went on to finish second that year as well, but this year, as they seemed certain to win the league title and then when they did win the title, the pickpocket story came back to me as I watched Arsenal play conservative, defensive football. Little by little, Arteta had succeeded in replacing the team I knew and loved with a group of imposters—they were wearing the Arsenal shirt, but they weren’t playing the Arsenal way; the football was not free flowing, beautiful, or genius, but repetitive, monotonous, and most of all, risk averse and boring. The team would delay each restart of play—a goal kick, a throw in, a corner kick—as long as possible, and they couldn’t score from open play, but only from set pieces. Arteta, who is Spanish, somehow came to remind me of an American tourist who goes on vacation to Europe, and upon returning from the Porta Portese market in Rome, or Las Ramblas in Barcelona, responds to the question of “How was your vacation?” with “Great! I didn’t get pickpocketed!” Yes, but did you enjoy the trip?

At the same time as I was thinking of Arteta’s pickpocket scheme, I remembered another famous coaching tactic: in 2004, the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team won the Stanley Cup following the mantra “safe is death,” which had been instilled in the team by head coach John Tortorella. Although I can’t corroborate this explanation, I seem to remember the Lightning losing a playoff game when they had held a two or three goal lead, largely because they tried to protect their advantage rather than extend it. From that point on, the team committed to an aggressive, attacking style, trying to simply score more than their opponents rather than focusing on limiting the other team’s chances, and this culminated in a Stanley Cup victory. Tortorella’s philosophy was the opposite of Arteta’s, and as luck would have it, while Arsenal were struggling to maintain their position at the top of the Premier League table, Tortorella was hired, rather extraordinarily, to coach the Vegas Golden Knights with eight games remaining in the regular season. The Knights won seven of those games, and at the time of writing, are up two games to one over the Carolina Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup Finals. A few key moments from this series and Arsenal’s season are worth elucidating.

In the Champions League final, Arsenal improbably scored early in the sixth minute to take a 1-0 lead. I knew this was the worst possible scenario, as it would lead the team to sit deep and try to hold onto a one-nil victory, but that they would inevitably give up a goal to PSG, who are one of the best and most adventurous attacking teams in football. Arsenal had won three of the five final leagues games one-nil, but this had been against teams in the bottom half of the Premier League table (two of whom have been relegated to the second division after finishing at the bottom of the standings). This strategy might work against mediocre teams, but not against the best. As the final wore on and Arsenal wasted time and slowed the game down, I thought of England’s loss in the 2020 European Championship final, when they’d scored in the second minute against Italy, then attempted to protect the lead, only to concede an equalizing goal and lose in a penalty shootout. England, too, had won a series of narrow victories against lesser opposition, and their performances in recent competitions—a semifinal loss in the 2018 World Cup, the 2020 defeat, a quarterfinal defeat in the 2022 World Cup, and another loss in the 2024 European Championship final—seemed to show that a conservative style could get you far in a competition, but that when you came up against a team with attacking verve, flair, and swagger, you would lose, and playing safe would ultimately end in death. My English mate, whom I watched many of the England games with, told me that their manager, Gareth Southgate, had been gently mocked in his playing days because he would read the newspaper in the dressing room, showing him to be an intellectual among a group of unthinking brutes, but to me, the newspaper anecdote was damning in a different way—sport is the domain of poetry and art, not the lowly newspaper, and if a manager must insist on reading something, let it be Nietzsche or Baudelaire, even Kerouac’s “burn, burn, burn” will do, but certainly not the staid and sanctimonious pages of a newspaper.

In game two of the Stanley Cup Finals, the score was 2-2 late in the third period. After a scrum in front of the goal, the puck somehow ended up in the back of the net for a Vegas Golden Knights goal, except it wasn’t a goal because the referee had blown his whistle to end the play. Or had he? Tortorella decided to challenge the call; if he succeeded, Vegas would go up 3-2 with only a few minutes remaining, likely leading to victory. If he lost, Carolina would be granted a powerplay, reducing the number of Vegas skaters allowed on the ice from five to four and giving Carolina a higher chance of scoring and winning the game. The stakes were clear: risk losing to win the game, or play it safe. Tortorella challenged, lost, and Carolina scored on the resulting powerplay. After the game, all the pundits agreed that Tortorella had made a mistake, but I wasn’t so sure. In going for the win, Tortorella had signaled to his players that the path to victory was through risk taking, not caution, and I imagine this idea would have given the players confidence, encouraging them and influencing them to play positively on the ice, without fear of mistakes. The next game, Vegas went up 4-0, largely thanks to the play of Mitch Marner, who had previously been maligned for his playoff failures with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Now, on a new team and with a coach who supports him, Marner is the best player in the NHL playoffs. In the third period, Vegas somehow relinquished their lead, and at 4-4, the game went to overtime, then double overtime, but Vegas proved resilient and eventually won on a fluke slapshot off the boards. Should Vegas have played it safe and protected their four-goal lead? Maybe. But in a seven-game series, and as the stronger, more talented team, an aggressive philosophy that allows them to play to the best of their ability should culminate in a series win.

Unlike Vegas, who have focalized Marner and encouraged his creativity, Arsenal started the match against PSG with their most creative player, their number 10, Eberechi Eze, on the bench. He didn’t enter the pitch until the 91^st minute, which is a bit like having a Ferrari and only ever moving it from the garage to the driveway. In first half stoppage time, when referees can stop the match at their discretion once the allotted extra time has passed, Arsenal won a corner kick. This was a great chance to double their lead, as Arsenal set a record this year for the most goals from a corner kick in any Premier League season. With a chance to kill the game, Arsenal took so long walking to the corner flag and setting up—not wanting to give PSG time to counterattack—that the referee ended the half before they could take the kick. Reader, in all my years of watching soccer, I have never seen this occur, nor have I seen a team play with such fear as in that moment. This is where the shame and disgust come from that I mentioned earlier, and at that point, I knew Arsenal had no business winning the match.

Arsenal’s season, then, played out as a sort of Faustian bargain: you can win the Premier League, you might even win the Champions League, but to do so, you have to betray yourself and everything you stand for. Is it worth it? Most fans will say it was, but for me, it wasn’t. Certain readers will have deduced this already, but part of the reason I developed an affinity for Arsenal is that they brought me out of myself with their expansive football; the truth is, I, too, am cautious, reasonable, and safe, just like Arteta, but I also know you can’t always be like this, or you’ll miss out on the most beautiful and meaningful things in life. On the other hand, one can’t take risks all the time, and while I’ve focused on Tortorella’s coaching success in this essay, he’s had just as many (if not more) failures. Perhaps one shouldn’t look to sports to understand how to live, but I’ve always done this, and I can’t help but read meaning into the way someone dribbles a ball or shoots a puck.

Arsenal’s point total this year—85 points—would have only won the title one other time in the last nine years, and three times in the past twenty-two years. Did they win because they played safe, or despite playing safe? The result determines the narrative, but next year, I hope they take a few more chances, try to score a few more goals, and most of all, take pleasure in running around a patch of grass and kicking a ball. The World Cup starts today, and despite the corruption on FIFA, the exorbitant ticket prices, the absurd policies of the United States, when the players take the pitch, it will be a joyous occasion, and the only thing that will matter is 22 people and the magic they can create with a ball at their feet. The winner, I hope, will be the team that plays fearlessly and beautifully. ■