Arsenal Celebrates Premier League Triumph and Eyes Champions League Glory

Arsenal finally got their hands back on the Premier League trophy at Selhurst Park, a 2-1 win over Crystal Palace sealing a title that had taunted them for three straight seasons. Red shirts scattered across the pitch, families on the grass, medals glinting under the south London floodlights – it felt like a cathartic full stop to years of almost.

For Mikel Arteta, it was anything but an ending.

Even as the celebrations swirled around him, the Arsenal manager’s gaze was already drifting east, towards Budapest and a date with PSG in the Champions League final on Saturday. The Premier League, monumental as it is for a club that had finished runners-up three years in a row, is now the platform. The real shot at immortality lies ahead.

Arteta has no intention of letting the party blur the edges of his team.

“We need that energy to flow and going against that, I think it will be a big mistake,” he said, outlining a plan that turns euphoria into fuel rather than distraction. The conversations have already started: what Arsenal must do in Budapest, how to harness “all the incredible energy” from this title run and pour it into the biggest game in European football. Preparation, he insisted, begins immediately.

The Premier League crown changes the way this group walks into any stadium. Arteta knows it. His players know it. That “champion” tag is more than a line on a CV; it’s a psychological weapon.

“I said to the boys that this shirt now represents something else,” he explained. “We are the champions, and that brings a lot of confidence and a different kind of presence and energy to it. But as well, another kind of responsibility as well.”

That duality runs through everything he says: joy and burden, validation and demand. Arteta’s next job, as he sees it, is to raise the bar again. The title has not satisfied him; it has emboldened him. “My job now and everybody at the club is going to be lift those standards now and achieve much more, because I think we are capable of doing it.”

The “much more” is obvious. Arsenal have never won the Champions League. For a club of their size and history, that absence glares. Arteta, who lifted the FA Cup in his first season in 2020 and then endured several years of late-season anguish, understands the scale of the chance in front of him. This is the frontier that has beaten every Arsenal manager before him.

“And we can't wait to write a new chapter in the history of our club and lift the Champions League,” he said, leaving no doubt about his ambition for a domestic and continental double that would redefine what this era of Arsenal stands for.

The route to this point has been jagged. Three seasons of finishing second, campaigns that frayed in the final weeks, left scars that were visible in the way Arteta spoke about “falling short at the end” in “three locations”. Those collapses hurt him. They hurt his players. They also hardened them.

“Throughout this journey we have made some massive steps,” he reflected. The manager pointed to achievements that, in his view, carried “a lot of value”, but he never lost sight of the bottom line. Arsenal, he reminded everyone, exist to win major trophies. Nothing less.

That clarity drove him to search for new methods. Visualisation became part of his armoury – seeing himself with the Premier League trophy before it ever touched his hands. On the pitch at Selhurst Park, celebrating with his family, that imagined picture finally matched reality. It left him, as he put it, “happier and relieved”.

Relief, though, is not the emotion he wants to carry to Budapest. Confidence is. Belief is. The feeling that the shirt on his players’ backs “represents something else” now – the aura of champions.

Arteta is convinced the title has changed the psychology of his squad. Under the lights next weekend, against PSG and the weight of their own European obsession, he expects that shift to matter. The manner in which Arsenal finally got over the line in England, after years of being picked apart in the run-in, has given this group a different edge.

“That’s what has driven all of us to find new ways to show what we are made of,” he said. “That's why I said that the manner that we've done it, it makes it even better.”

The Premier League trophy has already etched this team into club folklore. Budapest offers something rarer: the chance to rewrite Arsenal’s place in the European game in a single night.