Paul Merson makes a living out of firing off wild takes on television. His predictions are usually a coin flip between mild confusion and pure chaos. But a broken clock is right twice a day. The man who once called Kevin De Bruyne a massive waste of money has finally accurately diagnosed the biggest tactical rebuild of the last decade.

If you look at the latest Sky Sports column, the headline is a massive dose of reality. The transition is totally complete.

Merson: Arsenal were also-rans, Arteta has brought them back.

It is May 21, 2026. The dust is finally settling on the Premier League season, and the simulation is fully broken. Arsenal have actually done it. The memes are dead. The viral fan meltdowns are a relic of the past.

To understand how insane this is, you have to remember the absolute state of this football club just a few years ago. It was a radioactive wasteland. Arsenal were a comedy act wearing red and white.

The galaxy-brain methods

The absolute state of 2019

Unai Emery had completely lost the dressing room. Granit Xhaka literally threw the captain’s armband on the grass and told the Emirates crowd to go to hell. Shkodran Mustafi was treating defensive positioning like an avant-garde art project.

They dropped £72 million on Nicolas Pepe just to watch him aimlessly step over the ball, run into a defender, and lose possession. The fanbase was in open revolt.

During the banter era, Arsenal Fan TV was probably generating more internet traffic than the club’s actual commercial department. You could guarantee a viral meltdown every single Sunday. Fans were fighting each other in the stands, flying protest banners behind airplanes, and crying into microphones outside the stadium. It was the best reality television on earth.

Then they hired Mikel Arteta. The Lego-haired disciple of Pep Guardiola walked in and immediately started acting like an absolute madman.

We all laughed at him. Do not pretend you did not. When the Amazon documentary dropped, Arteta was a walking meme generator. He drew pictures of a heart and a brain holding hands before a match.

He brought a literal lightbulb into the dressing room to explain team energy. He played Liverpool’s 'You'll Never Walk Alone' over giant speakers during training to prepare his players for the noise of Anfield. It sounded like pure Reddit copypasta.

We eventually found out he secretly hired professional pickpockets to steal his own players' phones at a team dinner. He did this just to teach them about being alert. You hear that stuff and you think it is pure Michael Scott managing a football club.

But here is the terrifying part. It actually worked. Arteta completely brainwashed an entire squad of young millionaires into buying his psychotic level of obsession.

Ruthlessness and missing pieces

He did it by being brutal. Arteta did not negotiate with big egos. If you did not fit the highly rigid, deeply neurotic tactical setup he was building, you were instantly gone.

Mesut Ozil was frozen out. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, the club captain and best goalscorer, was literally paid to leave the club after showing up late too many times.

Aubameyang went from lifting the FA Cup to being completely exiled because he could not respect a simple timetable. Arteta made an example out of him. It was a terrifying power play. If he was willing to dump his highest-paid star, nobody was safe. That level of fear creates unbelievable discipline.

People called Arteta arrogant. They said his ego was completely out of control. But getting rid of the established stars allowed him to build a culture of absolute, unwavering compliance.

He replaced the divas with pure athletes. He handed the keys to Martin Odegaard, a player Real Madrid casually threw away, and turned him into the most relentless pressing number ten in the sport. Odegaard does not just create chances. He triggers the entire defensive press. He runs like a maniac for ninety minutes straight, barking orders and pointing at empty spaces.

He built a defense out of concrete and bad intentions. William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes turned into the most terrifying center-back pairing in Europe. They stopped playing beautiful, flowing Wenger-ball. They started playing suffocating, miserable, highly effective football.

The goalkeeper controversy

We cannot talk about ruthlessness without mentioning Aaron Ramsdale. Ramsdale was a massive fan favorite. He was the emotional heartbeat of the team during their first real title push.

So what did Arteta do? He threw him on the bench the second David Raya became available. He looked the media dead in the eye and claimed he wanted to rotate goalkeepers during matches.

That was an incredible lie. Raya came in, took the number one shirt, and Ramsdale was left out in the cold. The media lost their minds. Pundits screamed that Arteta was destroying squad harmony.

But Raya won the Golden Glove. Raya would casually trap the ball under his foot with a striker running full speed at him, wait for the absolute last microsecond, and clip a perfect 40-yard pass to Gabriel Martinelli. It gave fans heart palpitations, but it worked. Arteta looked like a villain, but he was completely vindicated by the underlying numbers.

The 105 million pound lock

The real turning point was Declan Rice. When Arsenal dropped £105 million on a defensive midfielder, rivals laughed. It was an absurd, astronomical fee.

But Rice was the final piece of the puzzle. He allowed Arsenal to defend in a mid-block that was practically impenetrable. Teams would spend an entire half passing the ball in a U-shape around the Arsenal penalty area without registering a single shot on target.

They won massive away games simply by boring the opposition to death and striking on set pieces. Nicolas Jover, the set-piece coach, became the most dangerous weapon in the league.

They essentially turned into prime Stoke City but with designer clothes and better haircuts. If there was a corner kick, you knew Gabriel was going to aggressively dismantle his marker. Arsenal scored an absurd number of goals from corners. They would crowd the goalkeeper, cause absolute chaos, and bundle the ball over the line in the 89th minute. It was not pretty, but it broke the spirit of every team chasing them.

Where the machine breaks down

But let’s not pretend this is a flawless operation. No team is perfect, and Arteta has a massive, glaring weakness that he absolutely refuses to fix.

The man physically cannot rotate his squad. He treats his starting eleven like they are indestructible cyborgs. Bukayo Saka has been playing through visible pain for three straight years.

Arteta will be up 3-0 against a relegation candidate and will still leave Saka on the pitch until his hamstrings scream for mercy. It is borderline negligence at this point.

With the World Cup kicking off in exactly 21 days, Gareth Southgate is probably staring at Saka's medical reports in pure panic. Arteta runs his star boy into the ground because he fundamentally does not trust his bench players to execute his insanely demanding tactical instructions.

And then there is Europe. For all their domestic dominance, Arsenal in the Champions League look entirely out of their depth.

Arsenal won the league, but they are going to be watching the Champions League Final from the couch in seven days. The moment they face elite European dark arts, they fold.

They go away to Munich or Madrid and suddenly look completely naive. They pass the ball sideways, freeze in the final third, and completely forget the basics. You cannot spend north of half a billion pounds, win the league, and still look like deer in headlights the second you step foot outside of England.

The terrifying reality

Merson called them also-rans. They absolutely were. They were the punchline of the Premier League for a solid decade. Every rival fan loved playing Arsenal because you knew they would eventually collapse under the slightest bit of physical pressure.

Now? They are champions. Arteta built a machine that grinds out results with terrifying efficiency. He alienated half the fanbase, spent a massive fortune, and treated team dinners like psychological warfare.

It was ugly at times. It was incredibly weird. But you cannot argue with the trophy cabinet. The banter era is officially over. We just have to live in Mikel Arteta's world now, pickpockets and all.