Tony Adams was just before my time. The man nicknamed Mr. Arsenal, who captained the club for 14 years, retired the summer I started watching football, having just led the team to their second Premier League and FA Cup Double in just five years. The armband was handed to one Patrick Vieira. If ever a player was a “complete midfielder” while being wholly unique and escaping definition, it was this system-breaking, almost-mythical Frenchman who not only joined Arsenal just because compatriot Arsene Wenger was set to take over, but also embodied Le Prof’s intense 21st-century transition-heavy, one-two-touch football that required great technical and physical ability. Vieira’s final kick of the ball for the club would be, incidentally, the winning penalty in a penalty shootout against Manchester United in the FA Cup final—Arsenal’s last trophy until a Mikel-Arteta-led side won the 2014 FA Cup, nine years later.
Prior to Mikel Arteta, there were many who bore the responsibility of the position, some much better suited to it than others, but in the increasingly turbulent seasons just prior to and after Wenger’s departure and when Arteta took over the reins in late 2019, the armband had somewhat lost its value, flitting between players, and an appeasement rather than a deserved, earned, reward to a worthy candidate.
When the Spaniard returned to Arsenal with the weight of expectation on his young shoulders, he also brought with him the concept of non-negotiables—any player who couldn’t live up to them was out; there was too much to lose if the rebuild didn’t go to plan. A long-term project like the one he’d accepted came with its own set of challenges, but he knew better than anyone that it would have to be broken apart in the short-term so that it could be moulded back into what we all wanted: a team capable of competing for, and hopefully winning, the best and biggest of the trophies on offer, but also doing it The Arsenal Way.
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Martin Ødegaard landed in North London on loan in early January 2021. The narrative that had elevated him to one of the top young talents to watch out for simmered low. He’d failed to get regular playing time at Real Madrid, who sent him out on loan twice in the Netherlands and, later, within Spain, where he had varying degrees of success, but it was nowhere close to what everyone expected from him. More importantly, I suspect, what he expected from himself. With the standards he’d held close even as a boy, spending countless, determined, obsessed hours training with his father, friends, and alone in Norway’s south-eastern river and port city of Drammen where he grew up.