Arsenal Are 2025-26 Premier League Champions

It's funny how the football league system works: because teams earn a certain amount of points for wins and draws, the aggregate of results over a season can make it so that a team wins the league through results elsewhere. So it was today with Bournemouth's draw with Manchester City in the Premier League, which handed victory to Arsenal despite them not even playing today.

Of course I've been following the league eagerly all season - both from general interest and because of my participation in various Fantasy Premier League mini-leagues. And it's been fun watching the ups and downs of Arsenal's campaign, with the constant question each week of whether this would be the match that Arsenal fucked up, or if it would be when Man City turned on the style and steamrolled to their inevitable victory. Despite a couple of hiccups, neither of those things happened.

I'll admit I haven't always been convinced by Arsenal, or by their manager Mikel Arteta, over the last few years. I think that's partly because I memory-holed the fact that they came second in each of the past three seasons, but also because they came second in each of the past three seasons, including one memorable year when they threw away not one but two sizable leads over City to lose at the very end of the season. 

It also felt like every season was the same thing with Arsenal, the same problems of not scoring enough goals, because they never seemed to have a good enough striker. Ironically, this season was kind of the same, as they win the league with the fifth-lowest goals tally (I think in the Premier League era). Much was made of their ugly style of play and reliance on set-pieces, particularly corners, but another way of looking at it is, for whatever reason this strategy clicked and was enough to keep Arsenal ahead of their competitors pretty much all season.

The thought that strikes me is that Arsenal seem to have broken the City-Liverpool duopoly of the last couple of seasons - the last time a team other than those two won the league was Chelsea in 2017. Arsenal winning this year bolsters the argument - which I don't entirely buy - that the Premier League is the most competitive big league in Europe. There's some truth to the argument, because the EPL isn't dominated by one big marquee team (like Germany or France) or by a pair of dominant teams (like Spain), but also, in the previous eight seasons, City won six titles, including an unprecedented four in a row.

The reason people think the Premier League is more competitive is because the pool of teams that can challenge for the title is larger than in Spain or Germany. There used to be talk of the "Top Six" teams in England, which were City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Manchester United. No matter that when this designation was coined, Liverpool hadn't won a top-flight title since 1990, or that Spurs hadn't done so since 1961 (and the less said about Spurs this season, the better). Arsenal also hadn't won since 2004, the Invincible season, and United hadn't won since 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson's last in charge.

It's worth noting that all of these teams have challenged for other big trophies in these past few years, even if they haven't always been competitive in the league. Liverpool won the Champions League in 2019, beating Spurs in the final, and Spurs won the Europa League last season against Manchester United. Arsenal have also qualified for Europe most seasons since their last title, so they've been doing well.

By comparison, since 2018 only two teams have won the Bundesliga (Bayern Munich and, just once, Bayer Leverkusen), two teams have won Ligue 1 in France (PSG and Lille, also just once), while in Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid have won most of the titles in that same period (and yes, the one-time outlier is Atletico Madrid). The only moderately competitive league in this same period has been Serie A, where there have been four winners (Juventus, Inter, Napoli and Milan), of whom all but Milan have won multiple titles.

That list of league winners across the top four leagues, plus France, is a who's-who of extremely rich clubs. It's worth remembering that for all the talk of Manchester City's alleged financial doping (what's happening with those 115 charges, btw?), the richest teams win the richest leagues, and they also win in Europe. Chelsea didn't win a Premier League title until Roman Abramovich contributed his billions, and both City and PSG are effectively petrostate sportswashing projects, so of course they have a lot of cash behind them.

There's perhaps a temptation to suggest that Arsenal winning this season is a David vs Goliath style triumph against football's one-percenters, but no, let's keep in mind that Arsenal are themselves in the one-percent. Indeed, the title sewn up today is Arsenal's 14th in their history, which makes them the third most successful club in terms of league titles won, after Liverpool and Manchester United. Arsenal may not have won as many leagues as their stature implies, but that's only because some club has always come up with even more cash than them to buy their way to league success.

(Incidentally, Arsenal have also won 14 FA Cups, which is more than any other club, so they have those trophies to fall back on too)

In terms of what's next for the Gunners, I'm even more excited to see how they'll do in the Champions League final against PSG at the end of the month. And looking farther forward, I found myself sizing them up against their league competition next season - Man City will have a new coach, in Enzo Maresca, Xabi Alonso will be new at Chelsea, and Michael Carrick will have entrenched himself more at Manchester United (unless they decide not to hire him after all?). All of these teams will have the summer to rebuild and realign their playing styles, as will Liverpool, which may yet have a new coach in the dugout come August.

Arsenal have already vowed to keep improving, which will hopefully make for a better title defense than what Liverpool mustered this year. Without getting too far ahead of myself, I'm looking forward to seeing how they get on next season.

Objectivism is Immoral

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

I'm really not a fan of Randian objectivist libertarianism, so the quote above has always resonated with me.

I remember in college I had a friend who identified as libertarian explain to me what exactly it meant. He said that, in his view, the government shouldn't own any land, so a libertarian government would immediately sell all public lands off. When I pointed out that meant that all the national parks would get sold to logging and mining companies, he shrugged and said that was just how the market would work. And that's when libertarianism lost me forever.

I've spoken before on this blog about how I'm big on rule of law. I believe I'm also on the record as being not the biggest fan of large corporations that distort markets and do what they want. Libertarianism would give us a lot of corporations doing whatever they want without worrying about downstream effects, and without being beholden to regulators or accountability.

The downstream effects thing is particularly important. In the objectivist view, companies shouldn't have to reckon with negative externalities, but that just means that everyone else would have to. But because the federal government would be effectively nonexistent ("small enough to drown in the bathtub", as many right-wingers like to say), cleanup wouldn't be the responsibility of taxpayers: there'd be no regulatory or centralized bodies to clean up oil spills and mining disasters and whatever else would happen. We'd just have to deal with the after effects of all these disasters individually.

If you don't believe me, Senator Rand Paul's reaction to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that poisoned large sections of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was, "Sometimes accidents happen." This was, it needs to be noted, in reaction to the US government attempting to make BP clean up its mess. Paul is possibly the most objectivist member of either house of Congress - it's no coincidence that his first name is "Rand", after all.

Without imputing further motives or ideology to a sitting US Senator, I just want to reiterate how immoral that viewpoint is. In that worldview, a pharmaceutical company that poisons its customers would suffer no consequences, and the victims - or rather their next of kin - would have no recourse. And if you think that's a far-fetched example, look up the Elixir Sulfanilamide poisoning of 1937, which killed 100 people and led to the introduction of toxicity testing for food and drugs.

About the only good thing about libertarianism is that it doesn't mind people smoking pot, but unfortunately, most libertarians in the US are also Republican voters, so we get the worst of both worlds: libertarians who want to control what you do in the privacy of your own home, but who don't want to stop companies killing you in the course of doing business.

This is why it's so concerning to see the Liz Truss-Javier Milei wing of politics running rampant all over the world. And why it was so concerning to see people talk about Milei's policies as "interesting" back in 2024, after Donald Trump was re-elected, because some of Milei's shock treatment in Argentina has seen reductions in inflation, albeit at the cost of higher prices for individual households, but that was because Argentina was a basket-case, economically. When Liz Truss attempted to push through unfunded tax cuts in the UK in 2022, she spooked the markets so badly that she lasted just 45 days.

By contrast, I'm heartened by the example of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, who's managed to fix a lot of quality of life issues like fixing potholes and clearing snow off the streets, while also balancing the budget without cutting social programs that people rely on. Instead of the libertarian view that the government can't do anything well, Mamdani's example is showing exactly how government is well-placed to fix certain things that the free market can't. I hope he'll manage to continue on like this, because government works when lawmakers understand what normal people need - libertarians can never understand that, and so they'll only ever offer cuts to regulations and services, all while everyone's daily life gets worse and worse.

Which is, as I say, immoral.

Another First Draft in the Can

I'm pleased to report that I finished the first draft of my romantasy novel yesterday. In its present form it weighs in at an impressive 148,930 words, which makes it the longest thing I've ever written. Though that word count will have to come down a little, not just in the normal course of revising and editing, but because debut authors plunking down phonebook-sized manuscripts into agents' Query Manager are, ahem, frowned upon.

To put that word count into perspective, Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses runs to about 130,000 words, while Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing is apparently over 200,000 words. Neither is the first book by their respective author, so I'll have some cutting to do.

The other notable thing about this accomplishment is that it took me barely three months to write it. The key factor was obviously my current lack of employment, which meant I had a lot of time to devote to it during the day, but I also think I did a better job of plotting it out than I've done with my previous attempts at novels. For example, the last novel I wrote, which ran to 98,000 words when I subbed it to agents in 2024, took about six months to write, mostly in one-hour increments at 8pm when I'd finished all my life stuff (work, dinner, tidying, etc). The novel I wrote before that was intended to hit at least 80,000 words but came out at 50k, so I cut 10,000 words out and repackaged it as a novella.

I'm not entirely sure why this one stuck in my imagination so well, but I suspect it's because I plotted it out much more thoroughly than those others, with a lot more emphasis on the two POV characters' journeys. Although who knows, maybe when I go back to revise it I'll see all kinds of glaring plot holes and infelicities. I won't know until July at the earliest...

It's also worth saying that, apart from any outcomes I may be hoping for, I just had more fun writing this than I have in a long time. Partly that had to do with the spicy scenes (if we're being honest), but those were a way to get further into the characters' heads - to me at least. My critique group might be horrified (or worse, bored) by them. But the upshot is that I'm a little sad to be leaving the characters behind for the moment - they were my main creative focus for a relatively short but intense time, and now I have to try and banish them from my thoughts for a while, so that I can come back to them at revision time with fresh eyes.

Though, one thing I've been pondering (and this might just be the bargaining stage of my grief journey at leaving them) is how this "put the book away for at least 6 weeks" thing works for authors who are on deadline? Surely when Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J Maas or Joe Abercrombie finish their first draft, they don't put it aside for a couple of months, do they? Their editors must be waiting for something, surely.

This is one of those things I'd like to learn first hand.

On the other hand, I have other projects that have started to demand attention, and I've been looking forward to revisiting and revising them, so at least I'll have other things to keep me busy for the time being. And my critique group has been asking about one of them, which is, with luck, going to be my next main project - unless my brain falls in love with something else and makes me work on it at all hours like it did with this project.

Brains are fun!