Arsenal have earned their pain. It will pull them even closer together

Sometime in a few weeks, months or even years, Arsenal’s players will perhaps be able to process the emotional extremes they have lived with as this season reached its silvery climax. The joyful release of all the Premier League suffering they endured along the way to the title segued into a mountainous occasion in Budapest. They made it very close to the top but faltered just before the summit.

Mikel Arteta spoke for everyone on planet Arsenal when he tried to sum up the feeling at the end of it all. “Pain,” he said. “That’s it.” But if there is one feature of his reign in recent seasons, it is a willingness to absorb it, learn from it, pull everyone even closer together, and throw it all into the mix to fuel the drive for an antidote.

The penalty shootout is a cursed affliction when the roulette wheel fails you, and that was Arsenal’s fate here. After 63 games, they confronted not just a technically accomplished Paris Saint-Germain but also the weight of the club’s blemished European history.

As the players linked arms as one by one — five of them were brave enough to take on the enormous pressure of these penalties — in the shadows was the 2-1 defeat by Barcelona in their only other Champions League final twenty years ago. There were other ghosts. Valencia in 1980 (also lost on a penalty shootout). Galatasaray in 2000 (yes, vanquished again in the same way). And a few more doses of European pain on top of that.

But from the embers of the hurt is the knowledge that this is an Arsenal that truly belongs on this stage. They have, as Arteta said multiple times since his team touched down in Budapest, “earned it”.

Arsenal return to London overnight and will be enveloped in the love of their people as they parade the Premier League trophy around Islington. Of course, an extra cup would have been even better, but that won’t deter the huge numbers expected to greet their team anyway. Gabriel will feel only warmth and thanks from supporters who call him their “King of Brazil”. A missed penalty takes nothing away from his status.

Perhaps too many variables went against Arsenal come those penalties. They lost both coin tosses, conceding the end and the first penalty to PSG. Three players who would certainly have taken penalties were not fit enough to last the distance.

The Champions League remains out of reach for now. But there is a clear upward trajectory in striving to get there. In 2023-24, their first season back after several years of absence, they reached the quarter-finals. The following season, the semi-finals. This time, the final. There remains one hurdle to go.

“We are going to have to end that,” Arteta said. “The same progression we had in the last few years, we have to do it over again, and the level is increasing every single season. We had an incredible competition — we haven’t lost a single match — but the reality is when something had to go our way, especially in the boxes, and the penalty kicks, those margins didn’t go for us.”

Arsenal are by no means the paupers of world football, but they are committed to chasing prizes through a philosophy of being self-sustaining in an era when artificially pumped super-rich clubs owned by nation states lead the way. Their main competition for the two main trophies in their sights this season comprised Manchester City domestically and PSG in Europe, backed by Abu Dhabi and Qatar, respectively. It is no mean feat to try to compete with that kind of power, souped up over the past decade.

It is telling that the only new winners of the Champions League over the best part of the past 30 years are clubs which have been reinvented by staggering investment — first Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea, and more recently City and PSG. All of them lost a final in their modern iteration before they finally got to celebrate on the podium.

There is recognition that Arsenal were up against a team that has set superior standards in Europe in the past couple of years, with a level of technical prowess pieced together over recent years that ensured their best bet was to lean into their expert defensive nous and resilience.

On their run to the final, PSG scored so freely — six against Bayern Munich, four against Liverpool, eight against Chelsea. Arsenal restricted them to fine margins — a penalty in normal time, conceded by a rash decision by their third-choice right back against arguably the most in-form winger in the world. It was a platform that almost worked.

They started beautifully. Kai Havertz’s goal gave his team something wonderful to hold on to. Having tamed the ball with a silken touch, when the move found its way back to him, he burst down the left channel with nobody for company. So he ran, and ran, and found himself at an improbably acute angle with one thought in his head. His rifled shot rose into the roof of the net.

Then it became a test of defensive resolve, and after PSG’s equalising penalty, Arsenal were aggrieved not to get one themselves as Nuno Mendes collided with Noni Madueke. Arteta later said that he watched every single penalty in this Champions League season in his preparations to best understand what does and doesn’t get given. Ultimately, that did not help him here.

As they did when Manchester City beat them in the Carabao Cup final, Arsenal waited and watched, and paid their respects to PSG as they lifted the trophy they so crave.

More fuel. More desire to keep improving. More fire in the belly to find a way to reach new levels, just as they did in the Premier League.

Defeats, as the watching Arsene Wenger mused, leave a scar on your heart. This will take some time to heal, then Arsenal will dust themselves down and go hunting for the biggest and most beautiful things in football, and another shot at history, once again.