ou Can’t Win Champions League If You’re Not In It Says Tabs
Let me get this out of the way before anything else: some of the negative reaction after the Sporting CP Champions League quarter-final second leg was perplexing.
Not all of it, we’re Arsenal fans after all and we like a moan, but enough that you start wondering what some fans actually want out of this sport – and it did my head in.
And no, this isn’t some “be grateful for what you’ve got” piece. I’m not lowering the bar. I’m not saying a semi-final is the ceiling. I want to win trophies. I want the big ones. That’s a lot of what we are here for, right?
But that’s exactly why the mood around reaching the Champions League semi-final felt so strange.
Because for a section of the fanbase, reaching a Champions League semi-final, back-to-back, for the first time in our entire history, is being treated like it barely counts unless we go and win the whole thing. But here’s the uncomfortable truth, this is rare, it shouldn’t be for a club like Arsenal, but it is.
Nobody’s printing t-shirts for “semi-finalists 2026”.
But you don’t win the Champions League without getting to the semi-final.
You don’t go from “nearly there” to “lifting the trophy” without putting yourself in these positions first.
This is what it looks like, you get into the latter stages, you stay in the competition, you give yourself a chance, and we’ve done that.
Manchester City aren’t there. Liverpool aren’t. Real Madrid aren’t. Barcelona aren’t. We are. And rather than seeing that as a meaningful step towards something we want, a decent chunk of the reaction has been a shrug, a sigh, and some variation of “yeah but we’re not going to win it anyway.”
That’s not ambition. That’s not standards. That’s just opting out before anything’s happened.
We topped the league phase unbeaten. We’ve gone 12 games unbeaten in the competition – no other team has managed that.
We’ve conceded barely anything, we’ve handled ourselves properly while other English clubs have been slapped around the Continent.
We managed our way through a two-legged tie short of key players, with fragile confidence, running on fumes, and we came out the other side. That’s not luck. That’s not a fluke. We’ve earned this.
Yes, the football hasn’t been pretty. Nobody walked out of the Emirates the other night feeling like we’re unstoppable right now.
We lent into our defensive organisational strengths, but performances can be a bit nervy, the spark’s been missing, and there’s a general sense we’re just about grinding through matches with little to write home about.
All fair. All true. You can see it, I can see it, everyone can. You can criticise the way we’re playing without turning it into a full inquest. But the idea that because we didn’t blow away Sporting, the whole thing suddenly isn’t worth getting behind? That’s where it goes too far for me.
There’s a mindset creeping in where anything short of perfection is treated like failure. Like if you’re not convinced, we’re going to win the whole thing, then there’s no point enjoying being here at all. For me that’s just choosing misery in advance.
Because the reality is simple, this level is hard. Really hard.
Big clubs fall out of this competition every year thinking they should have gone further. And yet here we are still in it. Two games away from the final. That doesn’t mean we will win it but it absolutely means we can, and that’s the whole point of getting this far, isn’t it? And the idea that “big clubs don’t celebrate semi-final”, come on, of course they do. They don’t treat it like it’s worthless, they’ve just been there more often.
And let’s be honest, it’s easier for some of those clubs in other leagues to get to this stage than it is for English clubs.
Enjoying the moment doesn’t mean settling for it.
It doesn’t mean lowering standards. It doesn’t mean pretending everything is perfect. It just means recognising that being in a Champions League semi-final is part of the journey to where we want to go.
You can want more and still appreciate where you are. Those two things aren’t opposites; they go hand in hand. And for me the mood matters.
When everything gets drowned in negativity, when the default is to pick holes before you’ve even taken a breath, it seeps into everything. It becomes the atmosphere, it becomes the lens through which every single thing is judged, it doesn’t have to be like that and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t help either.
There will be a time for judgement. If we fall short, people will for sure have plenty to say about the squad, the performances, Mikel Arteta, the lot.
That conversation isn’t going anywhere, but it doesn’t need to start now.
Right now, we’re in a Champions League semi-final. Right now, we’re three games away from winning the biggest trophy in our club’s history.
So enjoy it, not as an end point, but as a step towards the thing we actually want.
Because you don’t win trophies by being on the outside looking in, by standing on the outside picking faults.
You win them by being in the mix, which we are. COYG!
