{"id":697779,"date":"2026-05-27T19:48:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T19:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/697779\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T19:48:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T19:48:07","slug":"arteta-ready-to-take-final-step-on-arsenals-20-year-journey-to-redemption-arsenal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/697779\/","title":{"rendered":"Arteta ready to take final step on Arsenal\u2019s 20-year journey to redemption | Arsenal"},"content":{"rendered":"

They left London in their thousands, full of hope and devotion, heading for Paris in the springtime, yet romantic anticipation lasted all of 18 minutes, which was when Arsenal\u2019s goalkeeper, Jens Lehmann, was sent off in the 2006 Champions League final<\/a> against Barcelona at the Stade de France.<\/p>\n

Twenty years on, as Arsenal fans again travel in anticipation, this time to Budapest, for the club\u2019s second Champions League<\/a> final, you could argue that Arsenal hearts have been a little broken ever since.<\/p>\n

On the surface, all looked promising in May 2006. Two years previously, the Invincibles of Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and Robert Pires had made English football history, now Ashley Cole and Cesc F\u00e0bregas were establishing themselves and Ars\u00e8ne Wenger\u2019s knack of signing obscure talent continued with Kolo Tour\u00e9, Robin van Persie and Ga\u00ebl Clichy.<\/p>\n

That August the club would move into the Emirates Stadium, a seismic upheaval from playing at Highbury, but one that theoretically allowed them to challenge Manchester United for the next 20 years. Now the club just had to take the final step and win the Champions League to consolidate their reputation as a global force.<\/p>\n

The overwhelming memory of that day for those at the club at the time is profound frustration. \u201cWe were robbed,\u201d says Keith Edelman, then managing director. \u201cThe ref shouldn\u2019t have given him a red card.\u201d<\/p>\n

The referee, Terje Hauge, is said to have apologised to the Arsenal<\/a> delegation, for he could easily have played an advantage as Ludovic Giuly scored from the loose ball from Lehmann\u2019s collision with Samuel Eto\u2019o. Arsenal would have been 1-0 down, but at least with 11 men.<\/p>\n

Arsenal fans arrive at the Gare du Nord in Paris ahead of the 2006 Champions League Final. Photograph: Laurence Griffiths\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

That said, they were formidable thereafter, taking the lead through Sol Campbell and hanging on until 76 minutes when Eto\u2019o scored, with Juliano Belletti getting the winner four minutes later.<\/p>\n

Prescient fans might have had a sense of foreboding, that the Wenger era had peaked and was coming down the other side. Vieira had departed for Juventus the year before, leaving a huge void; Pires was playing his last match, a sad finale as he would be the sacrificial lamb, subbed when Manuel Almunia came on for Lehmann; Bergkamp was on the bench, also his last match. Henry would leave for Barcelona a year later.<\/p>\n

The vice-chair, David Dein, had defined the coming decade and the forces that would blow Arsenal off course when he had said: \u201cRoman Abramovich has parked his tanks on our lawn and is firing \u00a350 notes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new stadium was meant to consolidate the future, but it came just as the game\u2019s finances became turbo-charged by the Russian oligarch\u2019s arrival at Chelsea in 2003 and Sheikh Mansour\u2019s at Manchester City in 2008. Even though a bond issue in 2006 had reduced interest payments on the stadium, the new ground initially made Arsenal uncompetitive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t have the luxury of funding; we were begging and borrowing to tread water,\u201d says one Arsenal director of that time. \u201cWe had the albatross of the stadium around our neck, \u00a3400m of debt. We were strapped for cash and had to sell before we could buy and we were going through a transition with the Invincibles breaking up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I came in, the board said they wanted to build a stadium,\u201d says Edelman, who joined in 2000. \u201cSo I said: \u2018How much are you going to put in?\u2019 And everyone looked at me blankly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ashley Cole consoles Jens Lehmann. Photograph: Tom Jenkins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

The start-up cash was eventually raised in a \u00a347m deal with the erstwhile media giant Granada for 10% of the club and 50% of the \u201cinternet rights\u201d, a peak dotcom bubble deal. Granada had bought 50% of nothing. \u201cIt was an amazing deal,\u201d Edelman says.<\/p>\n

But their financial worries were not over. Banks were not keen on lending to football clubs in that era. \u201cWe had 10 banks [we pitched to] and all the credit committees said: \u2018No,\u2019\u201d Edelman says. \u201cThat was an amazing moment. We couldn\u2019t build the stadium.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, the club persuaded Nike to pay \u00a3140m for a 10-year shirt deal and Emirates to pay \u00a3100m for a 10-year naming rights and shirt sponsorship deal, but the club were mortgaging future revenues to pay for now. Barclays also loaned \u00a3120m. \u201cIt was a white knuckle ride,\u201d Edelman says.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Arsenal could not keep up and when the club quibbled over a \u00a35,000-a-week difference over Cole\u2019s contract he left for Chelsea that summer. City would take Tour\u00e9 and Clichy and later Samir Nasri and Emmanuel Adebayor. It was impossible to stem the bleeding and Wenger, who failed to win a trophy between 2005 and 2014, lost Van Persie to Manchester United and F\u00e0bregas to Barcelona, the team who would dominate the era.<\/p>\n

The roots of the Bar\u00e7a revival were evident in Paris, with Xavi Hern\u00e1ndez and Andr\u00e9s Iniesta on the bench, though another 18-year-old was sulkily refusing to join in celebrations because he did not make the squad. Just who did this precocious teen, Lionel Messi, think he was?<\/p>\n

Dejected Arsenal fans in the rain after losing 2-1. Photograph: Matthew Ashton\/AMA\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, football was moving on to an era of sporting directors and analytics. \u201cArs\u00e8ne couldn\u2019t do all the transfers on his own without David,\u201d says Edelman, who was often cast as Dein\u2019s arch enemy at the time, but is clear it was the vice-chair\u2019s acrimonious departure in 2007 that precipitated the stagnant years. That said, Edelman, who left in 2008, feels Arsenal could have recovered more quickly from the shock of the Abramovich era and never imagined there would be seven more trophyless years after Paris. \u201cI felt the heavy lifting had been done on the stadium,\u201d he says. \u201cThe fact that the board was at daggers drawn didn\u2019t help matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The desperation to bridge the funding gap created by Chelsea and City led to the fracture of the Arsenal board and it is forgotten by most that Dein, the less exalted straight man in a double act with Wenger that created the Invincibles, was fired for attempting to bring US money to the table, specifically Stan Kroenke. Once Dein was gone, the board magically saw the wisdom of his thinking and the path was paved for today\u2019s Arsenal with Stan and his son Josh in charge.<\/p>\n

Even so, the route back to the summit would proved long and arduous. Fittingly, Mikel Arteta provided a significant staging post by lifting the FA Cup in 2014<\/a> as captain. Yet the pain of 2006 and the subsequent decline remains raw even 20 years on. Now, finally, Arteta can mend hearts broken in Paris.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They left London in their thousands, full of hope and devotion, heading for Paris in the springtime, yet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-697779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}