Winning Justifies Itself

All season, you could hear the complaints. Arsenal is boring. Arsenal's exclusive source of goals is the corner kick, which they treat as something between an offensive-rebounding exercise and a defensive line trying to get the quarterback. Arsenal is lucky, living free and easy thanks to down years from the other big clubs, who otherwise would have mounted stiffer challenges. Arsenal plays ugly, cynical anti-soccer, an aesthetic betrayal of the man who made the modern Arsenal. Arsenal is unworthy, barely scraping past the worst teams in the league instead of blasting them to hell. Arsenal is the apotheosis of all the worst trends in the game, a club by center backs, for center backs, dedicated to squeezing the very heart out of the game as part of a cold, rationalist approach. There's no match Arsenal won't try to win 1-0, no attacker Mikel Arteta won't try to coach the joy and creativity out of, no spontaneity the club won't kill. I found some of these points reasonably valid and some of the defenses offered by Arsenal supporters thin. But more than anything, I found the whole exercise pointless. Both complaints about the supposedly ugly soccer played by the Premier League champions and attempts to defend it on the merits assume that the title carries with it some sort of moral weight, as if a champion has to justify themselves on something other than competitive grounds. The point is not to play beautiful soccer, to win hearts and minds, or to prove the doubters wrong. The point is to win. A title justifies itself. After 22 years, a botched transition out of the Arsène Wenger era, several full cycles of promising young players' ultimately title-free careers, and three consecutive, variously agonizing second-place finishes, the Gunners are now champions of the Premier League. That's all that matters.