About 10.50pm on Wednesday evening, half the televisions in north London snapped off simultaneously. A collective sigh, then a good stare into the abyss. You can always rely on the abyss.
An evening of brinkmanship had gone as far as it could – the risk of being force-fed lilywhite euphoria was simply too great. Manchester United clearly were not going to score, although that had been evident for 96 minutes. The first sobbing Tottenham fan panned into view 30 seconds before full-time. By the time triumphant hordes gathered in the cerveza-sodden streets of Bilbao screaming “Are you watching, Arsenal?”, no-one was left to reply.
And so, like a dog returns to its vomit, the inevitable debates began. Who really had a better season? Do trophies really matter? Who won El Crapico this year?
There are a few immutable truths to consider before we get into this. Tottenham remain incapable of achieving success without viewing it through the prism of Arsenal’s performance, while Arsenal are far too insecure and insular a club not to use a Tottenham trophy as a springboard for existential crises. You cannot assess one’s season without the background of the other.
With that ouroboros of fear and loathing in mind, here are the numbers. Trophies: Tottenham 1-0 Arsenal. Wins: Arsenal 31 – 26 Tottenham. Losses: Tottenham 25 (a club record) – 10 Arsenal. Fan meltdowns on radio shows and podcasts: infinite. Europa League final vs Champions League final. Both Carabao Cup semi-finalists. Second in the top flight vs 17th.
The dullest way of adjudicating would be on prize money alone – we won’t do that – but it is at least a useful indicator. By Uefa’s own guidelines, a Champions League semi-final (£12.9m) is worth more than a Europa League win (£10.96m). Carabao Cup winnings are negligible and neither side made it past the FA Cup fourth round. So it comes down to their drastically different league fortunes – Tottenham earned £22.4m this year, Arsenal £66.45m. A clear winner there.
But much of this comes down to what a trophy is worth, the value of the memories and madness. It is a pretty dramatic U-turn for Spurs fans to argue success is measured solely in silverware after building an identity on the exact opposite, but stranger things have happened. They actually won a trophy, for one.
Does that night in Bilbao make up for the 2-0 loss to Crystal Palace when most players couldn’t even be bothered to break out of a jog? What about the 2-1 home loss to Ipswich? 6-3, 5-1 or 4-0 to Liverpool? 4-3 against Chelsea from 2-0 up? 3-2 to Brighton, also from 2-0 up? That gritty, grating 2-0 to Fulham?
Does the good of lifting silverware outweigh all that bad? And equally, does not winning anything negate the highs of Arsenal’s season? Declan Rice’s first free-kick against Real Madrid. His second, for that matter. A 5-1 win over Manchester City, although Tottenham also beat them twice. Taking points off Liverpool twice. Beating Paris Saint-Germain in October, finishing second in the Champions League league phase to drub PSV 7-1 in the last 16. Beating Spurs home and away.
Through the power of hindsight and nostalgia, through rewriting and rewiring reality, history flattens memory into extremes. This is the great argument in Tottenham’s favour: what will we remember in a decade? Which moments will persist? Does the Europa League consume all around it? Only time will tell. It’s hard to imagine Arsenal fans not talking about Rice’s magnum opus in 2035.
Then there is the context of expectation. Last August, Arsenal were aiming for the Premier League title. At best, they have matched pessimistic expectations for this season, at worst they have slightly underperformed. The highs were undercelebrated in the hope of further highs which never came. It’s been a long and winding road to nowhere.
But then the vast majority of football, of competitive sport, is. However much the trophy goggles might currently have taken over, Tottenham reaching the 2019 Champions League final and managing 86 points in 2016-17 were more difficult and remarkable.
There is less than £85m in annual revenue between Arsenal and Tottenham, but 15 league positions and access to entirely different European competitions. Spurs were favourites to win the Europa League when the draw was made (9-2, ahead of United at 11-2 and Roma at 9-1). Everything in between sold this victory as an underdog story it never was. Ange Postecoglou, King of Spin, strikes again.
Of course there’s ending the trophy drought, the ceremonial stripping of monkeys from backs, but this changes very little. The odds of this being a springboard rather than a trapdoor seem somewhere between remote and fantastical.
Being the second-best team in the most competitive and highest-quality league in the world is a significantly greater achievement than winning the Europa League, especially in the post-Champions League relegation era. Reaching a first Champions League semi-final since 2009 having beaten Real Madrid, and only losing to the world’s best team, is hugely impressive.
Spurs will always have Bilbao, but they’ll also have the baggage of everything else. Postecoglou successfully navigated a kind route to the final and an even kinder final, one you suspect most Spurs managers of the modern era could also have survived.
That it came at the cost of any semblance of domestic form was not some grand masterplan, it was a desirable outcome stumbled upon after a dreary series of undesirable ones. A trophy is just fabulous make-up on their battered corpse of a season. Arsenal’s biggest failing was their own overambition, rather than anything real.
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