Arsenal are no plucky underdog and no Champions League final is ever a ‘free hit’

There is a curious vibe now around Arsenal’s presence and chances in the Champions League final.

We’ve seen it described by senior journalists as ‘like a free hit now’ for a team with ‘a puncher’s chance of causing an upset’ against PSG.

We kind of understand, but also are simply very much not having it. Winning the Champions League would not be just a lovely little bonus cherry on top of the title-winning cake; it would elevate this Arsenal team to the top of the pile, above The Invincibles and into legendary status.

Sure, losing the final will be less painful in the here and now than it would have been without the cathartic release of finally ending a 22-year wait for a fourth Premier League title. Indeed, had they somehow messed up domestically it would be almost impossible to imagine them recovering the run of themselves in time to lay a glove on PSG.

But this is so much bigger, so much more important than the current narrative suggests. It’s the Champions League final. It’s not a nice little bonus if they win it.

None of this is groundbreaking stuff, but it does feel like we’ve somehow reached a point where it’s become worth saying.

Our conversations with Arsenal fans over recent months have very clearly revealed that the Premier League was the one they wanted most, and that’s fine. That makes sense. It had been too long for a club of Arsenal’s standing, and those second-place finishes were enough to make anyone’s eye twitch. Winning the Premier League was how Arsenal silenced the voices inside and outside.

But all season this has felt like a remarkable opportunity for Arsenal to do more than just scratch that particular itch, and now that opportunity’s here there’s a curious lack of external focus on it.

Take emotion out of it, and this is if anything the chance that most requires taking. A quick glance around Arsenal’s potential title challengers at home next season leaves you quickly wondering where, precisely, Arsenal’s potential title challengers at home next season even are.

They will be as compelling a favourite to win next season’s Premier League as any Pep team of the last decade. At the very least it is almost impossible to picture a Premier League title race next season that doesn’t contain Arsenal front and centre. If they are not precisely There, you can be certain they will at the very, very least be Thereabouts.

The Champions League is a less predictable beast. One bad night or even one slice of misfortune with the draw in a stupid, unfair and capricious format can wreck the whole caper.

So flawed is the Champions League format now that while the way the draw has opened up for Arsenal is entirely apt for a team that strode so flawlessly through the League Phase, it still required basically dumb luck to achieve it. They could still just as easily have ended up on the conspicuously tougher side of the draw.

In essence, Arsenal are now able to take for granted their place in Premier League title races in a way nobody can in the modern Champions League, a tournament that has cheerfully turned everyone’s first eight games into something of an irrelevance before becoming a straight knockout for the best 24 teams in the spring.

There are no guarantees this chance comes round again for Mikel Arteta and his side. It never did for Arsene Wenger after his 10 men suffered that galling 2-1 defeat to Barcelona in Paris in 2006.

And let’s not accept this puncher’s chance, plucky underdog narrative. It undersells and underplays Arsenal’s quality by a vast amount. They are unbeaten in Europe this season and however much PSG continue to highlight the essential irrelevance of the League Phase, winning all eight games is still quite something. Especially when you’re casually swatting aside such Gazprom-hardened teams as Atletico Madrid, Bayern Munich and Inter.

Arsenal have been slightly less convincing in the knockout stages, but only slightly. They have managed their way through a kind draw while trying to conserve as much energy as possible for the domestic front and have at no stage against Leverkusen, Sporting or Atleti actually looked like they might get knocked out.

And the relative ease with which they were eventually able to get over the line in the Premier League even takes away some of PSG’s undoubted advantage of being able to focus all their meaningful effort and attention on this game for the best part of a month.

PSG, having ended their own long wait for this particular prize, remain worthy favourites. But the best team from the continent’s strongest league have far more than an underdog’s chance of stunning the favourite to make their own slice of history.

And it would be historic. Saturday represents a glorious chance for Arsenal to start setting about putting right a conspicuous black hole in their history. The 22-year wait for a Premier League title was bad for a club like Arsenal; the possession of one single, solitary major European trophy on their honours list utterly mortifying.

It’s hard to think of another club anywhere close to Arsenal’s place in the game with so barren a record. Worse still, far sillier English clubs than Arsenal have started gleefully hoovering up European trophies, some of them without even bothering to stop being silly for a single bloody second while doing it.

That fact leaves us also wondering just what UEFA might want to happen here. They surely don’t want an English clean sweep of the three trophies, a result that would also mean five different English clubs had won five of the last six continental pots. That’s a terrible look for everyone else.

But another PSG win on the back of another half-arsed League Phase effort in which they cheerfully throw themselves into the punishment round because that’s actually less stressful than trying properly for eight whole games in the autumn and winter raises serious questions about the format, leaving the vast number of games in that 36-team league looking even less justifiable if they’re not even going to really matter.

Arsenal need not think on these things, though. They just need to grasp this chance. It may not come again. While it might not sting quite so hard in the warm immediate afterglow of their Premier League triumph, in the years to come it really could with no guarantees at all that Arteta or Arsenal are ever this close again.