For 20 long years, Arsenal football club has dreamed of a return to the biggest stage in European club football. On Tuesday night, that dream became reality, as a 1-0 second-leg semi-final victory over Atletico Madrid at the Emirates Stadium sealed the Gunners’ spot in the 2025 Champions League final — their first appearance in the showpiece match since a heartbreaking defeat to Barcelona back in 2006.
The decisive moment came in the first half, when winger Bukayo Saka tucked home a close-range finish to secure a 2-1 win on aggregate for Mikel Arteta’s side. The full-time whistle triggered wild celebrations: 60,000 cheering fans packed into the north London stadium, while a frenzied Arteta joined his players for an emotional lap of honour, his high-energy celebration matching the momentous occasion.
The win leaves Arsenal on the cusp of something no side in the club’s 140-year history has ever achieved: a domestic and European double. With three remaining Premier League fixtures against West Ham United, Burnley and Crystal Palace, three wins will hand the Gunners their first English top-flight title since Arsène Wenger’s iconic Invincibles side went unbeaten to claim the crown in 2004.
Once the Premier League title race with closest contender Manchester City concludes, Arteta’s squad will travel to Budapest on May 30 to compete for their first ever Champions League trophy. Their opponent will be either defending champions Paris Saint-Germain or Bayern Munich, with PSG holding a 5-4 aggregate lead heading into Wednesday’s second leg in Munich. Ironically, it was PSG who knocked Arsenal out of the Champions League at the semi-final stage last season.
The electric atmosphere began hours before kickoff, when thousands of Arsenal supporters gathered outside the Emirates to greet the team bus, waving red flares, unfurling club flags and roaring defiant words of encouragement for the side. In the aftermath of the win, Arteta said that energy had shifted the entire mood around the club, and he urged his players to channel that momentum across their final four matches of the season.
“Everybody can feel a shift in energy, in belief, in everything,” Arteta told reporters post-match. “Let’s use it in the right way and understand that the margins and the difficulty of what we are trying to achieve are huge, but that we have the ability and the conviction to do it. I’m really going to enjoy it tonight, everybody is enjoying this moment now. But the high is not too high and the low is not too low. My job is to be quite stable. We have an incredible game against West Ham, a really tough one, and we’re going to have four days to do that.”
It has been more than two decades since Wenger’s Invincibles cemented their place in English football history, and in the years following the 2006 Champions League final defeat to Barcelona, the club drifted away from the pinnacle of the sport. But Arteta, who took over as the club’s first team manager in 2019 for his first senior managerial role, has spent six years rebuilding the bond between players, fans and the club’s historic identity — a project that looked uncertain during a four-year trophy drought that followed Arsenal’s 2020 FA Cup win.
This season, the rebuilding work has come to fruition, putting Arsenal on the brink of erasing the pain of three consecutive second-place finishes in the Premier League. Arteta hailed the contribution of the club’s supporters, who he said created an unmatched atmosphere that pushed the team over the line against Atletico.
“It was an incredible night. We made history again together and I cannot be happier and prouder for everybody that’s involved in this football club,” he said. “The supporters were with us for every ball. They made it special and unique, and I have never felt it like that in this stadium. We knew how much it meant to everybody, we put everything on the line, the boys did an incredible job.”
Looking back at his tenure at the club, Arteta admitted he never could have imagined getting this close to such historic glory when he first took the job. The side didn’t even qualify for European competition when he first arrived, making their run to the Champions League final even more remarkable.
“They are the ones that have to make these kind of performances. I didn’t really imagine it because we weren’t in Europe at the beginning. This is a big achievement,” he said. “We have been building little by little. We believed in what we wanted to do. Now we have to maintain it.”