by STAFF WRITER
FOR 22 YEARS, a particular kind of anguish was passed down like a family heirloom among Arsenal supporters.
Fathers who had celebrated the “Invincibles” of 2004, watched their children grow into adults who knew only near-misses and annoying collapses.
On Tuesday night in Zimbabwe, as the final whistle blew 8,000 kilometres away on Bournemouth’s south coast, Fortune Daniel Molokele a top lawyer and opposition parliamentarian from Hwange finally had a different message to send.
The interim national chairperson of the Arsenal FC Zimbabwe Supporters Association issued a statement that was equal parts joy and relief: the “mighty Arsenal” were champions of England again.
The arithmetic was settled without Arsenal kicking a ball.
Manchester City’s 1-1 draw at Bournemouth—Eli Junior Kroupi scoring for the hosts in the 39th minute, Erling Haaland equalising deep in stoppage time but too late to matter—meant Mikel Arteta’s side held an unassailable four-point lead with one game remaining.
Pep Guardiola, widely expected to end his decade-long tenure at City this summer, could not muster one last twist in a title race that had repeatedly threatened to follow a familiar, cruel script.
Instead, confirmation arrived at Arsenal’s training ground, where players huddled around screens erupted when the news came through.
Declan Rice, the £105m midfielder who embodied the steel this side had so often lacked, posted a photograph of the celebration with two words: “It’s done”.
What made this triumph different from the three consecutive second-place finishes that preceded it was not attacking flair—though Bukayo Saka, Kai Havertz, and Gabriel Martinelli provided plenty—but a defence that conceded just 26 goals in 37 matches, the stingiest in the division.
David Raya claimed his third straight Golden Glove with 18 clean sheets.
William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhães formed a central partnership that opponents found almost impossible to breach, while Rice shielded them with the quiet efficiency of a man who considered chaos a personal insult.
Arteta’s Arsenal scored 18 goals from corners alone, a Premier League record, and won four consecutive matches after a bruising 2-1 defeat at the Etihad in April—three of them by the nerve-shredding scoreline of 1-0.
“It was a reset moment,” Arteta said of that loss to City, a phrase that might have sounded hollow at the time but proved prophetic.
The celebrations that spilled across north London—thousands massing outside the Emirates Stadium, flares turning the night sky red, Ian Wright mobbed by strangers who wept on his shoulder—were mirrored in miniature across Zimbabwe.
In Harare, Bulawayo, and smaller towns where Premier League football is followed with an intensity that sometimes surpasses local affairs. Supporters are organizing themselves into official branches.
The association Molokele leads had been preparing for this moment. In March 2025, it launched a Chinhoyi town branch, and earlier this year members travelled to Zambia for the seventh edition of the Arsenal Africa Fans Easter convention, a gathering of officially recognised supporters’ organisations from across the continent.
These are not casual admirers; they are, in the truest sense, a constituency.
“From the start till the end,” Molokele’s statement read, “the Gunners are no doubt the only deserving team to be crowned EPL Champions.” He urged Gooners across the country to organise public celebrations, and they needed little encouragement.
The relationship between Zimbabwean football fans and the English game runs deep—sometimes in unexpected directions.
In 2017, during the protests that helped end Robert Mugabe’s presidency, marchers in Harare brandished placards that read “Wenger Out,” collapsing the distance between the frustrations of north London and the grievances of a nation.
That the same passion could now be channelled into uncomplicated jubilation was its own kind of progress.
Arsenal’s triumph does not close the book on the season.
A Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest awaits on May 30, offering the possibility of a double that would elevate this side beyond anything achieved even during Arsène Wenger’s pomp.
But that is for another day. For now, a club that had become a byword for aesthetic fragility has shown it can win ugly, win narrow, and win when the old doubts whispered loudest. Across Zimbabwe, as across the world, the long wait is over.
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