The final day of 2025 has been an extremely tedious one on the internet. With Aston Villa and Arsenal playing one another on December 30th, it was always going to be that way.
Villa were beaten 4-1 at the Emirates Stadium, ending their run of eight consecutive Premier League victories. They close the year in third place in the table, their Champions League hopes intact with half of the season played.
There were mitigating factors on Tuesday night, refereeing decisions and suspensions and Amadou Onana going off, but the bottom line is Villa were second best on the night and Arsenal ran with it after taking the lead. Fair enough, I say.
I’ve no complaints about the result. Emiliano Martínez gave Arsenal a free goal and they were energised by it. They’re not top of the table by accident; when they turned it on, freed by the opener, they had too much for Villa.
I don’t care about the guff that’s followed. I don’t care about Unai Emery not shaking hands with Mikel Arteta, Martínez bickering with Arsenal fans, Gabriel Magalhães thinking a celebration Onana’s done for 11 matches in a row was somehow about him, and I don’t care about the reaction to any of it.
But it won’t take much of a scroll on social media today to find a Villa fan reposting some abominable garbage from a Gunners fanatic who’s totally lost the run of themselves, and one point I’ve seen hundreds of times does need slapping down. Apparently Villa “needed humbling” and that, folks, is football social media.
Let’s be clear: proper Arsenal supporters are no different than the rest of us. I know lots of them and they’re legit – switched-on, thoughtful, football nuts. It’s unfortunate that they seem to have attracted a very particular flavour of plastic.
Just imagine it for a second. Imagine having the brass balls to say that a football club “needed humbling” for having the temerity to go on a winning run. Imagine believing that’s your right in any circumstance, never mind as a gloryhunting internet poseur.
Consider the implications – that Villa have no right to compete because of an imagined established pecking order – and the nature of the fanatical, self-appointed protectors of it, overcompensating for the physical distance from a club they chose to root for on their favourite television drama.
That’s not the Arsenal supporters I know.
Defeat at Arsenal was always likely to be framed as Villa being put back in their place but this is sport. Their place is their place. It’s an imperfect system, flawed beyond repair, but broadly speaking English football is a meritocracy.
If Villa are third, they’re third. If they’re in a title race, they’re in a title race. If they’re in the fourth division, well, you get the picture. That’s how sport works.
Regardless of the awful crap bouncing around the internet today, perspective is required for Villa supporters as 2025 becomes 2026.
The same is true of Emery and his team and I’m sure it will be discussed this week. Losing to Arsenal was likely, maybe even expected, because losing away at the league leaders is not unusual for teams below them without genuine title plans.
Villa are on a fantastic run. With the right reaction this can be a blip. It can be a pause, not a stop. There might be no more difficult fixture left on the schedule and Villa, with a good platform in the Champions League chase and the right attitude in response to defeat, are good enough to get back on track.
They’ll have learned as much from this one defeat as the eight wins that came before it. They need to take those lessons into the next matches and retain the confidence, the aura, that saw them through December’s big wins.
What matters now is what happens against Nottingham Forest, against Crystal Palace, against Tottenham Hotspur and Everton and Fenerbahçe.
Defeat at the Emirates was a sore one, no doubt. It was a tough watch. It doesn’t have to be a defining one.
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