By Obinna Iwuno
A reflection on loyalty, resilience, and what winning actually costs from a Gunner and a founder
On 20 May 2026, Arsenal Football Club was crowned Premier League Champions for the first time since 2003/04 – the season of the Invincibles. That was 22 years ago. I was a teenager then, drawn into this club by two names: Kanu Nwankwo and Thierry Henry. I never left.
Twenty-two years. Let that breathe.
No Premier League title. Multiple near-misses. Seasons where we sat at the top of the table, raised every fan’s hope like a flag, and then watched the gap close slowly, painfully, until another team lifted the trophy while we finished second – three consecutive seasons in a row. Again. The trolling from fans in Nigeria and England never helped. But we stayed. That is what Gunners do.
But this season tested something deeper in me.
There was a stretch this season; Arsenal was at the top of the table, and then the draws started. Then the losses. The gap between our closest competitor and us began closing like a vice, and I felt a frustration I had never quite felt before. Not anger. Something worse: the creeping dread that it was happening again. That this would be another season of promise without fulfilment.
I sat with that feeling. And I recognised it immediately—not just as a football fan, but as someone who builds things for a living.
The business parallel nobody talks about honestly
Building a business or scaling one is not a straight line. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you the highlight reel, not the journey. There are seasons where you are at the top of your category, your metrics look clean, your pipeline is healthy, the market is turning in your direction, and then something shifts. A deal falls through. A partner pulls out. A competitor closes the gap. Internal cracks appear. Momentum stalls.
And the most dangerous thing that can happen in that moment is not failure itself. It is the story you start telling yourself about failure: that it is permanent, that it is a pattern, that this time is different from all the other times you got back up.
Arsenal this season did not win by avoiding those hard stretches. They won by surviving them and then executing when it counted.
What this means for leaders and teams
Mikel Arteta did not rebuild Arsenal overnight. He came in with a vision, absorbed the criticism, held the culture under pressure, and built something sustainable season by season. There were moments where the outside world called for his head. He stayed the course.
Leadership is not most tested when things are going well. It is tested in the silent, grinding middle; when the team is questioning the process, when results are not matching effort, when stakeholders are losing patience. That is when culture either holds or breaks.
What Arsenal showed their team, and what every leader must show their team, is that the vision does not move because the results temporarily did. Clarity of direction in a season of doubt is the most powerful thing a leader can offer.
Teams also need to see that their contributions are not invisible. Every training session that never made the headline, every tactical adjustment, every player who stayed professional through a tough run of form—it all compounds. Winning cultures are built in the moments nobody is watching.
What it means for relationships
Loyalty under pressure is rare. And this applies just as much to the relationships we build in life and in business with partners, clients, collaborators, and even within our teams as it does on the terraces.
People leave when things get hard. They pivot, they hedge, they quietly stop investing. And sometimes that is necessary; not every relationship deserves your loyalty indefinitely. But there is a category of relationship – a partnership, a vision, a team, a cause where staying through the hard seasons is actually what defines the relationship’s worth.
I think about the fans who may have walked away from Arsenal over these 22 years (Arsenal fans rarely do). They will celebrate today, as they should – football is for everyone. But the ones who stayed, who argued the case in rooms where nobody believed them, who never unfollowed the club on a bad day; they are experiencing something categorically different right now. There is a joy that is only available to those who have endured. Business partnerships and personal relationships operate similarly.
The new normal of winning and how to sustain it
Here is something we do not talk about enough: winning changes you. And not always in the ways you expect.
After a long-awaited breakthrough – in business, in sport, in any arena, there is a surge of pride, confidence, ambition. You suddenly believe in the next level, and you should. But sustained winning requires something that raw celebration cannot give you: the discipline to not become a different team just because the results look different.
The habits that built the win must survive the win. The hunger, the attention to detail, the culture of accountability – these cannot become casualties of comfort. Champions who forget how they got there rarely defend their titles. The same is true of businesses that close a major deal, hit a revenue milestone, or land a headline partnership and then coast.
Sustaining winning is actually harder than achieving it. Because now you carry a target. And because now the margin for error shrinks, the standard has been set, and everything is measured against it.
To Arsenal. To builders. To everyone still in the hard stretch
Arsenal are Premier League Champions. And now with the UEFA Champions League Final on the horizon, we dare to dream of a historic double.
But beyond the football, this moment means something to me as a person. It is proof that 22 years of showing up; even when it hurt, even when it made no sense from the outside, was not wasted. The investment counted. The loyalty held. The wait had a point.
If you are a founder in a hard stretch right now, if your pipeline has slowed, if your team is strained, if the gap between you and the next milestone feels wider than it should, I want you to hear this: the effort is not wasted because the result has not arrived yet. Stay the course. Refine the strategy. Hold the culture.
And when it comes, because it will come, you will know exactly what it cost. And it will feel like nothing else.
We are Arsenal. We never stop. And we are just getting started.
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