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By Tony Attwood
Last season, in which Arsenal won the league (as you might recall), Arsenal had, or could have had (had they wished to get involved), two celebrations.
Of course, they celebrated winning the League. You probably remember that. But the other, although it did get a passing mention on the club’s website, was by and large ignored, which is a shame, given that we did win the league. For last season, the club reached 100 consecutive seasons in the top division of English football.
The Arsenal run in the top league started in 1919, and with only the pause for the Second World War as an interruption. They have been in the top league ever since. So 2025/26, the season Arsenal won the League, was also their 100th consecutive season in the top division. Personally, I think it would have been nice to make more of that achievement, but the club disagreed.
Arsenal did ultimately put up a notice about it being 100 seasons in the top league after being reminded of the issue by our sister site “The History of Arsenal,” but didn’t make too much of the topic, which was a bit of a shame since not just winning the league but winning the league in the 100th consecutive season in the top division was quite an achievement. Especially since the nearest team to Arsenal in terms of top division continuity is Everton. And while Arsenal joined the top league in 1913/14 Everton did not start its current run until 1954.
Indeed there seems to be a genearl desire not to notice that Arsenal have just concluded 100 consecutive seasons in the top league, for although Wiki does admit that “only Arsenal have a longer unbroken run [than Everton] at this level” it forgets to point out that while Arsenal reached 100 seasons in the 2025/26 campaign, Everton won’t get there til 2054 – if they are still in the top league at that time.
However, the league’s and Arsenal’s own reluctance to celebrate some of the club’s great achievements has allowed us to get on with our series of “100 years in the top league” articles on the Arsenal History site, which is heading towards a conclusion. You can find the index to the series here. Although I guess I should point out there is quite a lot of it, since there are, well, 100 seasons to cover.
But if you haven’t contemplated it before, Arsenal’s continuing success in the top division is interesting, as in 1925, they did miss relegation by just one place. However, fortunately at that point, the owner of the club, Sir Henry Norris, who was the man who paid for the move of the club from Plustead to Highbury (having paid off most of the debts incurred by the move), decided it was time to bring in a top manager. He appointed Herbert Chapman, who had just won the league with Huddersfield Town, and the big times came rolling along.
Unfortunately, the story of Knighton’s failure as a manager (the club missed relegation by just one place in the season before Chapman arrived) was later written out of history by none other than… the man responsible for the disaster: Leslie Knighton. During the Second World War, being too old to serve in the armed forces, he wrote his autobiography, “Behind the Scenes in Big Football.” It was published in 1948.
It is hardly what one would call a “good read”, but it has proven to be influential, as it places the blame for Arsenal’s failure under Knighton’s management clearly at the door of everyone else other than himself.
Of course, those reading the book in the 1940s would probably not have had access to documentation that showed that Knighton was the one and only manager ever to relegate Arsenal. In 1923/4 Arsenal ended the league in 19th place, and in 1924/5 they were 20th, with the 21st and 22nd placed clubs going down. Finally, Sir Henry Norris, having finished paying for the building of Highbury and the move of the club from Plumstead to north London, had had enough. He sacked Knighton, brought in Chapman and the following season the club came second in the league, rather than just squeaking away from relegation.
Sadly, Sir Henry’s wife was then taken ill, and the remedy for her, as was common 100 years ago, was to move to a warmer climate. The couple moved to France and other directors used that situation to mount a boardroom coup, which removed Sir Henry from power.
Other clubs, however, have not been so successful at seeing their way through the ups and downs of football. Take Blackburn Rovers for example who were founding members of both The Football League in 1888 and the Premier League in 1992, being champions three times ,and cup winners six times.
As recently as 2009/10 Blackburn finished tenth in the Premier League and were semi-finalists in the League Cup. But just a couple of months ago the BBC ran a report on Blackburn which was headlined, “Blackburn Rovers have reported a loss of £10.4m loss during the 2024-25 season – but is it as bad as it seems?”
And the answer is yes, it is as bad as it seems since the club appears to be spending something like 114% of their income on players’ wages while making a loss of over £20m a year. Now they have reached the last resort of clubs in trouble: they are selling players and trying to make a profit that way. Unfortunately, the income from that is still not enough, even to break even, and they are getting deeper and deeper into difficulty.
As Kieran Maguire told BBC Radio Lancashire, “The money coming into the club has gone up by 11%, but the wages bill went up by the same amount, and as a result of that they lost probably about £400,000 a week. If you take a look at the auditors’ report, it has specifically said that if Venky cannot extract money from India, we’ve got a big problem…”
Of course, they are not the only club in the Championship running into financial worries. We know that Portsmouth’s finances have been declared unsustainable, and others are in a similar position. Clubs desperately want to make it into the Premier League even if it is for just one season’s worth of the money that brings in, but in order to make it up to the top league, they run up more and more debts. Then they might start not recording everything correctly in the accounts, and the League pops up and docks some points. It is neither a healthy nor a sustainable situation.
Something at some stage is going to have to change.
