Arsenal are the most successful team in the history of English women’s football. No one has won more top-flight, FA Cup or League Cup titles than the Gunners, who are also the only English side ever to be crowned champions of Europe. The standards are high and, this season, they’re falling some way short of them.
Knocked out of the Champions League in the first round of qualifying, Arsenal were eliminated from another competition last weekend when Manchester City defeated them in the fifth round of the FA Cup. It leaves the Continental Cup and the Women’s Super League as their only two chances of silverware, and they are six points off the pace in the latter.
Such disappointment is not new for the Gunners, who were enduring a four-year trophy drought until they beat Chelsea in the Conti Cup final last March. But after working hard to close the gap on the top teams and successfully compete for silverware again, it’d be a blow to suffer a fourth trophy-less campaign in five years.
Arsenal have shown that they can beat this best this year, getting the better of both Chelsea and Man City, the two front-runners for the WSL title, in the league already. So why are they staring down the barrel of yet another underwhelming season?