The penalty was never really in doubt, not for the eighty-nine minutes before it. Ruud van Nistelrooy placed the ball on the spot at Old Trafford in the closing minutes of a goalless afternoon in September 2003, six matches into Arsenal's title defence, with Jens Lehmann rocking on his line in only his fifth league start for the club. Van Nistelrooy struck it low. Lehmann never moved. The ball came back off the crossbar and out, the game finished 0-0, and had it gone in — and by every law of probability it should have gone in — there would be no column to write today, because there would be no Invincibles to argue about. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the arithmetic of the thing.

What followed is remembered now as a procession, and the record does not support that memory as cleanly as the highlights reel suggests. Arsenal finished the 2003-04 season with 26 wins and 12 draws from 38 matches, 90 points, an 11-point margin over Claudio Ranieri's Chelsea, unbeaten across the entire campaign, the first team to manage it in a 38-game top-flight season. Thierry Henry scored 30 of them. Patrick Vieira captained the side in 29 of the 38 games and scored three goals all year, each one arriving at a moment that mattered: against Chelsea at the top of the table in February, at White Hart Lane where the title was actually confirmed, and on the final day against Leicester when the whole thing was sealed with a win rather than the safer draw the record would have allowed. Arsenal.com's own retrospective, published years after the fact, has the win tally as 28. It was 26. Even the club's institutional memory drifts, which is the sort of detail I keep a folder for.

Wenger had said the unbeaten season was possible before it was fashionable to say so, comparing it to Milan and pointing out that United, Liverpool and Chelsea all harboured the same fantasy and simply lacked the nerve to voice it. He was mocked for it at the time. Somebody, after the trophy was lifted, handed him a T-shirt reading "Comical Wenger says we can go the whole season unbeaten." His own line on the joke, delivered afterward, was that he'd been a season too early. He hadn't been wrong. He'd been early, which in football is usually treated as the same crime.

None of this, it is worth saying plainly, extended to the cups. Arsenal went out of the League Cup semi-final to Middlesbrough and the FA Cup semi-final to Manchester United, and were beaten by Chelsea in the Champions League quarter-final. The Invincibles were invincible in one competition, for one set of 38 fixtures, and the myth has absorbed the rest of the season into its glow without troubling to check. That is not a criticism of the achievement. It is a correction of the legend, which is a different thing, and the legend survives the correction perfectly well. It usually does.

The case for this current Arsenal side being capable of something similar is not a foolish one, and it deserves to be made properly rather than waved away. There is genuine squad depth now, built over successive windows rather than assembled in the frantic manner of twenty years ago. There is a settled system and a manager who, like Wenger before him, appears to believe privately in more than he says publicly. Sports science has advanced to the point where a squad's ability to sustain fitness across 38 matches is no longer left to guesswork and cod liver oil, and the rotation options available to Mikel Arteta would have been unthinkable to Wenger, who at times had barely enough fit bodies to name a bench. If analytics and recovery science can buy anything, it is consistency, and consistency is the entire currency of an unbeaten season.

But the competition it must be consistent against has changed shape entirely, and this is where the comparison thins. In 2003-04 there was a gap of quality between the top three or four clubs and the rest of the division that simply does not exist now, not with the financial floor raised across the entire Premier League by broadcast money and ownership investment that touches clubs who would once have been comfortably beaten twice a season without argument. Twenty-one years have passed since Arsenal's run, more than two decades of every ambitious club in England trying to spend its way to the same feat, and not one of them has managed it, not City at their most ruthless, not Liverpool at their most relentless. That absence of imitators, across a period of unprecedented investment in the English game, is itself a piece of evidence, and it argues against rather than for.

What is happening, I think, when the comparison gets made now — and it gets made most seasons Arsenal start well, this is not new to 2026 — is less a genuine forecast than a want. A club goes looking for its own best self in the archive when the present has not yet handed it anything to be certain about. The Invincibles get invoked not because the current run resembles that one in shape, but because Arsenal supporters would like to be told they are back in the company they were once in, and September form is the flimsiest possible evidence for that, dressed up as the strongest.

Van Nistelrooy's penalty missed the target by perhaps a foot. Nobody remembers the foot. They remember the outcome, which is what memory always keeps and record always corrects: the margin was thin, the run was long, and nothing about either fact has got any easier to repeat with time.