Sunday afternoon, the final whistle goes at 2-1 over Chelsea, and the number on the scoreboard says one thing while the last twenty minutes said another. Arsenal spent that stretch defending a lead rather than defending a plan, ceding the ball in patches that would have made Arteta wince on the touchline, and the goal Chelsea got back arrived exactly the way visiting sides had been told all week it wouldn't. Three points. A result any manager takes gladly in September. But watch the game rather than the table and you'll see a team that won ugly and got away with it, which is a different sentence to the one Sky Sports News was running by Monday lunchtime.

By Monday the rolling graphic wasn't asking whether Arsenal could win the league. It was asking whether they could go the whole season without losing at all, which is the sort of question that sounds like flattery and functions like a distraction. Nobody at the club is saying it out loud, not this early, not with Arteta still talking in press conferences about the squad he wishes he'd finished building rather than the one he's got. The ambient noise has already skipped past the actual job — winning enough matches to be champions in May — and landed on a historical footnote that has nothing to do with May and everything to do with how good a story it would make.

Here is the case for taking it seriously, and it isn't nothing. Arsène Wenger stood up in September 2002 and said Arsenal could go the whole season unbeaten, and the press did what the press does to bold men in tracksuits: they mocked him, printed T-shirts about Comical Wenger, and then watched him do it eighteen months later. Twenty-six wins, twelve draws, no defeats, the Invincibles, a dream he later admitted he wanted to have again. That is a genuine strand of Arsenal's identity, not media fantasy — the club that dared to say the unsayable and then delivered it, an act of nerve as much as talent. And this run isn't manufactured out of nothing: fifteen unbeaten in the league is Arsenal's best stretch since April 2011, ten wins and five draws, hard to beat even when they haven't been at their fluent best. If a squad can sustain that through a difficult winter, why wouldn't the players hear the chatter and feel it as fuel rather than pressure.

Because resilience over fifteen games is not the same claim as invincibility over thirty-eight, and mistaking one for the other is exactly how a club starts believing its own headlines before it's earned the right to. Wenger's Invincibles didn't get there by discussing it in September — they got there by winning at Old Trafford in April with the trophy still to be confirmed, by drawing at White Hart Lane in a match where the whole story could have unravelled in ninety minutes. The unbeaten tag was the consequence of a method, never the method itself. What Sky and the wider conversation are doing to this side is inverting that order: naming the outcome before the work that produces it has been finished, and inviting a group still short in specific areas — as their own manager has said plainly about this summer's business — to measure themselves against a ghost from 2004 rather than the actual list of fixtures between now and Christmas.

Arteta's own words on the window are the tell here. He didn't come out after deadline day talking about invincibility. He talked about areas that still need strengthening, about a squad that isn't finished, about the gap between where this group is and where it needs to be.

That is not the language of a manager who wants his players reading Wenger quotes from 2002. It's the language of someone who knows the version of Arsenal capable of going unbeaten doesn't exist yet, and who would rather his dressing room stayed hungry than started rehearsing how to celebrate something that hasn't happened.

The bloke behind me put it better than any pundit did, muttering through the last ten minutes while the away end were still making noise: "we're one bad Tuesday night away from all this chat looking daft." He's right, and he's right in a way that should worry the club more than the fans, because fans forget these headlines by Thursday and clubs sometimes don't. The danger isn't that Arsenal read the graphics and get complacent in some cartoonish way, feet up, minds elsewhere. It's subtler — a squad that starts measuring itself against history instead of against Fulham away in November, and loses half a step it didn't know it had.

Wenger earned the right to say the word unbeaten because he'd already built a team that could survive contact with adversity for six months before he said it. Arteta's group hasn't had that test yet this season, not really, and Chelsea at home with three points and a wobble in it is not the same evidence as Old Trafford away with the title on the line. There will be a night this winter when this Arsenal side needs to be excellent rather than merely hard to beat, and the last thing anyone in that dressing room should be carrying into it is a number they were never trying to protect in the first place.