The accusation gets thrown around like a bad tackle every single season. Arsenal are the Premier League’s dirty men. The dark arts merchants. The card happy cheats who only win because they know how to bend the rules.
It makes for a cracking headline. Shame about the small matter of the actual evidence.
Because when you actually bother to look at the numbers and let’s be honest, most journalists don’t, a rather inconvenient truth emerges. The Gunners aren’t the dirtiest team in the league. They’re not even close. In fact, they’re the complete opposite.
Let’s rewind to May 2023. The Daily Mirror ran a piece confidently declaring they’d “looked at who has been the cleanest in the league and who has been the dirtiest.” Arsenal, predictably, did not come out smelling of roses. What the article didn’t do was publish the full figures. Funny that.
So here are the full figures. All of them.
Over the past four seasons, Arsenal have ranked 15th, 17th, 16th and 16th for fouls committed per game. That’s bottom half. Consistently. For yellow cards, it’s even more stark. 18th, 19th, 18th and in the current campaign 20th.
Let that sink in. The team everyone accuses of being rugby players in disguise has been collecting fewer yellow cards than almost everyone else for years.
Season by season: the numbers that don’t lie
2022/23 9.8 fouls per game (15th in the league), 52 yellow cards (18th)
2023/24 10.3 fouls per game (17th), 62 yellows (19th)
2024/25 10.6 fouls per game (16th), 64 yellows (18th)
2025/26 10.2 fouls per game (16th), 40 yellows (20th) *
*current season, unfinished, but you get the picture
Red cards? They had that bizarre spell a couple of years back where the refs seemed to be reaching for their back pockets every time an Arsenal player breathed on someone. But reds are a notoriously unreliable metric, they fluctuate wildly year to year, and lumping together straight reds with two yellow dismissals just muddies the water.
What matters is the consistent picture painted by fouls and yellows. And it’s not just that Arsenal aren’t the dirtiest. They’re among the cleanest.
So how do journalists keep getting away with peddling the opposite?
Simple. They know no one checks.
Football statistics get thrown around in the press like confetti, and nine times out of ten they’re taken as gospel. A journalist writes “Arsenal are the most ill disciplined side in the league” and it gets repeated, and repeated, and repeated until it becomes fact. Even when the actual data says the complete opposite.
The only people who bother to fact check these claims are bloggers and stat nerds. And where do they get to publish their findings? On a blog. While the original nonsense sits on the back pages of a national newspaper.
Then there’s the why.
Let’s be honest. The idea that Arsenal are cynical, card happy cheats is a story that sells. It appeals to supporters of the other 19 clubs who are sick of seeing Mikel Arteta’s side winning trophies. It gives them something to cling onto, a neat little narrative that explains away Arsenal’s success.
“They only won because they cheated.”
It’s the same bitterness you feel when Manchester City lift another trophy funded by creative accounting. It might not be fair, but it feels good to believe.
The difference is, with City, the financial doping allegations have paperwork to back them up. With Arsenal’s supposed dirtiness, the only thing that backs it up is the volume of the voices shouting it.
So next time you see a headline screaming about Arsenal being the Premier League’s most cynical side, ask yourself one question.
Where’s the data?
