God Of football

Chapter 1009: What A Season Left Behind!

There was a photograph that a freelance photographer named Daniel Morse took on one of the very last days of the Premier League season that would, within a week, find its way onto the cover of hundreds of different magazines across all seven continents.

Even the non-football-dominated ones.

But that wasn’t all it did.

That photograph would get printed on thousands of shirts in a factory in Bangladesh, and hang framed on the wall of a bar in Osaka that had never once shown a Premier League game before a couple of seasons ago.

Morse had been positioned behind the north goal, shooting wide, trying to capture the full sweep of the Emirates in celebration.

The confetti cannons firing, and the red and white of it all.

Sixty thousand people on their feet, making a kind of noise that made it seem like a wormhole would pop out of nowhere and swallow them all.

He had been panning across the pitch when he found Izan in his viewfinder almost by accident, and something made him stop.

Izan was standing alone in the centre circle.

His teammates had moved toward the supporters.

The substitutes had spilt from the bench, and Arteta was somewhere near the touchline, arms around his coaching staff, face buried in someone’s shoulder.

The season was over, the title was won, and the whole world inside that stadium was in motion.

Except him.

He was standing completely still, boots planted in the grass, head tilted back at a slight angle with eyes closed.

The confetti was falling around him in slow, spiralling descent, catching the late afternoon light.

”They’ve done it again,” the commentators screamed from the gantry as it looked like the fans could step onto the pitch at any given moment.

”20 years of drought and now Arsenal have won the league, back-to-back!”

Back to Izan on the pitch, there was a grass stain along his left knee from a sliding finish in the second half.

His arms hung loose at his sides, hanging like a man who had finally, after a very long time, put something heavy down.

Morse took eleven frames in four seconds, and after going through them all in his comfort, he chose the third one, where the lighting in the stadium had shown on Izan, making him look like an angel ready to ascend back to his grace after completing a mission.

TIME Magazine ran it the following Thursday, with a single word beneath his face, above the masthead.

UNPRECEDENTED.

And that was it.

No subheading.

No explanation was offered, and none apparently felt necessary, which was itself a kind of verdict on what the season had been.

If you tried to explain the 2025/26 season to someone who had not watched it, someone who had been at sea, perhaps, or in a coma, or simply allergic to football in the way some people are, you would run into a problem almost immediately.

Not a lack of facts.

The facts were abundant.

The problem was that the facts, stated plainly and in sequence, sounded like an invention.

They sounded like the kind of numbers a child makes up when asked to imagine the greatest footballer who ever lived, before an adult gently explains that real life doesn’t work that way.

Except it had.

It just had, and there had been eyes, hearts and cameras to document it all.

Seventy-five goals in the Premier League.

In one season.

A disgustingly mythic output from a 16-year-old who had arrived from Valencia two summers ago.

The year before had been spectacular.

He had scored 47 goals in the league, breaking numerous records while winning the sextuple, but people had capped him off at that.

Izan was going to be the greatest player football had ever possibly seen because if he was giving those numbers at 16,17 years old, what would he do when he turned 23, but they didn’t even have to go that far or wait too long because just a season later, he had done this.

To make things even more dreamy, he had provided twenty-seven assists in the league to go alongside those goals.

Meaning that in the Premier League alone, across thirty-eight games, in which he didn’t feature in all, Izan Miura Hernandez had been directly responsible for a hundred and two goals.

For context, and context was increasingly hard to find, the previous single-season Premier League record for goal contributions before Izan came to the Premier League stood at 47.

That was a record held by Alan Shearer and Andy Cole, and had even been matched by Mohammed Salah in the season before, but in that same season, Izan had terrorised that record, bringing it all the way up to 67 goal contributions.

And just a year later, Izan had not so much broken it as rendered it a relic of a different sport.

Then there was Europe.

Thirty goals in the Champions League.

Twenty-two assists.

The thirty goals shattered the record he had set himself the previous season when he’d taken Ronaldo’s benchmark of seventeen with twenty-two, a record that had lasted barely twelve months before its owner made it look modest.

His fifty-three career Champions League goals, accumulated across parts of two seasons, had already made him Arsenal’s all-time leading scorer in European competition.

A distinction that would have seemed laughable to suggest when he signed, given that he was sixteen years old and there were players in that dressing room who had spent entire careers chasing even a whiff of that same milestone.

The FA Cup had given him six more.

The Carabao, four and the Spain qualifiers, eight.

One hundred and twenty-three goals in total.

Sixty assists.

A hundred and eighty goal contributions across sixty-three appearances in a single season.

The statisticians had run out of appropriate historical comparisons somewhere around March and had spent the remainder of the campaign in a state of quiet professional crisis, producing numbers that were technically accurate and contextually meaningless because the context simply didn’t exist yet.

You cannot compare something to history when history has no equivalent.

You just have to watch it and try to hold onto what you’re seeing.

What the wider public held onto, in the absence of proper context, was simpler and more human.

In all the praise and narratives, the season had not been without its friction.

There had been a Tuesday night in February at Molineux that nobody in the Arsenal camp spoke about with any warmth.

Wolverhampton Wanderers, fighting relegation with the desperation that only a club staring at the Championship can muster, had decided early in the match that the most effective way to deal with Izan was to make the act of being Izan as physically unpleasant as possible.

It was not a novel approach.

Several clubs had tried variations of it across the season, with uniform results.

Izan would absorb the contact, stay upright more often than seemed physically reasonable, and then score twice or thrice anyway.

But the Molineix on that particular night had been something beyond what even that pattern prepared you for.

He was fouled eleven times.

Eleven times in thirty minutes.

He was caught late on his left ankle in the first minute and played on.

He was elbowed in the ribs going up for a header in the 15th and said nothing.

He was brought down from behind in a tackle so blatant that even the Molineux crowd hissed at it, but he got up, looked at the referee, and then looked away, which was somehow worse than any reaction he could have given.

Even with all that, he scored in the forty-fourth minute and again in the sixty-second to win Arsenal the game 2-0.

Arteta had sat in the post-match press conference with the stillness of a man actively suppressing a considerable amount of feeling.

When asked about the physicality of the game, he had paused for a moment before answering.

”There are ways to play against exceptional players,” he said.

”Some of them involve football. Some of them don’t. Tonight we saw examples of both.” Another pause. ”I am proud of how Izan conducted himself. More proud than I can say.”

The FA reviewed it, but nothing changed administratively.

The statement had been non-commital, just brushing over things while satisfying no one.

What nobody could have predicted was that Izan himself seemed, after four days of rest and treatment on his left shin, to return not diminished but clarified.

As though the rest had stripped something away and left only the essential.

In the four league games that followed Molineux, he scored eleven goals.

His shot accuracy across those four games was ninety-eight per cent.

His average touches in the opposition box per game rose by three.

Whatever Molineux had been trying to do, it had not done it.

Wolves were relegated in April, and their manager left by mutual consent six days later.