Arsenal: Remember that time David Luiz said we were title contenders?

David Luiz thought that Arsenal should be competing for a Premier League title, and that makes me think there is a bigger issue here.

I’m all about optimism, as many of you already know. And when it comes to Arsenal, I feel like without a healthy spoonful of optimism a day, you’re risking a stress/anger/frustration-related stroke every single day for the rest of your life. Or at least risking hemorrhoids, maybe both.

But when David Luiz came out and said that his new club could challenge for the Premier League title before the Sheffield United match, even I was like… okay David. Maybe limit the spoonfuls of optimism to one per day.

As much as I hate to admit it, even before the Sheffield United loss, the whiners had a point. Sure, we were getting points, but were they sustainable? No. Absolutely not. You can’t scrape and claw your way to a Premier League title. At some point you have to show that you have the ability to gather consistent results.

Yet David Luiz still believed enough to say what he said, which now reads like complete and utter poppycock. Just like how it sounded when Matteo Guendouzi said it early last season.

That said, I shared a bit of the optimistic burst that Luiz had too. The way I saw it, the Gunners had clawed to third place and they didn’t even have their first-choice defense in there—at any position—and they’d also been missing Alexandre Lacazette.

And Granit Xhaka had been out of form, and Dani Ceballos and Nicolas Pepe hadn’t settled… it was all holding them back in every way except in their position in the EPL table.

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Which meant that, surely once everything clicked into play, the team would be in even better standing. Maybe not challenging for the title, because that is bat****, but keeping hold of the top four, surely.

The problem, though, wasn’t that they didn’t have the talent or the ability. The problem is that, even with a full compliment of defensive options, Unai Emery still opted with the same backline that hasn’t been able to figure it out for over a year. With a chance to do the right thing, Emery blatantly did the wrong thing.

Essentially, we got in our own way. And David Luiz has to be wondering what the hell he was thinking when he said those crazy things, because let’s be honest, he must have just had too many spoonfuls. I get it. I believed Matteo Guendouzi when he said the same thing at the start of last year. Which I think is the most troubling thing about all of this.

Consistently we have new players come to this club and say that we should be challenging for Premier League titles, yet we’re nowhere close. When Guendouzi did it, you could blame it on youthful optimism.

But Luiz? Luiz knows the game. He’s been around a long time. And sure, he’s a bit of a character, but he wouldn’t out of the blue say something so incredibly incorrect if there wasn’t an actual belief that this team has what it takes to compete.

So is this the case? Are the Gunners far better than Unai Emery is letting them to be? Or are Guendouzi and Luiz both just delusional?