Champions Don't Defend: The Overlooked Are Attacking 2026

The gold letters above the Emirates Stadium entrance say it in simple, unmissable terms: "Champions."

Arsenal spent 22 years waiting to earn that word. Last season they finally did, and now — according to BBC Sport — they're not planning to defend it. They're planning to attack it. Captain Martin Odegaard put it plainly: "We don't feel we have to defend anything. We want to do it again. Last year is finished now. We want to attack it."

On the Premier League's opening night, that swagger showed. A 3-0 win over Coventry gave Mikel Arteta his 150th league victory in under 250 games — a feat only Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, Jurgen Klopp, and Sir Alex Ferguson have matched. Not bad company.

But this isn't a story about one club. It's a story about what happens when the people everyone counted out decide they're done being counted out.

Across town in moodier territory, Hull City returned to the Premier League after nine years away — and promptly beat Manchester United 2-0. The Tigers had been predicted by nearly everyone to finish bottom. Their manager, Sergej Jakirovic, the first person from Bosnia-Herzegovina to manage in the Premier League, has a simple response: "We are trying to prove people wrong."

Defender Semi Ajayi, released by West Brom just over a year ago, echoed the sentiment: "We aren't worried about the pressure from outside. We have to keep putting in performances like that and maybe people will stop sleeping on us."

The same spirit burned in Norway, where Bodo/Glimt thrashed NEC Nijmegen 3-0 to reach the Champions League main draw for a second successive season — qualifying 6-1 on aggregate. And in Bratislava, where Slovan Bratislava needed Cristian Martinez's brilliant extra-time flick over the keeper — enough to knock out Celje and book their place among Europe's elite.

Then there's Bay City Western — a high school boys soccer team in Michigan, of all places. Their six seniors were thrown onto the varsity team as freshmen, the one season the school fielded no junior varsity. No safety net. No easing in. Coach Kyle Jean remembers it well: "Some kids might quit or get angry about it. But they worked hard and trained every day. And they're getting what they deserve right now."

They got it — a second straight Bay County Championship, seventh in the event's 13-year history, without conceding a single goal all day. A 9-0, a 6-0, a 4-0. Built for exactly this.

And in Manchester, 19-year-old Nico O'Reilly received the 2026 PFA young player of the year award — a full-back for City and England whose rise feels early but earned. "It feels amazing," he said.

What connects all of them — a Michigan high school, a Bosnian manager in Hull, a Norwegian club from the Arctic Circle, an English champion — is the same refusal. The refusal to accept the script that was written for them.

Year after year, the same question: is it enough? Is a title enough, a qualification enough, a single opening win enough?

The answer, from every corner of this season's opening chapter, is the same. It never is — and that's the point. Champions don't defend. They attack the same thing they always have: the doubt, the odds, the "sleeping on us."

So as 2026's league seasons begin in earnest, keep an eye on the ones everyone wrote off. The senior from Bay City Western who's still a senior in name only — he's already a champion. The Hull defender released a year ago. The boy from Norway playing European nights under the Arctic sun. And the gold letters above the Emirates that no longer feel like a surprise.

They all got what they deserved. They're not done yet.