Arsenal v Sporting CP

Arsenal v Sporting CP

Wednesday April 15th, 2026

Champions League Quarter Finals second leg

The Emirates 

The warm up

Since I started writing these matchday posts this will be the first occasion with a two legged Champions League tie where I've started out on the second leg post actually feeling quite buoyant. Not because I think we're about to waltz over to North London and cause serious carnage, merely that the two previous posts against BVB and Bodø/Glimt felt like trying to sell snow to the Eskimo's. Why was I even bothering to write either? It's not like I get paid anything for doing them. 

I write the afternoon after the first leg in the Estádio José Alvalade and spoiler alert if you don't want to know the score look away now. OK maybe that joke doesn't work well in print. Anyways the lions are going into the second leg only 1-0 down instead of their customary 3-0 deficit. Perhaps this time around I can give you the possibility of some optimism for the second leg. We shall see. 

Naturally conceding in the first minute of additional time felt like a kick in the teeth but it's fair to suggest that my teeth have taken harder kicking’s than that over the years. If I were to go into the finer detail of the budgets of the two clubs then we could be here all day so I'll try my best to make my next point as brief as possible. Regular readers have just gone to make a cup of tea already thinking here we fucking go. 

Below are the transfer fees and total outlay for Sporting's starting XI last night. 

Rui Silva €4m

Fresneda €9m

Diomande €14.5m

Inácio Homegrown

Araújo €13.73m

Trincão €18m

Morita €3.5m

Simões Homegrown 

Gonçalves €13.5m

Geny €2.4m

Luís Suarez €22.95m

Total €101.58 m

On current exchange rates Declan Rice alone would be the equivalent outlay of €120.72m. Had Hjulmand not been suspended and played instead of Simões we'd still only get to a total of €119.58m, still not quite the cost of just Declan Rice alone. You can see where I'm going with this already I'm sure. Bukayo Saka (who was missing from Arsenal's starting XI) is reputedly paid £15.6 million per annum. Geny as an equivalent position is paid €400k per annum. Even Trincão's reported new wage deal as the lion's highest paid player would be considered pocket change for the Gunners. 

The lions are a Sociedade Anónima Desportiva (SAD). Arsenal are owned by Stan Kroenke who is reported by Forbes to be worth €22.2 billion. The gross transfer spending under Arteta since December 2019 has reportedly topped £1 billion. In layman's terms the lions are at their foundation a fan owned club, Arsenal are backed by a billionaire with additional revenues from the world's richest league. The wealth disparity between the two clubs is quite frankly night and day. 

If Arsenal are shopping in Waitrose then the lions are basically shopping in the special’s aisle of your local Aldi supermarket. Discounting the home grown players who started these are the clubs each player was signed from.

Silva - Real Betis 

Morita - Santa Clara 

Gonçalves - Famalicão 

Suarez - Almería 

Geny - Black Bulls 

Fresneda - Valladolid 

Araújo - Toluca 

Diomande - Midtjylland

Trincão - Barcelona 

Throw in the fact that both Sporting's substitutes used last night in Daniel Bragança and Rafael Nel are homegrown academy players and the club captain Hjulmand, who'll come back in for the return leg came from Lecce. Barcelona and Real Betis are the only two names likely to be familiar to the average football fan and let's not kid ourselves here, it's not like we've signed some of their most established players in the cases of Silva and Trincão, albeit both are Portuguese internationals. Arsenal of course signed Sporting's top striker Viktor Gyökeres in the summer weakening their team, albeit they appear to have completely broken him but that's a sidebar. 

It should be noted that Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya was the UCL man of the match. The BBC's headline post game asked the question of whether Raya is the best goalkeeper in the world? Is he? I don't know but he pulled off terrific saves to first push Araújo's goal bound effort onto the bar and secondly to keep out Geny's header which was sneaking into the bottom right hand corner. 

Opta have revised their Xg for the game today to 1.33 for Arsenal but it's worth noting 0.75 was from the Havertz goal and 0.44 from a Gyökeres effort that my Nan could have saved and a blocked header in the 14th minute they didn't see fit to include at the time but has been added back in when I looked today. 

Let's look at the total attempts against Sporting for each game in the Champions League in order from last night's game through to the opening group game. 

Arsenal 8

Bodø H 9

Bodø A 10

Athletic Club 9

PSG 27

Bayern 23

Club Brugge 8

Juventus 18

Marseille 10

Napoli 12

Kairat Almaty 9

We see that Arsenal along with Club Brugge came away with the lowest total attempts and let's be honest other than the goal itself (discounting the disallowed goal) Arsenal rarely threatened. In fact let's say over the course of the 90 minutes they didn't threaten at all because as we've established they scored after the final 90 was played. This should have been a tough game for the lions after all it's the first leg of the Champions League quarter finals and let's not forget that Arsenal topped the qualifying with 8 straight wins. 

Let's get real, this was not a classic performance from the lions by any stretch of the imagination and personally I think they were guilty of showing Arteta's side too much respect. I wouldn't have rated any of our players higher than a 6 or 7 out of 10. Yet all told, with everything above taken into account and added together, Arsenal managed to snatch a 1-0 win in the 90th minute playing the most turgid football we've seen from any side this season in the José Alvalade. Imagine paying a billion quid for an FA Cup win to create a suped up version of Santa Clara. Imagine having to pay £1,500 plus every season to watch that crap at home every week in a stadium nicknamed the Library. I'm sure it's cheaper to fly to Lisboa every other week and watch Sporting than to follow Arsenal at home for a season. 

If you're looking for omens, Bournemouth were the side that played Manchester City in the match before the famous 4-1 win in the José Alvalade and they will take on the Gunners in the lunchtime game on Saturday at the library. We've already learned you cannot discount this Sporting side having been comprehensively outplayed in Norway against Bodø/Glimt in the first leg, something we definitely couldn't say about the Gunners in last night's game. What followed was the 5-0 remontada to set up this game. Pulling a 1-0 scoreline back seems definitely more plausible to me that 3 goals to a side who'd played us off the park a week earlier ever did even if it is the Premier League leaders. 

Sporting as mentioned have their club captain back from suspension, an Arsenal fan from boyhood who comes with matching tattoo and having missed out on the World Cup, will be desperate I'm sure to put in a vintage performance to put him in the shop window of Europe's elite before he departs for destination unknown in the summer. 

Arsenal will have one eye on Manchester City the following weekend knowing that a loss there could jeopardise their chances of winning the Premier League, albeit I'll caveat that statement by assuming that City beat Chelsea away when they play on Sunday. If Bournemouth can get a positive result on Saturday lunchtime then the Gunners season would start to implode even more than the two results going into the first leg which saw them lose in the Carabao Cup to Manchester City and then in the FA Cup to Southampton. Sporting will most likely choose to rest several first team players against Estrela once more in their weekend game and Arsenal now don't have the luxury of doing that against either Bournemouth or the lions. Most importantly Sporting have previous form of going to the Emirates and coming away victorious on penalties, having equalised through the infamous Pedro Gonçalves lob over Aaron Ramsdale. Whilst the majority of faces have changed for the Gunners this was still a side that started with Gabriel and Saliba in the centre of defence and Jesus and Martinelli as part of a forward three. White, Trossard, Saka and Ødegaard all came off the bench in addition. As an example of how Portugal has to sell to survive, of Sporting's entire Matchday squad only Trincão, Gonçalves, Inácio, Diomande and Nuno Santos remain although technically Tanlongo forms part of the Sporting B squad. 

What the lions lacked last night was pace. We had it and we let it go to Napoli and you have to imagine that Alisson would have had a field day against Ben White last night. There's a distinct possibility that Araújo could have a field day in London. Sporting now have nothing to lose. There's no point sitting back, they need to go out swinging and if Arsenal tear them apart then so be it. But if they can reproduce what they did against Bodø/Glimt then they have more than a chance. The longer the game goes on without Arsenal finding the net the more anxiety will creep into their fans. Start in the same way as we did last night and this time find the net after five minutes and we'll see what Arteta's side are really made of. I'm not saying we'll win, far from it but it wouldn't be a massive shock all things considered if we did let's put it that way. I imagine after the 5-1 last season many Gunners fans will have envisaged that they simply had to turn up to roll us over again. It was no surprise to see many taking to social media with excuses in hand for a poor performance and a 1-0 win. Sporting had won 17 straight games at the José Alvalade. They had won all their home games in the Champions League.

You can bet your bollocks to a barn door they won't underestimate them in the return leg a week to day.

In the markets 

Arsenal 2/5

Draw 15/4

Sporting CP 6/1

Sporting to qualify in 90 minutes 20/1, Extra time 40/1 or on penalties 28/1.