After the Crystal Palace match, the squad returned to North London for a brief tactical review. Wenger then announced that the following day would be free, which was met with the kind of collective relief that only comes after a period of sustained hard work and very few late mornings.
David seized the opportunity and invited the squad to his house in Hadley Wood for a party, framing it as a belated housewarming. The response was immediate and enthusiastic.
"We'll be there at ten," Giroud said, with the certainty of a man who had already decided what he was bringing.
Even Sánchez confirmed he would cancel his other plans, which was noted quietly by several people as a meaningful gesture.
Wenger watched his players laughing together and felt something settle in him. Talent was one thing. A dressing room where people genuinely wanted to be around each other was something rarer and considerably more valuable. Teams that spent their energy on internal politics, on positioning and resentment and quietly undermining one another, rarely sustained anything for long. He had seen it many times.
"Just remember," he said before they dispersed, "nothing excessive. And nothing you shouldn't be touching at all." He looked around the room without focusing on anyone in particular. "I mean that."
In England, players drinking and spending nights out was unremarkable and largely accepted. What Wenger was careful about was the more serious edge of it, the substances that took hold in ways that willpower alone couldn't reliably resist, the kind of habit that had derailed careers he had watched with sadness over the years.
"I'll keep an eye on things," Arteta said.
Being captain at Arsenal was not a ceremonial role. It meant managing conflicts, mediating between personalities, staying alert to problems before they became crises, and doing all of this while also playing football to a high standard. Arteta had accepted this without complaint and had come to find genuine satisfaction in it.
Back at the house that evening, David opened his phone and read a notification.
Manchester City had beaten Chelsea three-one at the Etihad. De Bruyne and Agüero had linked repeatedly, with Kevin involved in every goal. The footage showed him sliding on his knees after his assist, the celebration of someone who had found exactly the right stage.
David smiled and sent him a message.
The Wolfsburg twin engines, separated by three hundred miles and different coloured shirts, were apparently both fine.
Liverpool beat Bournemouth one-nil as the last match of the second round concluded. The final table had Manchester City top on goal difference, with Arsenal immediately behind them. The weekend had also delivered some unexpected results. United had lost to Aston Villa. Spurs had drawn with Stoke again.
On Sky Sports' Monday Night Football, Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville were doing what they did best, sitting across from each other with the comfortable antagonism of two people who had spent their careers on opposite sides of the same argument.
"Last season, everyone said Chelsea before a ball was kicked," Neville said, "and they proved everyone right. This season is genuinely different. Every major club has strengthened, but every major club also has a specific problem they haven't solved."
Carragher leaned forward. "Chelsea still have only five fit defenders if you count carefully. City have De Bruyne and Sterling, but Sterling's consistency at this level is still unproven. Arsenal have solved the goalkeeper with Čech, and the attack has a completely different dimension with David Qin in it. But they have one holding midfielder and no adequate cover for him. If Coquelin gets injured, the whole midfield structure is exposed."
"My read," Neville said, "is that Arsenal are the most interesting side this year. The Community Shield result broke the psychological hold Chelsea had over them. Coquelin and Bellerín are into their second full seasons, which means better decision-making in big moments. And the attack is now, honestly, comparable to what Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern have. The question that has followed Arsenal for years is whether they can stay healthy into March."
Carragher pulled up a statistical breakdown on the touchscreen. "Something worth noting about David specifically. His numbers in cup competitions are consistently higher than his league numbers. Dribbles completed, goal involvements in decisive moments, chance creation under pressure. If you had to use one phrase, it would be big-game player. You see the same quality historically in Drogba, Di Stéfano, Ronaldo."
"Wenger used to look physically pained whenever someone mentioned Drogba before a Wembley final," Neville said, with a smile that suggested genuine sympathy. "I imagine he feels rather differently when he hears David Qin's name these days."
"Entirely different emotion," Carragher agreed.
The highlights package that followed showed nearly three minutes of David's Arsenal appearances so far, the quick combinations with Cazorla, the acceleration past defenders, the left-foot finish at Selhurst Park curling into the top corner. Neville watched it and said nothing for a moment. Sometimes the pictures made the analysis redundant.
"The Champions League draw is next month," Carragher added. "Arsenal have gone out at the last sixteen four years running. The fans have taken to calling them the Round of Sixteen regulars. With David in the squad, I expect that story to change."
August 25th.
The Hadley Wood house, mid-morning.
The trophy room on the third floor drew everyone upstairs before the food was even ready.
"This is properly done," Giroud said, turning slowly to take in the room. A grey backdrop running the length of one wall, and arranged along it in chronological order: the hat-trick match balls, framed photographs from the brace occasions, the individual medals, and at the far end, unmistakably, the Europa League winners' trophy sitting in its own space with quiet authority.
"Can I turn this on?" Giroud asked, pointing to a small recording device on the shelf beside one of the match balls.
David nodded, and immediately the room filled with urgent German commentary, the voice rising and falling in a way that nobody in the room could follow linguistically but all of them understood perfectly.
"What is this?" Giroud asked.
"The Leverkusen hat-trick," David said. "The German broadcast."
He had started recording commentaries from important matches early in his career, keeping them as a kind of audio diary. The idea was that someday, when he was old and the matches were long finished, he would sit in a room like this and the voices would bring it all back, the specific atmosphere of specific evenings, the particular quality of certain moments. Giroud returned the recorder to its shelf with genuine reluctance.
"I'm going to do the same thing," he said, almost to himself.
"Come on, the chef is here," David said. "Frederick's. I think you'll be satisfied."
He had called Barnett, given him a brief description of what he wanted, and arrived home the following day to find everything arranged. Having a good agent, he had come to understand, was a quality-of-life matter as much as a professional one.
The lunch settled into the easy rhythm of people who had spent several intense weeks together and were now grateful to sit around a table without a tactical purpose. The food was excellent and the conversation moved between subjects naturally until Arteta, helping himself to more lamb, asked a question.
"Liverpool. You've watched them. What's your read?"
"Klopp's teams press everywhere and run constantly," David said, cutting through his Welsh lamb. "It's very similar to what Spurs do under Pochettino, actually. But he's only been at Anfield a few weeks and they're still finding the shape of it. The timing isn't quite there yet." He paused. "I think we win, but we shouldn't be casual about it. His teams get better very fast."
"Their front three concern me more than their system," Coquelin said, his expression careful. "Firmino is intelligent in a way that doesn't always show up in the numbers. Coutinho can unlock anything from thirty metres. And Benteke in the air is a serious problem for our centre-backs."
David thought about Coutinho for a moment and kept the thought private. The Brazilian had said in an interview that he wanted to be Brazil's version of Gerrard. A generous and understandable ambition. What he could not have known was what the future held for him, the move he would eventually make for a dream that didn't quite materialise, the parallel with Fàbregas that nobody drew at the time but that hindsight would make obvious.
"I'll track him closely," Bellerín said, with the quiet seriousness of someone who had identified a specific personal challenge and intended to meet it.
The tactical discussion expanded gradually, pulling in more voices, more details, and David looked around the table at his teammates arguing cheerfully about pressing triggers and defensive lines and felt something that was difficult to name precisely. Satisfaction, perhaps, though that was too small a word for it. Something closer to belonging.
After the meal, Giroud and several others took the Bugatti out for a circuit of the surrounding roads, the engine filling the Hertfordshire afternoon with a sound that was half music and half threat. David watched from the driveway with uncomplicated envy. He turned eighteen in September. The driving licence was on the calendar. Until then, the car sat in the garage as an extremely expensive piece of furniture.
The idea of driving without a licence had briefly presented itself and been dismissed immediately. The roads near the house had journalists parked along them at various points, and the image of a seventeen-year-old Arsenal player being collected from a North London police station by Arsène Wenger was not one he felt the season needed.
The next morning, Wenger's door was open when David arrived at the training ground.
"Cambridge University has an academic conference tomorrow. When training is finished, come with me. I want you to meet a few people."
David sat down. "What kind of conference?"
"The origins and development of football." Wenger closed the leather-bound book he had been reading and set it on the desk. "You know that association football has two distinct lines of ancestry. In China, cuju was played for more than two thousand years. The Western tradition runs through harpaston in Greece and folk football in medieval England. But neither of those traditions produced a formal set of rules on their own."
He settled into the explanation with the ease of someone who had thought about this for a long time. "In 1848, representatives from several Cambridge colleges met and agreed that the game needed governing principles. After considerable argument, they produced what became known as the Cambridge Rules. Basic by later standards, not universally adopted, and imperfect in several respects. But they became the foundation from which the modern game grew."
David listened. He had known the broad outline of this history but not its texture.
Wenger had a reason for this invitation that went beyond the academic content. David was seventeen and would turn eighteen in a month. His daily life had compressed almost entirely into football and everything adjacent to football. Wenger believed, from long experience, that the best professional footballers were not only skilled but formed, that the cultural and intellectual dimensions of a person contributed something to how they played and how they sustained the motivation to keep playing across a long career. He wanted to give David access to something outside the training ground, something that connected the game to a wider world.
"There's also someone I'd like you to meet," Wenger added. "My daughter is studying neuroscience at Cambridge. She'll join us for lunch."
"Of course," David said. "I have no reason to refuse. And honestly it sounds interesting."
The drive to East Anglia the following afternoon took less than an hour. Standing beside the Cam, watching the water move between its banks under the old willows, David found a few lines coming back to him, a poem he had read once about this specific river, about the particular quality of leaving a place you had briefly loved. He had barely settled into the feeling when an argument erupted nearby between two groups of men on the riverbank, apparently over punting territories.
"This happens often," Wenger said, entirely unsurprised. "One punt carrying twelve passengers earns a hundred and fifty pounds an hour. When the margins are that good, people become territorial."
"Like football before the rules," David said.
"Exactly like that."
They walked through the Gothic archways and the Victorian quadrangles until they reached the Medical Sciences building, where Wenger's expression shifted into something David had not previously seen from him in any professional context.
He looked slightly nervous.
"This is Léa," Wenger said. "My daughter. She's reading neuroscience here."
He turned. "And this is David, Arsenal's finest player at present."
Léa Wenger had her father's eyes, unmistakably, that particular quality of concentrated attention, of a mind processing more than it was expressing. The rest of her face was her own. She shook David's hand with the brisk efficiency of someone who had been interrupted in the middle of something specific.
"Hello," she said to David. Then to her father, with a tone that carried something unresolved beneath its surface: "Is there anything else? I have an experiment running."
Wenger asked, with a gentleness David had not heard from him before, whether she would join them for lunch at Cotto.
A pause. Something in her softened.
"Send me the reservation details. I'll come straight there."
She left, and Wenger turned back toward the corridor with the expression of a man who has just done something more complicated than managing a training session.
He noticed David watching him and cleared his throat.
"Children have their own understanding of things," he said. "Different from ours. It is not always useful to correct them."
David said nothing, which seemed like the right response.
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