From Henry vs Gyökeres to Pires vs Saka: How Arsenal’s 2006 finalists compare to Arteta’s current squad

For only the second time in Arsenal’s history, the North Londoners are preparing to contest a European Cup final. At Budapest’s Puskás Arena on Saturday evening, Mikel Arteta’s men take on Paris Saint-Germain, the Champions League holders, in a trophy decider that is, on paper, pretty closely matched.

After narrowly beating Atlético Madrid in the semifinals, Arsenal head into this weekend’s title game as only slight underdogs to PSG, who reached their second straight final by ousting Bayern Munich in a last-four thriller.

According to simulations run by soccer stats specialists Opta, the Gunners have a 44% chance of winning the European title, with PSG given the edge at 56%. The bookmakers, meanwhile, also offer the Parisians an advantage that is by no means comprehensive: per Oddschecker, Luis Enrique’s team is valued at -145 to lift the trophy, with Arsenal priced at +130.

Arsenal on the cusp of club history

While PSG can become only the second team to retain the European title in the Champions League era, Arsenal are chasing their first ever continental crown. Having just ended a 22-year wait for the domestic title, victory in Hungary would complete the greatest season in Arsenal’s 139-year history.

And it would assuage the painful memories of the team’s first appearance in the Champions League final, in Paris 20 years ago.

Can Arsenal banish Barça memories?

On May 17, 2006, Arsenal came up against Barcelona - the team of Ronaldinho, Samuel Eto’o, Deco et al - and scored first. However, Arsène Wenger’s men were denied the title when Eto’o and Julian Belletti netted late for Barça, who had benefited from a major turning point before any of the game’s three goals.

With just 18 minutes on the clock at the Stade de France, Ronaldinho’s pass left Eto’o one on one with Arsenal goalkeeper Jens Lehmann, who brought the Cameroonian down on the edge of the box. Lehmann became the first player to be dismissed in the history of the European Cup final, and Arsenal were forced to replace winger Robert Pires with their No. 2 custodian, Manuel Almunia.

Having then gone ahead through Sol Campbell’s 37th-minute header, Arsenal actually led for much of the game - but their 10 men could not hold off the 11 of a Barça team that was, without doubt, Europe’s best team. Once Eto’o equalised with a quarter of an hour left in the French capital, a Blaugrana winner appeared an inevitability - and took just four minutes to arrive.

Now, two decades on from Arsenal’s heartbreak in the ‘City of Love’, as the Gunners gear up for another Champions League final, we compare the classes of ’06 and ’26:

‘Invincibles’ aplenty vs newly-crowned champs

In their 10th season under Wenger, Arsenal’s 2006 iteration had despatched Real Madrid, Patrick Vieira’s Juventus and an excellent Villarreal side on their way to a Champions League final date with Barça. They were a team that boasted three world champions - Pires, Thierry Henry and Gilberto Silva - plus Cesc Fàbregas, a player four years away from lifting the World Cup.

What’s more, Arsenal’s starting lineup in Paris featured eight men who had made Premier League history two years earlier: in 2003/04, Wenger’s team of ‘Invincibles’ had won the English title without losing a single game.

But in 2005/06, Arsenal were a team that had finished fourth in the Premier League table, several country miles off the title pace. José Mourinho’s Chelsea, champions of England for the second successive year, amassed 24 more points than their fellow capital club, who lost 11 top-flight games. Arsenal even finished 15 points shy of the Premier League’s third-placed team, Liverpool.

Arsenal’s class of 2025/26, on the other hand, head to Hungary having become the first Gunners team to win the Premier League since the ‘Invincibles’. Moreover, they did so by beating the Premier League era’s ultimate juggernaut: Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, English champions in six of the last nine seasons.

Although they briefly relinquishing their Premier League lead in late April, Arsenal produced a final run-in that convincingly silenced any incipient ‘bottlers’ talk: indeed, they won all of their last five league games - at the same time as City won just two of theirs - to clinch the championship by a seven-point margin.

On the Champions League stage, Arsenal have, admittedly, benefited from a fairly straightforward path to the final: an exacting Atlético semi was preceded by far more favorable knockout-stage draws against Bodo/Glimt and Sporting CP.

But the history Arteta’s men can now create will be no less momentous for that: they have the chance not only win to a first ever continental title, but also become just the fourth English club to do a league and European Cup double.

Class of ’06 vs ’26: How do some of the individuals match up?

The top scorers: Henry vs Gyökeres

Above and beyond the question of which is better - the answer to that is clear - it’s worth noting that, in Thierry Henry and Viktor Gyökeres, we’re talking about two very different kinds of strikers. The former was a converted winger blessed with agility and searing pace; the latter, signed from Sporting CP last summer, is a far more physically-imposing, albeit far less mobile, target man.

Gyökeres appears unlikely to trouble Arsenal’s hall of fame, but the Swede’s 2025/26 figures speak of an eminently respectable first season at the Emirates Stadium. With 21 goals in 54 appearances, he is the team’s leading marksman; that haul includes five in the Champions League, among them a crucial penalty that helped to eliminate Atlético.

Indeed, Gyökeres’ Champions League tally matches that of Henry in the 2005/06 campaign. But, while it’s just possible that Gyökeres doesn’t even start in Budapest - Kai Havertz is also in the running to play at No. 9 - it would have been utterly unthinkable for Wenger to have dropped Henry in Paris in 2006.

Because Henry is Arsenal’s greatest ever player. The club’s all-time top scorer, with 228 goals in all competitions, the Frenchman broke Ian Wright’s record during that season’s Champions League group stage, in a two-goal, match-winning display at Sparta Prague in October 2005.

Henry’s five Champions League goals in 2005/06 also included a solo stunner for the Arsenal annals: a knife-through-hot-butter run that sliced open the Madrid defense at the Bernabéu. (Although, sumptuous as it was, the goal is not this writer’s favorite Henry moment from that game; that would be this piece of marvellously cool running-down-the-clock play.)

• Gyökeres’ 2025/26 stats: 54 games, 21 goals, 3 assists
• Henry’s 2005/06 stats: 45 games, 33 goals, 8 assists
• Henry’s overall Arsenal stats: 377 games, 228 goals, 107 assists

The wing wonders: Pires vs Saka

Let’s hope Bukayo Saka gets more pitch time in the Champions League final than Robert Pires did. The outfield player sacrificed when Lehmann was dismissed, Pires’ face was, understandably, thunder as he trudged off the field at the Stade de France. That was the only chance he ever got to play in European club soccer’s showpiece event.

By the time of the 2006 Champions League final, Pires was 32 and clearly on the way down: from 33 goal involvements in 2003/04, to 24 in 2004/05, and 18 in 2005/06. Indeed, the defeat to Barça was his last game for Arsenal. A week later, he agreed a deal to join Villarreal.

But Pires’ six-year spell at Arsenal is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest in the club’s history. After a tricky first season in England, he came to utterly dominate the Premier League, peaking in a 2001/02 season that saw him score one of the English top flight’s finest ever goals, and receive the Football Writers’ Association Football of the Year award. In an Arsenal.com fan vote, he was later named the club’s sixth-best player ever.

As for Saka: at this point, it seems no exaggeration to say he’s headed for a similar legacy, particularly if he helps Arsenal to victory in Budapest. The pair’s career club figures are, indeed, fairly similar; yet Saka is still only 24, still on an upward trajectory. And his influence on the team is undeniable.

This hasn’t actually been Saka’s best season in an Arsenal shirt: his 20 goal involvements are below his tallies for 2023/24 (37) and 2024/25 (26). But it can be no coincidence that he missed all but one game in Arsenal’s March-April run of one victory in six - and that the team has won every game he has started since his return from injury.

“Obviously his role has grown around the club, around the team and on the pitch towards the opponent as well,” Arteta said of Saka this month. “You sense that. He has got a presence now, he has got an aura. He has got something special. He is a different player, he is a player that can change a game at any moment. And creating that fear in the opponent is something important.”

• Pires’s 2005/06 stats: 48 games, 11 goals, 7 assists
• Pires’s career Arsenal stats: 284 games, 84 games, 64 assists
• Saka’s 2025/26 stats: 48 games, 11 goals, 9 assists
• Saka’s career Arsenal stats: 311 games, 81 goals, 81 assists

The playmakers: Fàbregas vs Odegaard

Martin Odegaard is five and a half years into what, in the main, has been a hugely successful spell in North London. Signed from Real Madrid in January 2021, initially on loan, he wasted no time in becoming the leader of the team’s attack. By July 2022, Arteta had made the Norwegian captain, at the age of just 23.

But in 2025/26, Odegaard has endured an injury-interrupted season that has seen his status as creator-in-chief wane. He has managed just 35 appearances in all competitions, with one goal and eight assists - by the far the least impressive figures of his five full seasons in England. In the Champions League, his seven appearances have yielded no goals and just the one assist.

However, that’s not to say Odegaard hasn’t produced moments of characteristic, crucial playmaking quality this term: just look at his match-winning assist for Leandro Trossard at West Ham this month, as Arsenal eked out a 1-0 victory that more or less sealed the Premier League title. Introduced as a second-half substitute at the London Stadium, Odegaard was, in the words of BBC pundit Wayne Rooney, “the big difference and why they won the game”.

While Odegaard was only 23 when he was named Arsenal’s captain, Fàbregas even younger. The Spaniard was just 21 when Wenger threw him the armband in late 2008, four years on from his breakthrough as a first-team regular.

Having established himself in the Arsenal side the year after the Gunners’ ‘Invincibles’ campaign, in 2005/06 Fàbregas racked up 50 appearances in all competitions - and earned rave reviews for his performances in the Champions League elimination of both Madrid and Juventus.

While Odegaard is a playmaker whose influence has dropped this term, Fàbregas was at the start of a decidedly upwards curve when he and Arsenal made it to Paris. From five goals and six assists in 2005/06, the Spaniard reached a career-high 38 goal involvements in 2009/10.

That, though, was his penultimate season at Arsenal: in 2011 he returned to boyhood club Barça. Only 24 when he departed, Fàbregas regularly features high on lists of Arsenal’s finest players - yet, as one ranking put it, his time at the Emirates was “ultimately tinged with a sense of unfulfilled potential”.

• Fàbregas’s 2005/06 stats: 50 games, 5 goals, 6 assists
• Fàbregas’s career Arsenal stats: 303 games, 57 goals, 97 assists
• Odegaard’s career Arsenal stats: 233 games, 42 goals, 46 assists
• Odegaard’s 2025/26 stats: 35 games, 1 goal, 8 assists

The coaches: Arteta vs Wenger

Arteta and Wenger’s styles of play are very different: the former’s game, all about defensive solidity and fiendishly effective set pieces, is certainly less easy on the eye than the brand of play the Gunners developed under the latter.

But, for all that there are complaints about the watchability of Arteta’s Arsenal, the stats show that they’ve averaged slightly more goals per game during their seven years under the Spaniard than they did in 19 seasons under Wenger: 1.89 under Arteta, 1.86 under the Frenchman. Arteta’s win percentage is also better than Wenger’s: 61.82% to 57.98%.

And, while his haul of one Premier League title and one FA Cup cannot yet compete with Wenger’s domestic tally - three leagues and seven FA Cups, including two doubles - Arteta now has the opportunity to do the one thing his predecessor could not.

In an otherwise legendary tenure in North London, success on the European stage is the major gap on Wenger’s resumé. Defeat in the 2006 Champions League final came six years after Wenger’s Gunners were also beaten in the UEFA Cup final, losing on penalties to Galatasaray.

Arsenal’s last European silverware remains the Cup Winners’ Cup, won under George Graham all the way back in 1993/94.

Paris Saint-Germain vs Arsenal: kickoff times, how to watch

Held at Budapest’s Puskás Arena, the 2026 Champions League kicks off tomorrow, Saturday, May 30, at 12 noon ET/9:00 a.m. PT.

Vewers in the U.S. can watch the game on CBS, Paramount+, TUDN USA, DAZN USA, Univision and ViX. Your streaming options also include fubo, which offers new users a free, introductory trial. You’ll also be able to follow live-text coverage of the action, right here at AS USA.

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