Arsenal's Title Parade Numbers Game: The Counting Conundrum and Eze's Cautionary Tale

The 25/26 season has finally shuffled off into the history books. From here on, it's World Cup fever all the way—though not before we've sorted through some curious media offerings from the past week.

The Great Parade Attendance Mystery

Arsenal's celebration lap through London following their first Premier League title since 2004 drew masses of supporters into the streets, though the precise headcount remains something of a journalistic Rorschach test.

The numbers flew thick and fast. The Daily Mirror went with "hundreds of thousands." The Sun first reported 75 fans requiring rescue from height, 16 arrests, and one stabbing amid "up to 1million" lining the streets. Then The Sun again upped the ante to "over 750,000" along the 5.6-mile route, complete with red flares and supporters dangling from trees and lampposts. The Daily Express crowned itself winner of the biggest-number sweepstakes, declaring "over one million fans" turned out across a five-mile loop through north London.

"Hundreds of thousands" is the safest bet here. Anything beyond that ventures into the realm of creative mathematics. "Up to 1million" deserves the same credibility we'd grant an advert promising to remove "up to 100 per cent" of stains—technically unfalsifiable, but deeply suspicious. Why stop at a million? Why not claim eight billion turned up?

Over 750,000 begins to strain credulity. Over a million? Come off it. Still, congratulations to the Express for securing first prize in the exaggeration stakes.

For the record, X-formerly-Twitter—that glorious wasteland of unfiltered nonsense—apparently settled on 1.5 million.

The Eze Enigma

Among those hundreds of thousands (or however many) celebrating was Eberechi Eze, Premier League medal draped around his neck, trophy in hand. Which makes Richard Keys' recent Twitter outburst all the more bewildering.

Keys suggested Morgan Rogers ought to ask Eze how he feels about his Arsenal move, implying the midfielder might spend his time "sitting next to him on the bench" rather than actually playing. Never mind that Eze just won the Premier League title at his boyhood club in his first season, reached the Champions League final, and is now heading to the World Cup.

This is a cautionary tale? The man joined Arsenal, won a domestic trophy, played European football, and is World Cup-bound. The suggestion that Eze harbours regrets about his transfer—posted the day after over a million people (or however many) lined London's streets to celebrate that very achievement—clears even the most generous nonsense threshold.

For context: Eze managed 3,118 minutes for Arsenal in 25/26, hardly the benchwarmer's pittance Keys implies. By comparison, he accumulated 3,303 minutes at Crystal Palace the previous season as a supposed "guaranteed starter." We're fairly confident Eze feels rather pleased with his move.

Soccer Aid's Deadpan Maestro

Soccer Aid 2026 arrived with its usual celebrity-playing-football-for-charity spectacle, and the Mirror's Kieran Horn covered it with the gravity normally reserved for actual international matches.

This is magnificent work. Horn rated the proceedings entirely straight-faced, offering neither knowing wink nor nudge-nudge acknowledgement that this was anything other than serious football analysis. He praised Danny Dyer for his defensive positioning. He noted Jack Whitehall's failure to track Michael Essien properly. He observed that Lukas Podolski "missed two great chances after being introduced at half-time"—because some things never change.

The sentence "Jack Whitehall – Showed no sign of being lethargic after travelling back from Budapest but perhaps should have got across to Michael Essien sooner before his goal" exists in a universe where it can be written with complete sincerity about a comedian who'd been on the lash in Budapest less than a day earlier.

That's the work of someone who knows exactly what they're doing and exactly how funny it becomes. We salute that level of conviction.