After the Stoke City match, the squad gathered in the dressing room and the conversation drifted naturally toward Malmö, their Champions League group stage opponents five days away.
Malmö were one of the three pillars of Swedish football, alongside IFK Göteborg and AIK. They had their own place in European history: a 1979 European Cup final appearance, where they had faced Nottingham Forest with half their starting lineup missing and lost one-nil, contributing in their own way to the creation of Brian Clough's red dynasty.
"You know Zlatan came through Malmö's academy," Giroud said, settling the topic with the authority of someone who considers this an interesting fact.
"Zlatan's at PSG," David said. "Same group as us."
He had spent time studying the group's other occupants. PSG were formidable on paper: Ibrahimović, Thiago Silva, David Luiz, Di María, Matuidi, a squad assembled with the financial ambition that characterised the club since the Qatari takeover. Their repeated failure to translate that investment into deep Champions League runs was one of the more persistent puzzles in European football.
"I've heard Zlatan is actually terrifying in a fight," Cazorla said, with genuine curiosity. "Has anyone seen evidence of this personally?"
"Most of the people he apparently fought are retired by now," David said. He was thinking of a specific piece of footage he had watched once: Ibrahimović leaping to drop-kick Materazzi in retribution for something that had happened earlier in the match, a moment of such unambiguous physical commitment that it had been replaying in various corners of the internet ever since.
Then Monreal stood up.
He placed both hands on his hips, tilted his chin upward, and adopted the particular expression of a man who considers himself above ordinary processes.
"When I was seventeen, Arsenal invited me for a trial," he said, with a studied imperousness that was clearly intended as an impersonation. "I declined Wenger's offer. Because Zlatan Ibrahimović does not do trials."
David opened his mouth to laugh.
He did not laugh, because standing directly behind Monreal, wearing the patient expression of a man who has arrived in the middle of a sentence about himself, was Wenger.
Monreal felt the silence in the room and understood its quality before he turned around.
"Nacho," Wenger said, in the unhurried tone of a schoolteacher who has heard a great deal more than a student intended, "we didn't ask you to trial either. After scouting you, we went directly to Málaga with an offer."
Monreal's face arranged itself into an expression that suggested he was considering whether the floor might open.
"Mr. Wenger."
That was all he managed. His teammates were suppressing their enjoyment with varying degrees of success, and he sent a look around the room that communicated very clearly what he thought of everyone's decision not to warn him.
Wenger, for his part, seemed more amused than anything else.
"It's a true story, actually," he said. "I did approach Ibrahimović. The conversation went almost exactly as Nacho described it." He paused, recalling the exchange. "I offered him a trial. He told me he didn't do trials. I said everyone does trials. He said he didn't. We went back and forth in this way for a while before it became clear neither of us was going to move." He allowed himself a brief, private smile. "In retrospect, it may not have been a bad outcome. His personality was always going to be a complicated fit."
The room released the laughter it had been holding.
"Right," Wenger said, clapping his hands once. "The match. Let's go through it."
He spent fifteen minutes on what had worked against Stoke, what had not, and how to approach the same problems differently. Then he dismissed them.
Five days later, Arsenal flew from London to Copenhagen and crossed the Öresund Bridge by bus into Malmö, a city whose reputation for producing exceptional football players was disproportionate to its size. The Yugoslavs and Iraqis and Poles and Danes who had settled there through successive decades of immigration had collectively given Swedish football something it could not have grown from its own soil alone. Zlatan Ibrahimović was only the most visible product of that particular mix.
"Thank God for the bridge," David said, watching the water through the window. "Otherwise we'd be connecting somewhere."
He was aware that two days after this match came Watford in the league. It was manageable if everyone stayed fit and the Champions League fixture did not demand too much of the key players. If the opponent had been City or United, Wenger would almost certainly have fielded a rotated lineup and accepted the group stage risk. But Malmö were what they were, and taking a full complement of points in the weaker fixtures was exactly how you gave yourself the freedom to manage the bigger ones.
Malmö Stadion filled on match night with a crowd that divided roughly between home supporters and neutral spectators who had come out of curiosity about Arsenal's record signing rather than any particular affiliation. Premier League clubs rarely appeared in Sweden. Ninety-million-pound footballers appeared even less frequently.
In the tunnel before kick-off, David looked around at everything. He was not trying to manage his nerves; he had learned enough about himself by now to know that the thing he felt in these moments was not anxiety but a particular form of heightened readiness, the same sensation that had preceded his best performances in Germany. He welcomed it.
Beside him in the tunnel, a Malmö midfielder named Lasse Kjaer Larsson stood quietly. Also seventeen. David had read about him briefly: talented enough to have broken into the first team young, good enough to be considered one of the more promising players his country had produced at his age. He was looking at David with an expression that contained both admiration and something harder to name, the recognition that the distance between two seventeen-year-old footballers could sometimes be measured in ways that numbers alone could not capture.
David noticed the look and gave a brief, easy nod.
Then the Champions League anthem began.
He had heard it hundreds of times on television. He had heard it at Wolfsburg in the Europa League qualifying rounds, where the melody played with slight variations. But the Champions League version, in its full, triumphal arrangement, rising through the speakers of a stadium where you were one of the twenty-two players about to play in it for real, was a different experience entirely.
His forearms tightened.
"First time in the Champions League, I was so nervous my legs felt wrong," Giroud said beside him. "It's completely different from the league."
"He has literally broken the Europa League scoring record," Cazorla said, without looking up. "I think he'll be fine."
"I'm quite nervous actually," David admitted. "But when I get nervous I tend to get too excited. Which is usually fine."
He rubbed his hands together and looked at his teammates.
"Feed me whenever you can today," he said. "And dinner after is on me. Anywhere you want."
The unanimous nod from the squad was immediate and sincere.
Arsenal emerged from the tunnel and the game began.
The first twenty minutes confirmed what the surface-level analysis had suggested: Malmö were a competent Swedish league side and a significant step below what Arsenal played against every week in the Premier League. The pressing was organised but not sufficiently intense to prevent Arsenal building with comfort. The defensive lines were disciplined but the gaps appeared quickly when Arsenal increased the tempo.
Thirteen minutes in, Cazorla had drawn three defenders toward him with a sequence of quick touches on both feet, moving the ball between left and right with the equanimity of someone who has made peace with the fact that they have no weak side. David had been watching the space that was opening to the right of Cazorla's orbit and had already begun moving into it before the pass was played.
He felt the approach of Larsson behind him and without checking, sensed the gap between the midfielder's legs.
He let the ball roll between Larsson's feet.
The stadium made the kind of sound that a crowd produces involuntarily when something exceeds their expectation, a sharp collective intake of breath before the noise. David was already accelerating, the ball retrieved on the other side of the nutmeg, driving toward the penalty area.
One cut took him past Malmö's right back. Then he was inside the area, left foot, a low driven shot that hit the post and came back into play.
The stadium exhaled. The Malmö supporters, who had been expecting a difficult evening, discovered that difficult had turned out to be an understatement.
Wenger and Pat Rice leaned forward from the bench. The post had kept it out, but the sequence preceding it had not gone unnoticed.
Arsenal continued to press. In the twenty-fifth minute, Ramsey looked at the density of bodies between himself and the goal and had a very specific memory: a training session, the exact kind of packed space, and the certainty that if you gave it to David something would come out the other side.
"Aaron!" David's voice carried over the noise.
Ramsey played it.
David received it at the left edge of the penalty area with two large defenders immediately behind him.
He pulled the ball back sharply with his right foot, which sent Larsson's momentum in completely the wrong direction. Then he turned, not backward toward safety but forward into the congestion, the kind of decision that looks reckless until it works.
The Malmö number four was slow to cover the lane that had opened. David read it in the same instant and drove through the gap, tucking the ball away from one challenge.
Malmö's academy product Bengtsson arrived with the committed lunge of a defender who has been told that this is the moment to stop the attack.
David moved the ball between his legs in a single, unhurried motion.
He was inside the six-yard box. Four defenders passed. The goalkeeper making eye contact.
Giroud was standing in the penalty area watching all of this with the absorbed attention of a man at an exhibition he had specifically come to see, when the ball arrived at his feet from a pass that appeared through the goalkeeper's legs.
He looked at it.
He kicked it into the net.
The goal was given.
The Malmö stadium rose. Even the home supporters stood, because some moments in football transcend the result they produce, and this was one of them. The four-man dribble, the nutmeg to end it, the impossibility of the pass itself, all of it in the space of a few seconds inside a packed penalty area.
"We're genuinely good," Giroud said in the corner flag celebration, with the simple wonder of a man who has just understood something for the first time.
"The ball was right there," David said.
"The ball was right there because you made it right there," Cazorla said, which was accurate.
"That's the talent combined with the work," David said, with the comfortable certainty of someone who has thought about this and arrived at an answer he believes in.
Giroud repeated it softly to himself, filing it.
Ramsey looked at his own feet briefly, then looked at the goal, then looked at David. He was thinking about the training session. He had learned something today that he was going to apply every time David called for the ball for the rest of the season.
Sánchez had watched the sequence from twenty metres away and found himself smiling without having decided to. He had been one of the best players at this club for two years. He had never quite been able to make the team feel the way it felt right now. Some players had this quality and some did not, and there was no reliable training method for it. What you could do, if you were honest with yourself and paid attention, was recognise it and find a way to make yourself useful inside it.
He was finding that.
On the touchline, Wenger turned to Rice with the expression of a man whose expectation has been exceeded.
"Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four," he said, "the improvements a player can make are extraordinary. Sometimes you look away for a month and when you look back they are different."
"He's a different player than he was in August," Rice said.
"Yes. He is."
Arsenal restarted and Malmö, still processing the blow, found themselves slow and reactive throughout the remainder of the first half. They were not a bad side. They were simply operating in the presence of something beyond their experience.
In the thirty-eighth minute, David and Monreal worked a quick combination on the left flank, the two of them exchanging passes with a fluency that had developed across months of training. Monreal's heel redirected the ball forward, Cazorla turned it first-time with his left foot, and the delivery arrived exactly where David had begun his run.
He hit it from distance with the full weight of his right foot behind it.
The ball reached the top right corner before the goalkeeper's dive was halfway complete.
Two-nil.
David sprinted to the corner flag and slid fifteen metres on his knees, then jumped and saluted the Arsenal supporters in the away section.
His first Champions League goal.
He had considered this moment before, not with anxiety but with a particular kind of patient desire, the way you consider a place you have been told about and intend to visit. The Europa League record was its own achievement and he was proud of it. But the Champions League was the mountain, and the first goal was the first step, and he intended to take a great many more.
At sixty-four minutes, with Arsenal two goals ahead and the match presenting no meaningful challenge, Wenger made his substitutions. David came off alongside several others.
Wenger had already charted September's schedule in his head: Watford in two days, the League Cup third round against Tottenham five days after that, Leicester in the league a further two days on, then the second Champions League group stage match. The calendar was dense. The choices made now would shape what was available later.
Final score: Malmö nil, Arsenal two.
One goal, one assist. A clean sheet in the first Champions League match of his career.
David sat in the away dressing room with his boots off, listening to the anthem play through the stadium speakers as the crowd dispersed, and thought about what came next.
The mountain was long. He was just beginning.
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