Credit - The Obi One Podcast

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John Obi Mikel Calls Arsenal Cheats But Refuses To Badmouth Man City Players

Arsenal, Chelsea, John Obi Mikel, Manchester City, Premier League

The heated online debate over former Chelsea midfielder John Obi Mikel exemplifies a stark logical contradiction in modern football punditry.

Mikel drew harsh criticism from the global football community when he spoke on The Obi One Podcast, condemning Arsenal‘s physical set-piece tactics while simultaneously defending Manchester City in their massive financial regulatory trial.

Obi Mikel went viral after claiming that Mikel Arteta‘s Arsenal were attempting to “cheat” their way to the Premier League title. He branded their tactical corner-kick routines, which included physical obstruction and blocking defensive lines to cage opposing goalkeepers, as an “illegal” and “lazy” method of winning football games.

When I watch Arsenal play right now, they depend solely, solely on corner kicks. You have spent almost a billion, Michael Arteta, almost a billion.

And you’re telling me the only way you can win games is through corner kicks? You look at the corner kicks, they holding the players… It’s illegal.

The creativity that they have, the potentials that they have, it’s all gone out of the window. We don’t see them anymore because they depend solely on corner kicks.

He went so far as to openly declare that he would never accept the North London club as legitimate Premier League champions if they won primarily through set pieces, as he spoke to the Talksport before Arsenal won the title of 2025-26 season.

Because for me, they’ve cheated their way to winning the Premier League. It’s illegal the way they’re winning games. It’s illegal.

We don’t want to see that in the game. I think 13 games this season, when they haven’t scored set pieces, they won three of those games. It shows you how much they depend solely on corner kicks.

This harsh stance immediately raised concerns among supporters, who believed his sporting ethics were heavily skewed against the Gunners.

However, Mikel’s strict sporting moral code vanished when Manchester City was found to have violated numerous financial regulations.

Despite openly admitting that corporate manipulation and institutional rule-breaking directly assisted City in organizing and assembling a world-class superpower squad, he fiercely defended their silverware from retroactive removal.

Credit: Youtube

He shared his opinion on The Obi One Podcast, to the host Chris McHardy,

I wouldn’t want to be handed a Premier League now and saying, yeah, strip it and say, give me a Premier League. No, no, I wouldn’t want to be in the Premier League that way.

Absolutely not. Because we like to compete. We like to compete on the pitch.

We like to compete against the best or we have to compete against whoever is in front of us. We want to beat whoever in front of us. We want to compete against whoever is in front of us.

So for me, yes, would I be upset? Yes. But right now, would I look at it and say, yes, I competed against Fernandinho, Yaya Torre back then. Did they cheat? Did they put the squad together and beat us some of the times when we lost against them? No, because I was happy to compete against Yaya Torre.

I was happy to compete against Fernandinho, Aguero, because I looked at that squad and thought, this is the team to beat. If we want to become champions, if we want to call ourselves champions, you have to beat the best team. But we need to be careful, right? Should they face the punishment? Absolutely.

He claimed he would be the last person to sit there and criticize what their team accomplished on the field, emphasizing Pep Guardiola‘s enormous sacrifices, sleepless nights, and undeniable tactical genius.

If they found guilty, but stripping them of the titles of what they’ve done on the pitch, the commitment, the hard work of the players and the manager, sleepless nights that they’ve had, sacrifices that they’ve done to achieve what they’ve achieved, you compete on the pitch. Yes, that cheating helped them create and organize and form one of the best squads. Yes.

Put together some the best. Yes. But at the end of the day, you compete as players.
It’s you against I. I don’t want, when I was competing, we don’t care who was in front of us. Drogba didn’t care who was in front of him. JT didn’t care whether it’s Aguero or Adebayo or who, or David Silva.

Mikel firmly argued that professional football players cannot influence high-level boardroom decisions and must simply sign contracts to perform optimally between the white lines.

My job is how do I fucking stop David Silva from running behind me, from creating those chances? Because I want to compete against the and they were the best. Not disrespect to Stoke City and all these teams that we come up with, but the City team back then were the best team.
And we were always happy to compete against them.

Mikel believes that a beautifully constructed team operating on an illegal corporate foundation deserves athletic respect, whereas a completely law-abiding squad executing an aggressive, frustrating set-piece style on the field deserves to be labeled as cheats.

This made some fans call him out as idiot and stupid.

This massive double standard elicited an immediate, explosive backlash from passionate football fans and media pundits alike, who rushed to point out the incredible irony of his remarks.

Prominent Arsenal fan accounts, such as WelBeast, bluntly labeled Mikel an absolute idiot in viral posts that received hundreds of thousands of views on social media.

Supporters easily dismantled his arguments by pointing out that corner routines are well-organized, referee-monitored, and fully compliant with the game’s established rules.

How dumb can someone be. Corner kicks are part of the game and has never mattered when other teams including Chelsea score with them. How is the guy a pundit, with so much bias.

Manchester City, on the other hand, used systematic financial engineering to get around strict spending caps and build an elite squad depth that their direct competitors couldn’t legally match.

Furthermore, critics quickly pointed to Mikel’s previous playing history at Stamford Bridge under Roman Abramovich. They reminded the retired midfielder that he won his silverware while playing under Jose Mourinho‘s pragmatic, negative defensive style, which rivals frequently mocked as “parking the bus.”

Fans contended that if off-pitch financial doping is dismissed as mere boardroom background noise, Mikel must retroactively invalidate his own trophy cabinet.

Chelsea faced 74 charges, and exactly during the time u was playing there… I don’t see any difference between Chelsea and Man City. Your trophies were won through fraud, too.

Finally, the football community has largely rejected his comments, viewing them as a romanticized athlete’s bias that protects corporate financial rule-breaking while demonizing legal, pragmatic football tactics. It demonstrates how modern punditry can deeply divide fans based on their individual sporting preferences.

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