Mikel Arteta will take Arsenal to Selhurst Park on Sunday for their final domestic match of the season, a game officials expect to treat largely as a holding exercise ahead of next weekend’s Champions League final. The trip to Crystal Palace arrives two days after Manchester City’s 1-1 draw with Bournemouth on Tuesday evening, which sealed Arsenal’s first Premier League title since 2003–04.
The scale of the change-up is clear: Arteta is likely to make wholesale alterations to his starting XI and is expected to rest Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice and Gabriel. With the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain looming, Arsenal will use the Selhurst Park fixture as a chance to preserve their main players and test fringe options in competitive conditions.
That decision matters now because Sunday is Arsenal’s first match since being confirmed as champions. The club have a single domestic fixture left and a major continental final to prepare for next weekend; managing minutes over these eight days will determine how fresh the squad arrives in Paris. For a manager who has driven a young team through a title race, the Selhurst Park selection will be the clearest signal yet of priorities for the summer’s biggest match.
Rotation will create opportunities. Kepa Arrizabalaga is in line to start, having played no part in Arsenal’s title-winning campaign and spent 37 gameweeks as a backup. With first-choice right-backs Ben White and Jurriën Timber still unavailable and Mikel Merino absent, Arteta’s options on the right flank are limited; Cristhian Mosquera remains the club’s only established option there for now. The selection headache is not just about rest, it is about availability.
Crystal Palace arrive at Selhurst Park with their own focus split. They are due to play Rayo Vallecano in the Conference League final on Wednesday, and that commitment will shape their selection and intensity on Sunday. Both clubs, for different reasons, are juggling two objectives in the same week: Arsenal the defence of bodies for a Champions League final, Palace the pursuit of European silverware in Seville.
The tension is obvious. Arsenal have won the league and now must choose when to ride the momentum and when to shelter it; resting Saka, Rice and Gabriel lowers the immediate ceiling for Sunday’s XI but raises the odds of the best team being fit for Paris. Meanwhile, Palace cannot simply surrender Selhurst Park if they hope to build confidence ahead of a continental final — and that creates a plausible scenario in which both sides field weakened lineups but still contest a competitive, unpredictable match.
What happens next is straightforward: Arteta will announce a rotated side and several regular starters will be absent. The selection should deliver a test for squad players and a platform for those on the fringes to stake a claim for the Champions League match. It will also lay bare whether Arsenal’s depth is sufficient to absorb short-term drop-offs in quality without surrendering the kind of momentum the manager has so carefully built.
In the end, this match will mean more as a rehearsal than a reckoning. Arteta is almost certain to prioritise the Champions League final and, by extension, to accept the risk that heavy rotation brings at Selhurst Park. For supporters who want to see the title winners finish on a flourish, that will be a compromise; for a team finally back at European football’s biggest table, it is a calculated one.
