The last time Manchester City and Arsenal faced each other in the League Cup final, Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta sat side by side in the Wembley dugout as head coach and assistant before celebrating as their City team destroyed the Gunners 3-0 and claimed the first of piece of silverware of the former's time in England. The rampant win only crystalized the widening gap between the two clubs.City and Arsenal had never previously considered themselves rivals until Sheikh Mansour and the United Arab Emirates set their sights on the blue half of Manchester and quickly established a new empire to compete with the established order, of which the Gunners were one of the proud leaders.City's already striking land grab of English football was turbocharged by Guardiola's appointment, and Arsenal threatened to be confined to irrelevance as a result. That was until Arteta switched sides and returned to the club where he had spent the final years of his playing career. Having watched Arsenal's decline under Arsene Wenger from the inside, Arteta was uniquely placed to plot the club's resurgence. He developed his own critique and as coach has reshaped Arsenal in his own direction. The Spaniard has veered from the irresistible but often naive style Wenger was renowned for and instead embraced a more scientific vision of football, prioritising physical prowess and efficiency at scoring from set pieces over joie de vivre. Like it or loathe it, Arteta has turned Arsenal into a formidable force that have reined City in and risen above them. They are nine points clear of Guardiola's side in the title race and are in the Champions League quarter-finals while the Blues are licking their wounds from yet another elimination at the hands of Real Madrid. At Wembley on Sunday, Arsenal will be hoping to cement all the progress they have made under Arteta and beat City in the Carabao Cup final to claim the first of what could be an incredible four trophies. Guardiola has, meanwhile, admitted that his side are, for once, the underdogs: "We challenge the best team in England, the best team in Europe."GOAL charts the history of a rivalry that has been bubbling away for years and has finally reached boiling point...Arsenal had already suffered the trauma of being overtaken by Chelsea following Roman Abramovich's takeover, so news that City had been bought by an even richer sovereign wealth fund hit the north London club like an earthquake. And Wenger, who had denounced Chelsea for practising "financial doping", was quick to call for tighter regulation to keep a leash on City's sudden explosion in spending."The beauty of sport is to respect the rules and to win. People who do not should not be allowed to win," he said.Wenger's fears that nouveau-riche City would poach his side's best players came true, as Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure signed for the Blues in the summer of 2009 for £25 million and £14 million, respectively. It made for a powder keg atmosphere when the two teams met in Manchester a few weeks later, with Arsenal fans taunting Adebayor throughout. The striker exacted his revenge by heading in the third goal in City's 4-2 win and running the length of the pitch to goad the Gunners supporters, who responded by hurling objects at him.After winning the FA Cup in 2011 and ending a 35-year trophy drought, City continued to strengthen. And as well making Sergio Aguero their record signing for £38m, they continued to raid Arsenal, signing Gael Clichy and Samir Nasri. The loss of Nasri was particularly painful to Wenger, who had said his side "could not be called a big club" if they sold the French playmaker as well as Cesc Fabregas, who joined Barcelona that summerThe Gunners' fragile squad was laid bare by their 8-2 thrashing at the hands of Manchester United in August and prompted a flurry of signings on transfer deadline day. The most important recruit would turn out to be the Spanish midfielder signed from Everton by the name of Mikel Arteta.Add GOAL.com as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reportingWhen Arteta retired from football in 2016, he made an eye-catching next move, snubbing the offer to work in Arsenal's academy to instead become number to to the newly-arrived Guardiola at City.Now he was working side by side the best coach in the world, having played under one of the best managers of the previous two decades in Wenger. It was the perfect apprenticeship for Arteta's own move into management, which many people expected to be as Guardiola's eventual successor at the Etihad Stadium.The gulf between Guardiola's City and Wenger's Arsenal was exposed in the most brutal manner possible in two 3-0 drubbings in the space of five days. First, City brushed the Gunners aside at Wembley in the Carabao Cup final, before history repeated itself at the Emirates Stadium amid a toxic atmosphere. The second defeat was made even worse by the swathes of empty seats that were visible throughout, which Wenger tried to blame on the snow. But there was no hiding from the fact that these were the dying embers of his long reign as Arsenal boss, and little more than a month later, his departure was announced.Encouraged by Guardiola, Arteta had applied to be Wenger's successor in 2018, but he was deemed to not have the adequate experience, with Unai Emery getting the nod instead. But less than 18 months later, Emery was sacked and this time Arteta was the man Arsenal wanted, and eventually got. Just days after Arteta had sat alongside Guardiola in the visiting dugout at the Emirates and watched City ease to victory, a Gunners delegation arrived at his house in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury to convince him to forge his own path as a head coach.Arsenal were 10th in the table when Arteta joined, and although he only managed to steer them to eighth, he gave a positive sign of what was to come by inspiring the Gunners to win the FA Cup, knocking out City along the way in the semi-finals.Unusually, a sign that Arsenal were building something special under Arteta came with an agonising defeat at home to City on New Year's Day 2022. Arteta was unable to attend the game as he had Covid-19, but Bukayo Saka gave the Gunners the lead amid a scorching atmosphere at the Emirates, and the team continued to battle on after Riyad Mahrez had equalised from the penalty spot and Gabriel Magalhaes had been sent off. Rodri nicked victory at the end for City, and even though they ended up missing out on Champions League football to Tottenham, many Arsenal fans present that day see that game as the moment they realised their true potential.Arsenal spent big in the summer of 2022, and where better to look to take the team to the next level than Arteta's former charges at City, Oleksandr Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus? It was a thinly-veiled attempt to imprint some of that City serial-winning DNA on Arsenal - and it worked, as Zinchenko told his team-mates soon after arriving that they were capable of winning the Premier League title.No one believed him at the time, but he was on to something as Arsenal marched to the top of the table and remained there until April, when City, gunning for the treble, overhauled them and clinched the title with three games to spare. The Gunners were inevitably labelled as 'bottlers', but the truth is that no one expected them to be in the race at the start of the season and there was a strong sense that there would be much more to come.Arsenal subsequently beefed their squad up with the signings Declan Rice, Kai Havertz and Jurrien Timber, and although the Dutch defender was soon ruled out for the season with a knee injury, the new additions helped them go toe-to-toe with City again.Arteta's side beat City for the first time in the league since 2015 at the Emirates, and the Gunners also held their own in the away game at the Etihad Stadium, drawing 0-0 to keep themselves in what was proving to be a far tighter title race.In the end, it was a home capitulation to Aston Villa which let Arsenal down, and on the final day of the season City clinched an English-record fourth consecutive title. But while there was understandable deflation at losing out to City once more, Arsenal could also feel they were getting closer and closer to overhauling their rivals.The two teams met days after the hearing into the Premier League's 115 charges against City began, and Guardiola stoked the simmering rivalry between the two clubs by declaring that the his side's opponents, including the Gunners, wanted them "wiped off the face of the earth". The match was also played in an ill-tempered atmosphere, with City fans repeatedly chanting "Champions again", which Arsenal supporters responded to by chanting "Cheating again".On the pitch there was more anger as Leandro Trossard was sent off for Arsenal while City's star midfielder Rodri was forced off with a serious knee injury. Ten-man Arsenal clung on to the lead until the 99th minute, when John Stones made it 2-2 and sparked defiant celebrations from City's players, during which Erling Haaland threw the ball at Gabriel, urged Arsenal to "stay humble" and asked Myles Lewis-Skelly, 'Who the f*ck are you?!'.Even though City had avoided defeat, it was clear that Arsenal were getting under their skin and they didn't like it one bit.All those morale-sucking defeats to City and missing out on two titles faded into nothing for Arsenal when they utterly thrashed Guardiola's side at the Emirates in February 2025, winning 5-1. The cherry on the icing on the cake came when Lewis-Skelly found the net and then told Haaland exactly who he was by cheekily enacting his meditation celebration.Almost a year to the day from their ill-tempered meeting at the Etihad in 2025, Arsenal and City played out another intense draw featuring a last-gasp equaliser, although this time it was the Gunners who were celebrating snatching a point.Gabriel Martinelli's injury-time chip could go a long way to ending Arsenal's long wait to win the title come the end of the season, as it worth three points in total. But even before the equaliser, the game was significant because it was a total reversal of roles, with Guardiola deploying negative tactics and playing on the counter-attack before parking the bus.It showed that the hunted had become the hunters.