Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta decided to make a barbecue rather than watch the match that clinched his team the Premier League title.

Arteta was due to watch the Bournemouth-Manchester City game with Arsenal's players and coaching staff at the club's London Colney training base on Tuesday evening, but he left before kickoff because “I couldn’t bring the energy that I wanted.”

Instead, he went home and started to grill in his yard, only “hearing some noises in the background” as second-place City could only draw 1-1 to leave Arsenal as English champion for the first time since 2004.

“My oldest son opened the garden door,” Arteta said, describing the moment he discovered Arsenal had won the title. "He started to run towards me, he started to cry, he gave me a hug and said, ‘We are champions, daddy.’

“And then my other two boys and my wife came over and it was beautiful, just to see that joy on them as well ... it was magical.”

Thousands of supporters — and some of the team's players — celebrated outside Arsenal's Emirates Stadium deep into the night, and Arteta was struck by how much it meant to a fan base that had lived through runner-up finishes in the league in each of the last three seasons.

Arteta described it as an “emotional explosion.”

“Everybody’s been just keeping emotions and living those emotions, but not being able to really express them,” he said Thursday. “So when we opened that bottle, I think everybody had so much release and it’s been incredible to witness.”

Arteta said he had questioned himself about whether he was “good enough to lead this team, this club, these players to win a major trophy.”

“Until you do it, you cannot validate yourself,” Arteta said.

“What I’m the most proud,” he added, “is how we’ve won it. Because we showed very important values, not only in sport but in life as well, which is perseverance, to be resilient, to be composed in moments when people are doubting. To be vulnerable.”

Arsenal's players will lift the trophy after the game at Crystal Palace on Sunday in the Premier League's final round.

The Gunners will then play the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest on May 30. A parade is set for the next day in north London — and it could be a double celebration.

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Spying on its opponents has potentially cost English soccer club Southampton a place in the Premier League and around $270 million.

The team from England's southcoast was expelled Tuesday from the second-tier Championship playoff final after admitting to the unauthorized filming of other clubs’ practice sessions.

The playoff final is labelled the world’s richest one-off soccer match because a windfall of at least 200 million pounds ($270 million) in future Premier League earnings is on offer for the winning team.

It isn't the first example of espionage in the world of sports as teams look to gain an advantage over their rivals.

Here are some others:

New England Patriots sanctioned twice

The Patriots didn't learn their lesson.

In 2007, the Patriots were caught using video to record the New York Jets' signals during an NFL game. Coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000, and the Patriots were fined $250,000 and docked a first-round draft pick.

Twelve years after that episode — widely known as Spygate — the team acknowledged that a video crew filmed the Cincinnati Bengals sideline during a game against Cleveland Browns, a week before the Bengals hosted the Patriots.

The Patriots were fined $1.1 million and had a third-round pick in the 2021 draft taken away.

Canada's drone spying scandal at the Olympics

Spying even got into the Olympics when Canada's defending champion women's team flew drones over New Zealand's closed practice sessions ahead of the teams' match that opened the Paris Games in 2024.

Canada coach Bev Priestman was suspended and removed from the team for the Olympics and two staff members were sent home.

FIFA weighed in, fining Canada Soccer $228,000 and docking the team six points at the Olympic tournament. Canada still advanced, before losing in the quarterfinals and suspending Priestman and the staffers for a year. The governing body accused Canada of "offensive behavior and violation of the principles of fair play.”

Baseball's 2017 champions were busted for stealing signs

The Houston Astros used more basic technology in a sign-stealing scandal that rocked Major League Baseball in 2020 — a camera, a TV monitor, and most famously, a trash can.

MLB's investigation that year found the Astros used a scheme during their 2017 World Series title run to steal signs relayed between opposing catchers and pitchers. A camera in center field zoomed in on the catcher and fed a monitor near Houston's dugout during home games. Teammates would study the catcher's signs on the monitor, then bang on a trash can to indicate to the batter if the next pitch would be a fastball or something offspeed.

Manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow were fired in the fallout, as was ex-Astros bench coach Alex Cora from his managerial job with the Boston Red Sox. Cora was later re-hired by Boston, and Hinch now manages in Detroit. No players were punished, and the Astros held onto their status as 2017 champions — although many fans view it with an asterisk.

The scandal sped up efforts by MLB to introduce technology to prevent other forms of sign-stealing, resulting in the PitchCom system approved for use in 2022. Now, catchers call pitches by pressing buttons on a remote control attached to a wristband or shin guard that sends audio signals to a device in the pitcher's hat.

McLaren gets $100M fine in F1 scandal

A 2007 spying scandal led to the McLaren Formula 1 team copping a $100 million fine.

As McLaren and Ferrari drivers battled for the title on the track that year, details emerged of McLaren staff having obtained confidential technical information about Ferrari’s car design.

One unlikely hero of the “Spygate” saga was a British copy shop manager who informed Ferrari when he spotted a customer, who turned out to be a McLaren engineer’s wife, making copies of the documents.

McLaren was eventually handed the vast fine and stripped of all its points in that year’s constructors’ championship. Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen won the drivers’ title when he beat McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso at the last race of the year.

Bielsa owns up after Leeds' season-long spying

News of Southampton's spying took soccer fans in England back to 2019, when Leeds — at the time managed by Argentine coaching great Marcelo Bielsa — was fined 200,000 pounds (then $259,000) for spying on one of Derby's training sessions ahead of a second-tier Championship game between the teams.

Bielsa accepted responsibility for having a club employee spy on Derby and, in a detailed, hour-long news conference, admitted to having watched at least one of each of his opponents’ training sessions throughout the season.

In handing out the fine, the English Football League said Leeds’ conduct “fell significantly short of the standards expected by the EFL and must not be repeated.”

Seven years later, Southampton did the same and got severely punished for it.

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AP Sports Writer James Ellingworth contributed to this story.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

MANCHESTER, England (AP) — Pep Guardiola’s record-breaking, 10-year tenure at Manchester City might be coming to a close, according to reports in the British media.

City wouldn’t comment on stories from outlets including national broadcaster the BBC and the Daily Mail that Guardiola is expected to leave the club at the end of this season. He has a year left on his contract.

Enzo Maresca, the former Chelsea manager who was previously assistant to Guardiola at City, is the leading contender to take over, according to the BBC. There was no immediate response from Maresca’s representatives when contacted by The Associated Press.

Guardiola, who has won 17 major trophies at City since arriving in English soccer in 2016, has repeatedly been asked in recent weeks whether he would be staying at City beyond this season.

On Monday, he rolled his eyes when another question was posed about his future and answered: “I’ve said so many times, I have one more year.”

In overseeing the most successful period in City’s history in his decade in charge, Guardiola has spent longer at the club than he did at Barcelona (2008-12) and Bayern Munich (2013-16).

His biggest achievement at City has been winning the Premier League-Champions League-FA Cup treble in the 2022-23 season, emulating the feat of Manchester United in 1999.

Guardiola’s City team has won the Premier League six times and became the only team in the nearly 140-year history of English soccer to win four top-flight league titles in a row (2021-24), the first team to earn 100 points in a top-flight season (2017-18), and the first team to win the domestic treble of the league, FA Cup and League Cup in the same season (2018-19).

This season, City has won both the League Cup and FA Cup and is second behind Arsenal in the Premier League, needing to beat Bournemouth on Tuesday to keep the title race going until the final round on Sunday. City is five points behind Arsenal.

Guardiola has also changed the face of English soccer in general, bringing a style of football — a possession-based approach that started with playing the ball out from the goalkeeper or defense — that ended up being mimicked across the country, from kids’ teams at grassroots level to rival teams in the Premier League.

Asked Monday if he thought a stand at City’s Etihad Stadium should be named after him, Guardiola said: “The important thing in our lives is when you look back, you can say, ‘Wow.’ You can look with a big smile and (say) that was good."

“I am pretty sure,” he added, “most of the people who lived this time together can feel that.”

The final years of Guardiola’s time at City has been under something of a cloud, with the club currently involved in a huge legal case with the Premier League. City was charged by the league in February 2023 with more than 100 financial breaches, including providing misleading information about its sources of income.

The case was heard by an independent commission between September and December in 2024 but no verdict has been reached.

Punishment could be as extreme as expulsion from the top flight. City has always denied the charges and Guardiola has said he is “fully convinced that we will be innocent.”

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Douglas reported from Sundsvall, Sweden.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer