All eyes on Budapest
Handbrake Off: The Athletic FC's Arsenal show
The Athletic
4.6 • 734 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Adrian Clarke and Art de Roche join Ian Stone to look ahead to the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain on Saturday.
The panel discuss the confidence level of the squad after winning the Premier League, how Arsenal’s defence can nullify the oppositions strengths, comparing both teams Champions League campaigns, their preferred starting lineups, getting used to how good Arsenal are right now, what winning the Champions League would mean, Declan Rice being a key player in this game and touch on his class after his message to West Ham following their relegation.
Plus, the panel respond to listener messages and we hear from Quentin in Paris in this week’s instalment of ‘Up Your Arsenal’.
If you like the panel’s song choices, check out the ‘Now that’s what I call Handbrake’ playlist on both Spotify and Apple Music and listen to them all there:
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/now-thats-what-i-call-handbrake/pl.u-d2b00jZuDxWk6P
Producer: Robby Williams
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Athletic FC. |
| 0:07.1 | The only way to score is, of course, to play with a handbreak-off. |
| 0:14.7 | Hello, I'm Ian Stone. This is Hand-Break-Off, the Arsenal podcast, brought to you by The Athletic. |
| 0:20.5 | Well, today we're going to look ahead to the Champions League final, Arsenal against PSG. I'm joined by Art de Roche and Adrian Clark. Good afternoon. Hello. Good afternoon. Afternoon. This is actually going out Thursday morning, apparently. If you're up at six, I don't know why you would do that. But let's just say you have to get up at 6 for some reason. You can listen to us right then. We're recording it Wednesday afternoon. Oh my God, we're playing in a Champions League final on Saturday. It's a bit, it's all a bit mad. It's not a line you've said in the pod before with previewing the Champions League final, is it? |
| 0:54.9 | No, no, because when we were last in the Champions League Final, I wasn't doing a pod. |
| 0:59.1 | Podcast didn't exist, really. |
| 1:02.0 | Well, it might have done, but I wasn't doing one. |
| 1:04.2 | Yeah, after the Champions League Final, there's going to be a trophy parade. |
| 1:08.8 | Sunday, May the 31st, it all starts at 2 o'clock. |
| 1:12.1 | I find to think people will get there on about Friday afternoon, to be honest with you. |
| 1:16.0 | It'd be like a working class Wimbledon, won't it? The similar sort of vibe, right? |
| 1:21.5 | And celebrating, of course, winning the league, hopefully the Champions League. |
| 1:25.7 | Apparently also, Arsenal, when will be part of the parade as well, showing off the FIFA Champions Cup. |
| 1:31.5 | They estimate between half a million and a million people expected to show up. |
| 1:36.9 | Now, here's the thing. |
| 1:38.3 | Have you ever been to a parade, by the way? |
| 1:40.3 | Have you been to a way? |
| 1:41.3 | No, no. |
| 1:42.3 | Well, I went to the Women's Champions League one last year, but this one's going to be |
| 1:46.3 | a much bigger scale. So, uh, not an Arsenal men's parade, no. No. Have you, Adrian? Have you, have you? I've worked on a couple. Yeah, I worked on a couple. But I haven't been stood there for hours. I sort of talked over pictures once |
| 1:58.9 | and then I had to do |
| 1:59.9 | some live interviews |
... |
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