Arsenal walked into the Amex Stadium unbeaten and walked out having conceded three without reply, Brighton finishing the rout with a corner-kick goal against the one team in England that was supposed to defend those. Four straight wins to open the title defense, gone in ninety minutes. Mikel Arteta's side had looked like the sport's most inevitable machine since August. Brighton reminded everyone that inevitability is a marketing term, not a football result.

Here is what the scoreline actually does: it hands every chasing club in the league a data point they didn't have on Friday, proof of concept that Arsenal's back line has a soft spot even set-piece specialists can find. The Premier League sells itself globally on exactly this kind of unpredictability, a title race that can't be called in September, which is a large part of why the league's overseas broadcast rights keep climbing every renewal cycle. Arsenal just did the league's marketing department an inadvertent favor. The table will forgive one bad Saturday. The corner-kick tape will not.