Gabriel Jesus can still remember the journey home.
The match wasn’t even over. He was in a car with his daughter and his wife. There was none of the usual laughing and joking. The mood was anvil-heavy. Jesus was silent.
His left knee ached. He had been injured before but this was different. “I knew I had done something bad,” he tells The Athletic.
A thousand thoughts passed through his head. Jesus had started the previous four Premier League games, scoring three times, his best run of form in some time. Arsenal were in the title race. He had a second child on the way and so much to look forward to. Then, in an FA Cup match against Manchester United, it all seemed to fall apart. A twist, a stretcher, darkness.
Gabriel Jesus injured his knee against Manchester United in January 2025 (Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)
“It was one of the toughest days of my life,” Jesus says. Another contender would arrive in short order, doctors confirming that he had ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament. “I was like, ‘Oh my days, a difficult time is coming’,” he recalls.
He was not wrong. This was January 2025. He would not play again for almost a year.
In the first weeks after the injury, time stretched out before him. He worried about his career. He worried about his daughter seeing his anguish. “I was very scared,” says Jesus. “There were a lot of emotions and feelings.”
That things improved from that point is obvious from the way Jesus talks about those difficult times. He is sanguine, even peppy. It helps that he is fit again, ready to contribute to Arsenal’s quadruple push, but it’s not just that. He seems at peace with himself. He speaks about that long absence — the part after the initial shock, at least — as if it were some kind of spiritual retreat.
Early on in his recovery, Jesus spoke with a mental-health professional in Brazil. It was a positive experience. “You can open up and talk about yourself, knowing that no one is going to judge you,” he says. “She helped me understand what I was feeling.”
Religion also played a part. He spoke to the pastor at his church multiple times a week, read the Bible in quiet moments. “Reconnecting with Jesus was the most beautiful thing that has happened in my life,” he explains. “I always had my faith but I never went very deep with it. I took the time to understand what the priorities in my life were.”
Arsenal allowed Jesus to spend the summer in Brazil. His son was born there in June. Here, too, he was able to explore a side of himself that had previously been dormant. “As a player, you travel all the time,” he says. “You miss a lot of important dates with the family, with your kids, with your wife. For 10, 11 months, I could be more present in my home. I missed football, but outside of football, I was the happiest man in the world.”
Throughout his recovery, Jesus was buoyed by the support he received, both from team-mates and further afield. Among the letters he received was one from Real Madrid. “I remember my first injury, back at (Manchester) City… Madrid sent me a letter,” he says. “Since then, unfortunately, they’ve sent me three or four more! I keep all of them at home.”
Another message he cherished was from Ronaldo, the former Brazil striker. “If you ask me who inspires me the most, I will say Ronaldo, R9,” explains Jesus. “Even after suffering such tough injuries… the way he came back and did what he did? Wow. The guy was a beast.”
On December 10, Jesus resurfaced, appearing in the Champions League victory against Club Brugge. His elation was palpable in a post-match interview. It was tempting to interpret it as relief. Yet he says that even at his lowest ebb, he always expected to make it back.
“I was not scared,” he says. “I (never) thought, ‘Maybe it’s done’, or something. I knew that I would come back well. In that game in Bruges, I realised that, when you have faith in God and don’t doubt his plan, everything is possible. It was a very, very good night.”
Gabriel Jesus made his comeback in the 3-0 win at Club Brugge in December (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
Jesus tells a story that lays bare the extent to which things have changed at Arsenal since he arrived at the club in July 2022.
It dates back to a few weeks after his arrival. Jesus, fresh from winning his fourth Premier League title with Manchester City and buoyed by Arsenal’s performances in pre-season, made a bullish declaration. He told his team-mates that Arsenal could win the title.
“A few of them laughed,” Jesus recalls. “They said, ‘Ah, maybe you signed for the wrong club’. I asked them why. With the quality in our team, why couldn’t we go and win the league?”
Belief took hold over the course of the campaign, Jesus says. Arsenal would eventually come up short, but something in the club’s mentality shifted. “They could see that it was real: that Arsenal could go and win it,” he says.
Two further second-place finishes have tested the patience and, at times, shredded the nerves. Jesus admits that he did not expect such a long wait for his first trophy with Arsenal. Now, though, with a nine-point advantage over City (who do have a game in hand), it feels like they are on the verge of something.
“It’s a process that you have to respect,” says Jesus. “We’ve gone from fighting hard to qualify for the Champions League to fighting for the title. We need to be happy about that. Our team is now more experienced, more mature. We can win the league this season and maybe another trophy as well.”
Jesus has never won the Champions League. Is that the ultimate goal for the remainder of the campaign? “The Arsenal fans were probably going to say the Premier League because it’s been more than 20 years,” he says. “But they also never won the Champions League, so obviously for them it’s a dream to win both. Me, I want to win everything, but if I have to choose, it’s the Champions League.”
Arsenal’s first chance of silverware comes on Sunday, when they face City in the Carabao Cup final. Much of the focus, inevitably, will be on the battle between City coach Pep Guardiola and Arsenal counterpart Mikel Arteta, his former assistant in Manchester.
It was a mid-season phone call from Arteta to Guardiola that set the wheels in motion for Jesus’ move to London in 2022. Having played under both men, the forward is well qualified to speak about the comparison between the two.
“They share something in their DNA,” he says. “They want to win every single game. Even in training sessions, they get mad if something doesn’t work the way they expected it to. Obviously, Pep is older and has been in more situations where you win trophies, but Mikel has now been fighting for the league for three years in a row.
“This year, the way the team is playing, it’s about time for Mikel to reach another level. He’s an amazing coach.”
Gabriel Jesus has been coached by Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Jesus grins when asked which of the two pushes players harder in training. “Difficult, but Mikel,” he laughs. “We can say I’ve aged due to being with one for six years and the other for three. I’m older because of this!”
There is more cackling when Jesus tries to explain Arteta’s latest motivational technique. You may have read about the professional pickpockets and the secret freestyler. Now, it seems, there is something involving a box of matches and someone hiding under a table.
“It’s hard to explain,” says Jesus, his subsequent attempts really bearing this out. “Everyone was smiling, laughing. I would say we enjoy 99 per cent of his games. Sometimes it’s a little bit boring, but most of the time it’s amazing. It gives us a (different) energy. Normally it’s football, football, football, but when you play another game, you feel, ‘Oh, this is different’.
“You forget about football for a second, but all the games have similarities with football. That’s why he does it.”
Arsenal reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League on Tuesday. They are still in the FA Cup. They are on a four-match winning streak in the Premier League. Their blip in February, when they were held to successive league draws by Brentford and Wolves, now seems a lifetime ago.
Jesus, though, is keen to clear one thing up. Those two negative results, he says, were not attributable to some festering, unspoken angst bubbling away in the squad.
“It’s not about the pressure,” he says. “Maybe bad memories — losing a game, losing the league — come to our minds because we have been through this process three years in a row. Unfortunately, our level dropped in similar ways and at similar times. We speak about this. We change it, mentally, and we go for it.
“When you have (success), you can be scared of losing it. We still don’t have it, so we cannot be scared. We cannot lose something we don’t have. We need to go out there, game by game, and try to win.”
Gabriel Jesus celebrates his goal against Wigan Athletic last month (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
There were, Jesus admits, “strong talks” after the Wolves game. He says they cleared the air, laid the foundations for the games that have followed since.
“I have been in teams (in which) players nearly fight in the dressing room and that wasn’t the case,” he says. “We were not accusing each other… it was more like, ‘OK, we need to step on it and do better, every single one of us’. That was a key message.
“It was very good. Everyone was there. Even the board was there. Sometimes that needs to happen. Sometimes the players need to take a step forward, take ownership, take responsibility.”
He reels off a list of those who frequently speak up: Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka, David Raya, Declan Rice, Mikel Merino, Christian Norgaard. After January’s 3-2 defeat to Manchester United, it was Jesus himself. “Each game is different,” he says. “There isn’t a single person who tries to lift everyone up. All the teams I’ve played for have had big personalities. Arsenal is turning into (this type of culture) and that’s very good.”
Jesus also has plenty to say about the other hot-button topic surrounding Arsenal: their set-piece dominance and the hand-wringing about it in some quarters.
“Every single team scores from set pieces,” he says. “One scores more than the others because they train more. At City, we didn’t score a lot but we didn’t train a lot. Liverpool score a lot from set pieces. Just because it’s Arsenal, everyone talks. It’s because it’s the team leading the league. The fans sing the song and everyone gets mad, but set pieces are part of football.
“We are taking it as a positive, being able to win in so many different ways. Sometimes you cannot play well. Sometimes teams come to the Emirates and play deep; it’s hard to get through them. But we have set pieces, and massive guys who love to score. That’s good for us.”
Jesus loves working with Nicolas Jover, Arsenal’s set-piece coach, but admits he pushes the players hard. There were even more drills before the Chelsea match at the start of the month because Arsenal had not scored from a dead-ball situation in six games. “He was fuming,” laughs Jesus. “You could see he was more stressed.”
The result of the extra work? Two goals from corners against Chelsea. Jover must have been delighted — not least because, as revealed by The Athletichis contract includes a bonus clause for such goals.
“I didn’t know that,” says Jesus, smiling. “Sometimes, in a game like that one, it’s tough. We won the game with set pieces. That’s good. Three points.”
As for his personal ambitions, there is one obvious target on the horizon. Jesus was in the Brazil squad for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. He has not played for his country since 2023, but he hopes that finishing the season well for his club can put him in the conversation once more.
“As a Brazilian, I want to be there at the World Cup,” he says. “I’m working to be healthy first, then have minutes at Arsenal. By helping Arsenal, I can show that I can still help Brazil. There’s still a long way to go and a lot to play for.”
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