The reigning champions of English football travelled to a Lancashire seaside town on Tuesday night with a matchday squad of internationals.

They were beaten by a League Two side whose ground is called Highbury, the name of the stadium Arsenal walked out of a generation ago.

The score was 1-1 after 90 minutes and 5-3 on penalties to Fleetwood Town. Luck had little to do with it, because the night exposed a club that has long confused spending money with building something that lasts.

Fleetwood, priced by bookmakers at 15-1 to advance, went ahead in the 21st minute through Aaron Loupalo-Bi.

Arsenal‘s response was to take the pitch for the second half with their captain, Martin Ødegaard, introduced as a half-time rescue. Viktor Gyökeres equalized five minutes after the restart, and Arsenal then produced 18 shots without finding a winner.

Jay Lynch, Fleetwood‘s goalkeeper, denied Ben White and Ødegaard in the closing stages as the champions looked like a team that believed the result was owed to them.

Max Dowman, a 16-year-old Arsenal handed the burden of a cup tie against a side from the fourth tier, was sent off five minutes from time. Television cameras caught Mikel Arteta appearing to rebuke the teenager as he left the field. A manager who selects a child for a match of this size, and then scolds him for the frustration the senior players could not discharge, has a lesson of his own to learn.

The shootout was a humiliation in four parts. Every Fleetwood penalty went in. Bruno Guimarães, the £75 million ($99 million) summer signing and a Carabao Cup winner with another club, saw his kick saved by Lynch, a goalkeeper who has spent his career in the lower divisions.

Conor Haughey, a teenage defender, then drove the winning kick into the top corner and sent the home supporters onto the pitch. Arsenal‘s sporting department paid a fortune for a midfielder who could not beat a League Two goalkeeper from 12 yards.

This was the first time a reigning Premier League champion has been knocked out of the League Cup by a fourth-tier club. Arsenal have not lifted the trophy since 1993, and their history in the competition now includes a penalty defeat to Bradford City, a 3-1 loss to West Ham and this.

A club does not reach that record by accident. It reaches it by treating the competition as an inconvenience, by rotating without a plan and by assuming the badge will do the work.

Arteta said afterward that the club needed to take the result on the chin. The supporters who pay some of the highest ticket prices in the country, and the board that approved a summer of heavy spending, are entitled to ask what the chin is for.

A champion with the deepest budget in its league has been out-fought, out-run in spirit and out-thought by a team of part-time-looking heroes on a ground that holds fewer people than an Emirates concourse on a quiet matchday.

Fleetwood will remember Tuesday for the rest of their existence. Arsenal should remember it as the night the champions found out how thin their depth, their composure and their cup culture really are, and how little a title protects a club that stops competing on every front.