In three years, Mikel Arteta’s non-negotiables have taken the Gunners from a toxic crisis at his December 2019 arrival to five points clear on top of the Premier League. FFT speaks to players, coaches and fans to find out how the Basque did it
when Pep Guardiola’s name appears on your phone, you take the call. You stop what you are doing. He demands nothing less than your sole focus. It’s as if he’s put the rest of the world on mute for the duration he has your attention. Mikel Arteta first met this hypnotic man many years earlier. He had grown up idolising this magician who could bend space, time and football to his will, long before the Catalan coaching sensei learned to choreograph whole teams to do the same. A 16-year-old Arteta would make his Barcelona B debut as a substitute for Guardiola, then-club captain and 11 years his protégé’s senior. The former never made a senior Barcelona appearance but, with the pair both schooled by Johan Cruyff principles and with a contacts book in common, they kept in touch. And, a decade and a half later, Arteta received the call that would adjust his career’s sails. It was now April 2012. The days were getting longer and Arteta’s first season wearing Arsenal red and white was drawing to a close. Guardiola wasn’t ringing to offer his fellow La Masia alumnus a job – that was another conversation for another timeline. He had simply rung an old acquaintance to pick his brain about Chelsea, Barcelona’s next opponents in the Champions League. Arteta gave his two cents. He explained succinctly the strengths and weaknesses of an outfit he had recently helped Arsenal to humble 5-3 at Stamford Bridge. He had even set up Robin van Persie’s injury-time hat-trick goal. Pep listened intently. “I must ask his opinion more often,” he said as he hung up. As compliments go, there are few bigger in the game than the most revered manager of a generation asking for a tactical take from an uncapped 30-year-old midfielder. It was an early endorsement of a football mind that Guardiola would mine on a regular basis
. “THAT WAS SO ARTETA” Guardiola grew up fascinated by British football’s romance and passion, admiring from afar its stacked pyramid, cup replays and travelling support. Arteta never had the luxury of distance. Unlike his playing and coaching mentor, he didn’t leave his boyhood club of Barcelona on his own terms. A gap year away at Paris Saint-Germain in 2001-02 – playing alongside Ronaldinho, Jay-Jay Okocha, Mauricio Pochettino and other big names – culminated in Barça spitting Arteta out to Rangers. He was just 20. The midfielder picked up English with a Glaswegian twang and learned a few choice swear words, as those who have seen All or Nothing can testify, before returning home to San Sebastian and Real Sociedad. That didn’t pan out, either. In the early summer of 2004, La Real planned to build their midfield around Arteta and Xabi Alonso childhood friends and neighbours on Calle Matia, a short throw-in from the Playa de la Concha city-centre beach where they once honed their craft – but within six months the Basque pair were opposing generals in the Merseyside divide. By January 2005, Arteta was a Blue and Alonso was a Red. A cultured midfield metronome, able to break defensive lines with his eyes closed, was forged in British football’s fire.
Arteta learned to fight at Ibrox, then Goodison, winning Evertonian hearts just as much for his spirit when tempers rose as for his dictating of the match tempo in calmer moments. After seven and a half seasons, and with his 30th birthday approaching, he wondered if he would ever get his big move. In August 2011, Arsene Wenger answered. The impact of his time at Arsenal cannot be measured in passing or possession stats,” Spanish journalist Guillem Balague tells FourFourTwo. His stability as a personality was what Wenger needed at the time. One of his first games was 0-0 at half-time and no one spoke. Wenger moved to a corner to let Arteta talk for him – that was so Arteta.” Arsenal signed Arteta and Per Mertesacker not to mention Park Chu-young and Andre Santos – in a deadline-day scramble that followed their infamous 8-2 humiliation at the hands of Manchester United three days earlier. Arteta was a replacement for the recently-departed Cesc Fabregas, at least stylistically, but more importantly he was a roll of gaffer tape for Wenger to stretch over the leadership void in his squad, with its average age a little over 24. Arteta and Mertesacker felt like short-term panic buys at the time but both would go on to retire at Arsenal, having been pillars on which Wenger relied. The Basque would eventually take the captaincy in 2014; Mertesacker took it next
. “Mikel was a great character, nice to work with and passionate about football,” former team-mate Lukas Podolski recalls, beaming, to FFT. “He was exactly the same as now: he gave 100 per cent. He hasn’t changed.” Arteta treated his responsibility as skipper with the utmost sincerity, too. He was closer to a number of the coaching staff than his own team-mates, became a regular in the video analyst suite to discuss upcoming opponents, and fellow players would call him gaffer” or “teacher’s pet”. Arteta would host barbecues in his own garden, and even here, his searing eye for detail remained. No fatty meat allowed – the get-togethers focused on combining team ethic with recovery. Towards the end of his playing career, Arteta would study for his coaching badges, working with Arsenal’s Hale End youth teams and the Welsh national set-up to attain his UEFA A Licence. His path was clear, even to those he trained with every day. “Mikel had decided he wanted to become a manager, and he prepared everything for that,” says Podolski, now 37 and playing for boyhood club Gornik Zabrze.
“I saw, on and off the pitch, that one day he would become a manager. He had that vision.” In May 2014, Arsenal’s in-house magazine asked Arteta about his coaching future “I’ll have absolutely everyone 120 per cent committed, that’s the first thing,” he said. “If not, you don’t play for me. When it’s time to work, it’s time to work, and when it’s time to have fun then I’m the first one to do it, but that commitment is vital. Then I want the football to be expressive, entertaining. I cannot have a concept of football where everything is based on the opposition.” Once again, Pep Guardiola – managing Bayern Munich by then – was impressed. In November 2015, the former Barça boys crossed paths after Arsenal lost 5-1 to Bayern in the Champions League group stage, with Pep suggesting they should work together if he ever left Bavaria for an English side. Little did Arteta know that his pal was already in talks to replace Manchester City boss Manuel Pellegrini the following summer. Arteta couldn’t turn down Arsenal when they approached him in the dying embers of 2011’s summer transfer window, but he simply had to five years later, when Wenger asked him to run the academy. For a second time, a Guardiola phone call had changed his life. Arteta was a regular sounding board for the Catalan while also completing his UEFA Pro Licence on the same Welsh FA course as Patrick Vieira, Freddie Ljungberg, Thierry Henry and Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool assistant, Pep Lijnders. Arteta and Lijnders got on famously, bridging the brewing City-Liverpool, Guardiola-Klopp rivalry.
“I loved every second,” Lijnders tells FFT. “Mikel and I were in the same position at that time, him assisting Pep, me assisting Jurgen. Curiosity and respect – so many similarities. I’m happy for his route, his success, despite being competitors. I want people I respect to do well. “Except against us,” he adds with a laugh. ALL HAIL KING MIKEL Arsenal considered handing a 36-year-old Arteta, still Manchester City assistant, the keys to the club in the summer of 2018 as Arsene Wenger’s successor. It would have broken the Premier League Richter scale. As audacious as that was, Arteta had his admirers. He was adored at City, with Leroy Sané and Raheem Sterling publicly praising him after they cruised to a 100-point Premier League title. He talked the talk, had studied Guardiolaball up close, and he got Arsenal. It would have been akin to a popular backbencher assuming power. Instead, Unai Emery got the nod as the ‘safe’ appointment. Emery was a horse for a Europa League course at a time when the competition was the Gunners’ best shot at silverware and entry back into the Champions League. He was a square-peg coach, however, and, after 18 increasingly toxic months, the club again went fishing for another Basque boss. “If Arteta had started managerial life away from City, it may have been a different path, but Guardiola’s influence cannot be denied,” Spanish football expert Balague tells FFT.
“He picked up a lot of how you relate to players – how not to relate to players, even. He learned from Pep, then added his own thing, which was influenced by his own playing career but also where he comes from.
“He comes from Gipuzkoa, one of the smallest provinces in the Basque Country, of just 700,000 people, and from there you’ve got Arteta, Emery, [new Wolves boss] Julen Lopetegui, Xabi Alonso… it’s an unbelievable quarry of football-thinking talent. Every year the coaching federation gives 500 licences – to race to the top, you have to be very good.” Arsenal took the leap in December 2019 and appointed Arteta after all. If they were brave, he was bold, laying out his famous
“non-negotiables” in his first interview and stating that the club had lost its way. Granit Xhaka came off the naughty step – and the transfer list – after twice telling some jeering Arsenal fans to “f**k off” at home to Crystal Palace two months earlier. Mesut Özil was reinstated as the creative hub, while record buy Nicolas Pepe was dropped for academy talent Reiss Nelson in Arteta’s first game, a 1-1 draw at Bournemouth on Boxing Day. Arsenal gradually improved, taking steps forward and back intermittently. Pablo Mari and Cedric Soares joined in January, while a teenage Bukayo Saka glittered on work experience at left-back. The skeleton of a team was beginning to knit together, as Arteta overloaded his side with fresh ideas.
“Mikel is about every small detail,” Cedric tells FFT. “He always tries to prepare with a lot of detail. In every game, too. Picking games when he’s not [detailed] is easier!” In that first half-season, however, detail became the downfall. After COVID-19 forced the world into isolation from March 2020, the Gunners lost consecutive fixtures to Manchester City and Brighton away, comprehensively out-thought and out-fought in both games. Arteta realised that his ideals were too ambitious for this group of players. Rather than trying to ad-lib attacking moves, he switched to a back three and religiously rehearsed patterns of play. Lockdown in an empty Emirates Stadium was filled with the sound of Arteta barking instructions to his men, often in multiple languages, as he micromanaged their attacking patterns.
“He’s on it,” says Cedric, “but the rest is down to the players. If he’s prepared every week with a game plan, we can’t complain about not having enough information.” As the 2019-20 campaign finally drew to
a close, Arsenal fans got their first glimpse of how good this coach could be when a red-and-white low block ground out wins against Liverpool in the league, then in the FA Cup against Manchester City and Chelsea – the latter in the final, on a silent, sunny August afternoon at Wembley. Game plans were executed exquisitely and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was the scalpel of the side’s military organisation. It was vindication.
“Knowing what had happened to Unai – and this was not much later – you realized there was something there,” remembers Balague of that FA Cup victory. “There was a lot of work needed but there was also a lot of improvement. Knowing that other big decisions were going to be taken, you were hopeful that the success could continue.” Aubameyang was rewarded with a new contract and Willian joined from Chelsea ona free transfer, and then head of football Raul Sanllehi left north London before the 2020-21 season began. The ‘head coach’ sign on Arteta’s office door was replaced by the word ‘manager’ and, with Edu as technical director, Arteta bought defender Gabriel Magalhaes from Lille and midfielder Thomas Partey from Atletico Madrid. The club’s post-Wenger structure had drifted towards a network of transfer experts, but now the manager was absolute monarch once more. Arteta had the final say and Arsenal essentially celebrated King Mikel’s coronation with his Wembley triumph. His honeymoon, however, didn’t last long.
“YOU DESERVE BETTER” Christmas came late in 2020. The Gunners were winless in seven league games and faced a Boxing Day encounter with Chelsea, Arteta’s recurring supervillains: his first home opponents, his cup final foes, and even the reason for Guardiola first asking his advice. Willian wasn’t fit. In came the fledgling Emile Smith Rowe to address a dearth of creativity, with Saka on the right and the pugnacious Gabriel Martinelli on the left. It felt a little like the last roll of the dice; at least if Arteta were to fall on his sword, he’d do so sticking to his principles. At the very least, these young guns were prepared to give that 120 per cent commitment.
“When he first came to the club, I went on loan to Huddersfield,” Smith Rowe tells FFT.
“He brought me into the office and said, ‘I want you to go and gain some experience for the first team – I want you to come back as a man’. He could see I was so shy.” Smith Rowe was not a Hollywood No.10. Happy to hide under a floppy, blonde fringe, he shuffled awkwardly in the camera’s gaze – and that was exactly what Arsenal needed in their rut. The difference between him and Özil, frozen out and soon to have his contract terminated, was stark. The Croydon De Bruyne’ drifted from side to side to create overloads and help his team-mates, rather than demand the spotlight. A week earlier, Saka had tweeted: “You deserve more, Arsenal fans,” after a dismal draw against Southampton. Now, he was helping to seal three hard-earned points with a cheeky edge-of-the-area lob over Edouard Mendy in a 3-1 win – and Saka maintains to this day that he meant it. A new attitude was born, as Arteta’s Arsenal learned to play with expression and, most importantly, trust in the youngsters at their disposal.
“When I returned from my loan, I felt much more confident,” continues Smith Rowe.
“Mikel pulled me in again and said, ‘You’ve come a long way’. He said that he was really happy with me. He’s just really good with young players: he speaks to us a lot, guides us and helps us individually. That’s what you want as a young player.” Arsenal eventually stuttered and spluttered across the finish line in eighth place, with the 2020-21 season chalked down as a learning curve for all involved. For some supporters, the following campaign would be the first in living memory without European football, as a young squad learned on the job alongside their manager. However, Balague doesn’t believe that the Arsenal board were ever close to pulling the plug on Arteta.
“You just have to go by what you hear,” he explains. “Things take time and they were willing to wait. I didn’t see any indication they were looking anywhere else; you know if a big club like Arsenal are going for a big manager like Lopetegui or Luis Enrique. Manchester United spoke to both, for instance. But there were no calls to vacant managers – nothing. They backed him, big time.” Arsenal doubled down on the manager’s ideals, turning Martin Odegaard’s loan spell permanent with an eye to making Real Madrid’s playmaker the prototypical Arteta footballer: young, deft, clever on the ball and in space, and someone for team-mates to look up to. The Norwegian received the No.8 shirt and was told by his new manager, the shirt’s former owner, to take care of it.
“Every day, I’m learning something new,” Odegaard tells FFT of life under Arteta. “There are so many details – body position, how to control the ball – and it helps us to improve. He’s not just telling everyone what to do; he’s teaching us why. It helps the team to understand and to improve.”
Odegaard became the nucleus in the centre of the pitch. Aaron Ramsdale, fresh from double-relegation at Bournemouth and Sheffield United, arrived in goal to much keyboard-warrior furore, with Poole pal Ben White a £50 million centre-back signing from Brighton. Little-known Albert Sambi Lokonga and Nuno Tavares joined the Londoners, too, as midfield and left-back cover respectively, and ambipedal Japanese international Takehiro Tomiyasu completed the overhaul. Then came the club’s worst start in Premier League history. Arteta’s second full season in charge opened with an infamous string of back-to-back-to-back defeats: after Brentford bullied the Gunners on opening night, insipid losses to Chelsea and Manchester City rooted a shell-shocked young side to the foot of the table. Again, Arteta’s position came under threat. Again, the board backed their man. “The most interesting thing is that the board has given him time,” Podolski tells FFT.
“Everyone was saying, ‘We have to change the manager. Why did they bring him in?’ But he trusts in the process. Everyone works for one goal and now you can see what good scouting, transfers and decisions can do. When you trust in the process and everyone works together, then anything is possible.” Coaching buddy Lijnders agrees. “He is transforming the club,” he says. “There isn’t a bigger compliment in football.”
A VISION APPEARS
Arsene Wenger hasn’t been back since his retirement in 2018, neither to the training ground nor the stadium he helped to design. It’s for the best, in many ways, that a ghost of such honeyed nostalgia refuses to linger in Arsenal’s marble halls, presiding over teenagers who will make mistakes as well as memories. Nonetheless, the current crop do high-five the Frenchman every day in training. An eventful year on from the miserable, behind-closed-doors autumn of 2020, when Arteta clung to the wheel like a ship captain lost in a sea storm, the Gunners boss asked for a Wenger mural to be installed at Colney: an image of his former mentor, raising one hand, for Arsenal players to tap on their way past. It felt fitting that as this new team began expressing themselves on the pitch, while the club culture was revolutionized from laissez-faire to labour-intensive, players should be reminded of the legends who have preceded them. Arteta’s vision started to appear from the haze of that catastrophic opening. His team went eight league games unbeaten, playing bravely and expansively, as the manager looked for new ways to motivate a young team. For example, before a trip to Liverpool– albeit one that ended with a 4-0 defeat – Arteta notoriously pumped You’ll Never Walk Alone onto the training pitch to simulate Anfield’s unique atmosphere for his players.
“We were all a little bit confused when we could hear the music on… then we saw the speakers,” Odegaard laughs now. “Anfield can be the loudest stadium in this country. It was a nice way to prepare the team.
“But Mikel is very creative. He will always do what it takes to prepare the team as well as possible. It’s always interesting to be in a meeting with him: you can learn things,pick up new things, and there’s so many details in the game he will teach you. It’s nice to learn so much about football.”
Arteta drafted in a coaching team, too, who would all take responsibility to talk to these burgeoning young men on a personal level as well as a footballing one. Mental health, self-confidence and settling in a foreign land were all topics brought to work. The gaffer dedicated his Manager of the Month award for September 2021 to the coaching staff by his side, in recognition of their efforts.
“As a young man, it’s difficult to open up to someone you don’t know that well,” Smith Rowe says of Carlos Cuesta, Arteta’s youngest coach at just 27. “ But it was good to speak with him. He’s someone I got along with straight away when I first met him.
“I don’t know what it was that made me open up, but I thought, ‘Let’s see how it goes’. It’s not only me he has helped; he’s helped other players and it’s good to have someone like that, knowing you can go to them. Not just him, either: you can go to the manager, the assistant – you can speak to anyone.”
Fittingly for a young team, Arsenal found themselves flitting between brilliant and bumbling as the season wore on. There was no in-between: they drew just three Premier League games throughout 2021-22, the fewest in the division. This bunch would either tear opponents apart like laser-guided Red Arrows, displaying imagination, passion and fluidity of movement, or they would look like lost souls in a departure lounge, frozen by fear, waiting for an announcement to inform them of their gate. They could give you life, they could take it away – sometimes in the same half of football. The older heads weren’t exactly helping. For all of his selfless industry, Alexandre Lacazette would register two non-penalty goals all campaign, while in January 2022, Aubameyang’s deal was terminated after one too many training no-shows. Arteta’s
“non-negotiables” had been compromised. Some questioned the harshness of this stance with his captain, while others were again furious, 12 months on from Özil’s exit, with a supposed leader.
“He’d seen it before under Guardiola and in his playing career – you have to be brave,”
Balague tells FFT. “The club told him that whatever he decided, they would back him up, and big decisions were taken.” The bravery wasn’t just in letting Auba leave, but in choosing not to strengthen up front, essentially leaving Arteta utterly unarmed against critics if his inexperienced team should fail to finish in the top four. Narrative dictated that it had to be Spurs who pipped Arsenal to the final Champions League spot. A spectacular spring collapse, including four losses in five from mid-March, preceded a mini-revival for Arteta’s men, but that was ended by back-to-back defeats at Newcastle and Tottenham in May. Pundits theorised that Arsenal would get few better chances. The youngsters begged to differ.
“Our mentality is our best quality,” Gabriel Martinelli tells FFT. “We have a young team, but age is not everything, and our mentality is amazing. We go into every game with the same mentality to win.” The bruises healed quicker than expected.
“THIS IS OUR FAMILY”
Arteta often talks about suffering. He has certainly suffered for the career he has built. Serious knee injuries ruined his chance of playing for Spain when he was on the brink of a call-up – he almost defected to England – while the biggest regret of his playing days is that he was too cerebral to properly enjoy them. From the dugout, he’ll tell players they must be prepared to suffer without the ball and embrace the hard slog as motivation. Arsenal have suffered in recent years, not least without a top striker, especially when heading into Champions League races opposite one-time Gunners youth-teamer Harry Kane. Arteta waited patiently for the right man and this summer Gabriel Jesus arrived, closing a circle from the manager’s Manchester City days. Arteta’s chosen No.9 was never going to have Kane’s precision – few do – but he drives, he drifts, he dribbles and, ultimately, he runs. And that’s enough. His goal return is decent but unspectacular: five by the mid-season break, albeit from a total xG of 9.38, representing the Premier League’s largest underperformance by any player and continuing a trend from his Etihad Stadium days. Yet fans love him, because he burns himself into the ground for the cause.
“Everyone can see the team’s spirit,” says the Brazilian, smiling when FFT posits that Arteta, a demanding whipcracker, would prefer his work rate over his ability. “You can see the way we love each other, the way we want to help each other on the pitch.”
Indeed, fellow Brazilian Martinelli saw the introduction of a new striker as an aid to him rather than an obstacle. “I see myself more as a left-winger but I can play on the right as well, or as a striker,” he insists to FFT. “I love to play with Jesus because he loves moving.
“He goes to the left, I can move central. It’s very good to have that movement and it helps the team as well.”
Jesus agrees. “This is our family and this is why it works so well,” he says. “I spend more time here than at home. Absolutely everyone here is like this.”
Jesus wasn’t the only summer bargain that Arteta picked up from his former club. Left-back Oleksandr Zinchenko has been instrumental to Arsenal’s evolution this season. The coach demands the Ukrainian and right-back White slide inside when the Gunners have the ball to form a midfield three either side of Partey, which in turn protects centre-backs Gabriel and William Saliba from counter-attacks. Providing a shape which keeps the opposition under constant pressure, this back five also supplements a fluid attacking five of Martinelli, Xhaka, Jesus, Odegaard and Saka. A rejuvenated Xhaka has licence to maraud as a de facto inside-forward from the left, and by November he had had equalled his best goalscoring season in an Arsenal shirt. This feels more like a finished team than it ever has under Arteta, and not just the bones of something for the future. Top of the table 14 games into a season, five points clear of Manchester City having dropped just four from a possible 42, is a nice place to be – with or without a winter World Cup as distraction. Six years on from Pep Guardiola asking Mikel Arteta to work with him – plus another four from that fateful phone call when the master realised the apprentice’s tactical nous – are the pair embroiled in a title race?
“It’s great to be where we are,” Arteta smiled coyly before the break. “We have to reflect on what we are doing, and be very much prepared for what is going to come. I can say that it has been phenomenal to work with these players and staff.” It’s been some journey. And there’s no need to merely trust this process any more. Arteta’s vision is there for all to see.
