Hello, everyone.
We have Bournemouth tomorrow and Mikel Arteta will meet the press a bit later today. It’s quite interesting to consider how quiet press conferences are these days. It wasn’t that long ago when the questions would be, if not problematic, then a bit more difficult, but I guess that’s the nature of things when you’re mid-table or top-of-the-table.
Over the past three plus years, we have gotten to know Arteta in a deeper way. The relationship he had with the club from his time as a player was the basis for that, but he is always quite superficial with the players. What you understood was that he was ultra-professional, demanding with himself and with others, and that played into his decision to end the day. He knew that he could no longer do it to the level that was required of himself, and though it clearly pained him to hang up his boots, that was exactly what he did.
However, being a manager is different. Since he came along, Arteta has been fairly direct and honest, and while there are always caveats in this line of work, much of what he has said publicly is what he has done. He puts some of us in front of a microphone and a bunch of journalists and we could probably talk a good game, but going through with that is another matter. He has talked the talk and, over time, has shown that he, too, can walk the walk.
Go back to your first interview, when you were asked about your football philosophy, and you said:
We have to have passion, we have to be dominant, we have to be aggressive. We have to play in the opposite territory as much as we want. I want the ball, I want to attack them as much as possible, I want to avoid being attacked as much as possible.
That’s the basics and then we can grow from there. So we can create an identity that I have in my head for this football club.
It made a lot of sense given his experience as a player, but there have been times when it was hard to see how it was going to happen. Remember all the discussions about how rigid our game was, how we lacked a bit of variety and spontaneity in our attacking game? I certainly do. Now look at what we do and how we do it. I’m sure we still have some way to go, at least in his mind, but we’re now at a place where adjustments to specific positions and individual players, as Tim describes so well here regarding Gabriel Martinelli, can transform a Shape and player contribution.
Part of the reason this season is so nice is that we played good football. Being first in the league doesn’t hurt, obviously, and I suppose there’s often a direct correlation between the quality of your football and your league position, but having lost ours somewhere along the way, there’s the identity of who speak. We feel like the kind of Arsenal we all want again.
Another interesting aspect is that sometimes Arteta says things very clearly aimed at his players. For a man who is absolutely committed to the sanctity of the dressing room, there are often some public messages as well. There’s no question he’s had these conversations with his team in private, because ground rules aren’t laid down through a press conference, but emphasizing certain things in public has been a hallmark of his time here.
There are always things you can’t say, incidents you can’t talk about, situations you avoid for obvious reasons. The omerta of the training ground and the locker room is something he values very much, but when you are a young coach there are going to be people and cliques and situations that test you.
“If they want to get on the boat, they are more than welcome and that is always my way of thinking,” he said after Matteo Guendouzi was dropped from the squad. Guendouzi, if you remember, chose to post a photo of himself on a sunny holiday the day Arsenal won the FA Cup. He didn’t get back on the boat.
During that dark period in November/December 2020, there were some leaks about a fight between Dani Ceballos and David Luiz, as well as stories about a delegation of veteran players allegedly coming to the club with “concerns” for the manager. He said:
“I will find out where it comes from and if that is the case, that goes completely against what I expect from everyone, the privacy and confidentiality that we need, and there will be consequences.”
If you look back, it doesn’t take a lot of investigative work to see who you might have been suspicious of. Suffice to say, none of them are at the club now. Instilling discipline in an environment where previously players were encouraged to behave as they wanted without much fear of consequences is difficult. But if, from the outside, we knew that the standards had to change, that they had to be raised, you can be sure that the players knew it too. He didn’t surprise them with a pop quiz one day. It was clear from the beginning.
In difficult times, when we have been poor and/or played badly, Arteta has almost always recognized this, without throwing anyone under the bus. When we have played well, he has also recognized it, but never in a way that nobody feels comfortable.
The thrilling win over Leicester last season, which really felt like the moment you knew something was up with this team, was greeted with comments like ‘We haven’t done anything yet’. Fast forward to now, and we haven’t done anything (tangible) yet, but it seems like it’s well within our capacity.
Which is to say, as he speaks to the press later this afternoon, there’s a lot to be said for speaking his mind. I don’t think you can create what he has created without him. People, I guess understandably, rolled their eyes a bit when he constantly talked about building the connection between the fans and the team again. He did it. He is there. We can all feel it, whether he’s at the games every week or on the other side of the world.
Arteta speaks, but Arteta also complies. Whether or not this season ends the way we want it to end cannot be denied.
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We’ll have press conference stories on Arseblog News later, and as I said yesterday on Arsecast, we’ll be making our Patreon preview podcast available to everyone later this afternoon.
Until then.
