Mikel Arteta – belligerent, defensive, and becoming the manager he said he’d be

There might be an overwhelming lack of evidence, but Arteta is undoubtedly neurotic and posturing enough to bother delaying poor Julián Alvarez’s shower if he believed there was even a minor benefit. What that benefit might be is less clear, but the dark lord works in mysterious ways. A “total team”, as Mikel Merino once described his manager’s philosophy, might even include a plumber.

No Premier League manager incites loathing quite like Arteta. Some people really hate this guy, and, at the very least, everyone has an opinion. Last weekend Merino called him “one of the best managers in the world, if not the best”. The self-proclaimed “really famous soccer player” Jamie O’Hara vehemently disagreed, apparently more of an Enzo Maresca man. Wayne Rooney thinks “it could be a big year for him”.

Then there’s his stylistic proclivities – Arteta is listed on the “anti-football” Wikipedia page as one of the form’s premier exponents, despite the suggestion that he has somehow ruined football by forging the tactical vanguard being just as ridiculous as the same accusation being levelled at Pep Guardiola. Tactics are cyclical. Someone had to trigger the next rotation. Set-piece fetishism might not be sexy but it is effective, and someone breaking the most thoroughly breakable part of the game was inevitable.

The general “David Brent as cult leader vibe” doesn’t help, neither does the pervading smugness, the sense he knows something you don’t. But perhaps the real basis for this extraordinary depth of negative sentiment against one of the most gifted coaches of his generation is the accusation that he has not earned the right to act as he does, that the aggressive confidence is in fact baseless arrogance. He has won one significant trophy in six years at one of the world’s biggest and richest footballing institutions, trapped in a liminal place where he has both proven himself and not. He is not, by the lofty standards of the Twitterati, a winner.

But then what is a winner? Can you be a winner without actually winning anything, or is that just delusion, arrogance, a confidence trick played on yourself? This might be a chicken-and-egg situation. Maybe the right degree of delusion is actually a fundamental tenet of becoming a winner. Be what you want to become. Fake it till you make it. Manifest destiny.

As a player he was considered a natural leader, but also humble and quiet and fun. Per Mertesacker tells a story about Arteta executing a flawless Macarena while standing on a chair that made Arsène Wenger “roll around” laughing. Can you imagine Arteta hitting the Macarena now?

His tactical outlook is a fusion of Guardiola and David Moyes, but the persona has often felt like a burlesque of Guardiola. He appears to have watched the closest thing to a deity in modern management and understood not only the importance of engendering a cult of personality and illusion of genius but also how to create and maintain them, to foster instant buy-in when players have no real reason to believe in you.

You suspect that the Arteta the world sees is something of a character concocted to get him this far, one which hasn’t changed or evolved since 2019, hair suspiciously black for 43, still as belligerent and defensive as ever. And this is not a criticism – the Premier League thrives on appearances and narratives, on consumable characters. He bought himself time at an impatient club, in an impatient game, by convincingly selling an impossible dream of his own brilliance.

But we appear to be reaching the point where Arteta is becoming the manager he’s always pretended to be, or at least the one he has always believed himself to be, the serial winner, the prodigal son, Guardiola’s heir and usurper. The defining feature of the 4-0 win over Atlético was not the dominance, but the ease and nonchalance, confirmation of the burgeoning suspicion that Arsenal, and by extension Arteta, now belong reasonably among Europe’s elite.

Not letting his squad stagnate through three failed title charges is a remarkable feat of man management. They are currently on course to beat the 15 goals Chelsea conceded in 2004-05, a total they won’t hit, but keeping that number below 20 in 2025-26 is probably a more impressive achievement given the league’s unilaterally increased quality. This season they have restricted opponents to the lowest quality shots of any team since 2017-18, 0.07 xG per match.

Arteta said last year that he wanted Arsenal to become “kings of everything”, probably the most instructive quote of his tenure. This is a man whose obsession does not allow him to concede any flaw, who has now been provided the parts to construct an impenetrable squad, with no clear weaknesses and extraordinary depth, some of the most likeable players in the Premier League and a miraculously unique weapon in Declan Rice’s set-piece deliveries.

Since Arteta was hired, the only other managers recruited into their first permanent senior position by a Premier League club are Keith Andrews (Brentford), Gary O’Neil (Bournemouth) and Rubén Sellés (Southampton). Andrews was only hired in June, O’Neil and Selles both lasted less than a year. Arteta is now the 10th-longest serving manager at the same Premier League club ever.

So, did he turn off the hot water? We’ll never know. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter. But just the suspicion he might have will be enough for him, a man who has survived this long on the power of image and myths, fashioning himself the space to create a team who are now the favourite for both the Premier League and Champions League.

Perhaps his true masterstroke is not the set-piece alchemy, or whatever a “free-role full-back” is, but selling the world a version of himself they would believe in until they had no other choice.

Photograph by Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images