Mikel Arteta is the fighter piloting Arsenal back towards supremacy in the Premier League

Arsenal hosted Southampton. As social and traditional media seethed over the news, Arteta addressed his players in the dressing room. Drawing a winding road on a whiteboard he wrote “journey” and “destination”. “What’s most important?” he asked.

Before anyone answered, he zeroed in on Alexandre Lacazette, Aubameyang’s close pal. “Tell me, Laca,” Arteta inquired.

Lacazette said destination. “No,” Arteta said, “It’s neither. It’s the company.” In other words: what always comes first is the group. A re-energised Arsenal won and Lacazette scored a brilliant goal. The drama, caught on the documentary All Or Nothing: Arsenal encapsulates Arteta: ruthless, risk-taking – and a winner.

It reminded me of the character I interviewed in his playing days, who told me, with a charming smile, he cheated the odd time to win at boardgames. And of the comments of a director of football who worked with Arteta in a commercial setting: “Mikel? A steely little f--ker. Having himself. Very bright. I really like him.”

The steely f--ker tops the Premier League after the first 17 games in which Arsenal have modelled consistency and positivity, starting better than all but four sides in the competition’s history. Season 2022-23, so far, is all about them – so much so, that at Arsenal’s north London derby preview press conference there was not one mention of Harry Kane.

Nobody could remember when that last happened, nor when Arteta last seemed so happy and relaxed. He spoke of his present group. “An incredible dressing room that’s just a joy to work with, every single day,” he said. “Some of the things we’ve done together, probably I’m never going to be able to do them with any other group. There are things we do together that will be resting in my brain for the rest of my life.”

Without steel, he’d never have kicked a ball. Born with a heart complaint, doctors forbade sports but his determined parents pushed for a second opinion and specialists eventually said he could play under certain conditions.

He liked tennis but loved football and played on the beach of his home town, San Sebastian, with friends including a boy who lived on the same street: Xabi Alonso. At 15, he joined Barcelona’s La Masia academy where his room-mates included Xavi and Andres Iniesta. Above him, in a bunk bed, slept Pepe Reina.

The player he understudied – and came on for, on his debut, aged 16 – was Pep Guardiola. There’s a story about him chucking ice cubes at people entering the academy building and one hitting the first-team manager, Lorenzo Serra Ferrer. “No, no,” Arteta said laughing. “It wasn’t ice cubes, it was water.

“It’s one of the best periods of my life, with the people we shared those moments.” If an Arsenal youngster ever drenched him? “I wouldn’t like it – but it was very funny to be fair.”

However, realising, with Guardiola and Xavi ahead of him, his path was blocked, Arteta was typically bold. Just 18, he forced a loan move to Paris Saint-Germain where teammates included Mauricio Pochettino ("my big brother") and Ronaldinho – a misunderstood, “sensitive” character, Arteta told me in one of our interviews. “In our room, he’d tell me before every game to remember how lucky we were. His attitude was ‘this is my style and what makes me happy and if I go another way, I won’t be happy.’ A very good concept.”

A year later, he left Barcelona permanently – for Rangers. Alex McLeish, his manager at Ibrox, remembers “a sense of confidence about him, a presence. He knew he was good. The other players loved him. In the dressing room he wasn’t vociferous but you always saw those white teeth: him grinning while the players were up to their frolics.

“He wasnae a little shy guy, he joined in.”

The Glaswegian accent could challenge him but his English was excellent, McLeish also recalls. While at Everton, Arteta lived two doors from Alonso (then at Liverpool) on the fourth floor of an apartment block at the Albert Dock and Reina lived in the same building, but he wasn’t clannish. His best mate at Everton was an Aussie who came from a very different background: Tim Cahill. Both shared a flinty competitiveness.

Arteta speaks seven languages (Spanish, Basque, Catalan, English, Portuguese, Italian, French) and has ambitions to learn an eighth (German). On Friday he talked about “evolving” – education being important to him. He’s in a group of coaches from various sports who meet over Zoom to exchange ideas. Members include former England rugby head coach Eddie Jones, Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur and basketball hall of famer George Karl.

It’s no wonder he was a favourite of Arsene Wenger. Signed in 2011, and Arsenal captain from 2014-16, Arteta would speak up at half-time with tactical instructions for teammates and liked to hang with Arsenal’s analysts, even grabbing the departmental iPad to scroll through the software and offer his own input on occasions.

Though he considered becoming an agent, coaching was his true path and in his final season as a player (2015-16) he took his UEFA ‘A’ Licence with the Football Association of Wales. Michael Flynn, Walsall’s manager, was part of the cohort. “Mikel is very astute, intelligent and dedicated. A gentleman. He has no ego and is so passionate to win,” Flynn says.

The biggest element in Arteta’s coaching education was Guardiola, though. They never lost touch after their master-and-apprentice days together at Barcelona and their contact was strengthened when Arteta lived in the same London neighbourhood as Guardiola’s brother, Pere. In 2012, as Barcelona manager, Guardiola phoned Arteta to ask about Chelsea, whom Barcelona faced in the Champions League. Arteta was so sharp, concise and tactically detailed in his analysis that Guardiola resolved they should speak more often and in 2015, after his Bayern Munich team beat Arsenal 5-1 at the Allianz Arena, Guardiola sought out Arteta and suggested they should work together if he came to England.

A year later, despite having offers to coach at Arsenal and Spurs, Arteta rang Guardiola – now at Manchester City – to ask if there was still a job. He joined City’s staff. Just three months into his first season, Guardiola called Arteta to his office and said, “You’re in charge for this game. You’re more than capable of taking the team. Do what you think is best.”

City were playing Arsenal and, Arteta being Arteta, he had already prepared a set of tactical strategies in case Guardiola wanted ideas about how to beat his former club. Arteta put these into action and City won 2-1.

During their three and a half seasons together, Guardiola kept giving Arteta his head, tasking him with one-on-one work with players, delivering matchday team talks on set pieces and taking training the day after games. In a recent interview for BT Sport, Rio Ferdinand joked to Guardiola that he had “created a monster”. Guardiola replied: “No, absolutely not! He was already! That drive … ”

Guardiola added that Arteta’s progress at Arsenal was “the perfect definition [of a club backing their manager]. There was not good results [initially]. I remember [people said] he must be sacked and ‘Arteta out.’”

Arteta will speak in a Sky interview, aired on Sunday, about the challenges he has faced turning Arsenal around. With Aubameyang, he compiled a dossier of the player’s misdemeanours, the breaking point being when Aubameyang returned late from an agreed break in Paris.

Ultimately released from his contract so he could join Barcelona last February, Aubameyang racked up 11 goals in his first 15 games for Barcelona – Arsenal having gone a month without scoring after his banishment.

At that point it seemed Arteta’s decision might backfire yet now, with Arsenal the Premier League’s second top scorers and Aubameyang surplus at Chelsea, having failed to complete a Premier League game after joining them in summer, jettisoning him looks shrewd.

Other big calls included identifying Aaron Ramsdale as the goalkeeper Arsenal needed to sign, despite doubts in some quarters at the club, and again ignoring dissenting voices to give Granit Xhaka a new deal in 2021, then redeploying the Swiss as an attacking midfielder this season.

Arteta was also criticised for sending William Saliba on three consecutive loans but may have got that one right too, given how Saliba arrived back at Arsenal this summer at the perfect stage of readiness to be a Premier League player. In his recent Monday Night Football interview with Jamie Carragher, Arteta gave a fascinating insight into how he sees the game when asked about Saliba, saying he sees combinations not individuals when he looks at players.

Saliba excels because of his partnership with Gabriel and Ben White works at right back precisely because Saliba is inside him. And with White at right back, a “different type” of left back is required – hence the recruitment of Oleksandr Zinchenko. And Zinchenko was key to enabling a change he saw as vital to Arsenal scoring more goals this season: pushing Gabriel Martinelli into the attacking line. But that would only succeed if he moved Xhaka forward too …

The swirl of ideas and detail and almost symphonic view of players working together sounded very Guardiola-esque. A monster? Guardiola may live to rue feeding it when he sold Zinchenko and Gabriel Jesus to Arteta.

In All or Nothing: Arsenal the best scenes are the team talks. It has been noted by some who have known him a long time that Arteta appears to have a different walk to his natural one when he strides into a dressing room nowadays. It is more padding and round-shouldered, more like a certain manager at the Etihad.

“There is some suffering, there are some beautiful moments but there is a lot of learning as well,” Arteta said on Friday, reflecting on management – and managing Arsenal.

“I feel so grateful and lucky to be in the position I am. There are tough moments, there are. And you have to take the bullets and know they come with your job.”

– The Sunday Times

Originally published as Mikel Arteta is the fighter piloting Arsenal back towards supremacy in the Premier League