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It didn’t start well for Mikel Arteta and Arsenal. On a crisp December night in 2019 at about 1am in a Manchester suburb, Vinai Venkatesham stepped out of Arteta’s home. The Arsenal managing director looked around, satisfied with his meeting. Arteta had just outlined a “hugely impressive” five-year plan to rebuild a club reeling from Arsène Wenger’s departure and Unai Emery’s failed succession. Venkatesham stepped into his car and was driven away with his colleague Huss Fahmy.
The club were about to take a huge gamble, but one with which they were increasingly comfortable. For many Arsenal executives, Arteta had won the interview round in 2018 when Wenger left. Yet it seemed too much to ask a 36-year-old rookie to manage a seismic transition and Emery had pedigree and experience; Arteta had charisma and a strong playing record.
Now Venkatesham was pushing Arteta as the principal candidate to replace Emery. It was important not to antagonise Manchester City, where he was Pep Guardiola’s assistant. Discretion was essential. Which was why Venkatesham was puzzled to be woken early that morning by a phone call from Arsenal’s media chief telling him to look at the Sun. The first he knew he had been photographed leaving Arteta’s house was when the images were published online. It was, to put it mildly, an embarrassment. There was “displeasure” from City, said one source. “Noises were made at boardroom level.”
Arteta, who was announced as head coach a week later after several days of somewhat fraught negotiations, could have joined Arsenal’s staff when he quit as a player in 2016. But even some at the club told him that joining Guardiola at City would be “the equivalent of a master’s degree in coaching”.
The prognosis for the new Arsenal manager did not look promising when he stepped out at Bournemouth on Boxing Day for his first game. His five-year plan outlined how the club had fallen behind. He and the sporting director, Edu, wanted to rebuild a squad of 22 high-quality, tactically flexible players. For that they needed money, which is where Arteta fits Napoleon’s maxim of requiring “lucky generals”.
“It was much better to be the manager that followed the manager who succeeded Wenger,” said one source. Even more fortuitously, his arrival came two transfer windows after the Kroenke family had finally bought out the 30% stake of the now-sanctioned Russian-Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov. The Kroenkes had always said they would invest when they had full control; most assumed that was deflection yet it turned out to be true. “Mikel had money Unai and even Arsène didn’t really have,” said a former employee.
“It was the perfect storm in that you had a really driven young manager, bright, well-schooled, ambitious and enthusiastic. You’ve got the money and you had a board that gave him time,” said one former senior employee at the club who was close to Arteta. “He told them it would take five years.”
All the senior Arsenal sources spoken to for this article have praised the Kroenke family and some pointed to the more active involvement of Josh Kroenke, the 46-year-old son of the patriarch Stan, as a key player at that point. “I had the impression he persuaded the board to pull the emergency cord on funding,” said one.
FA Cup and Community Shield wins in Arteta’s first eight months were somewhat overshadowed by Covid restrictions, before a terrible 2020-21 season meant Arteta looked doomed to outsiders. “There were never internal discussions about that,” said a source familiar with board meetings at the time. However, in December 2020, Arsenal lost 2-1 at Everton, a run of seven Premier League games without a win, five of which were defeats. They then lost a Carabao Cup tie 4-1 at home to Manchester City before Chelsea came to the Emirates. Arteta’s intensity is extreme even in good times; this looked like terminal pressure.
“They looked poor at Everton,” said one executive. “His future wasn’t being discussed, but I feared for him.”
The board did not waver. Arsenal beat Chelsea 3-1 on Boxing Day to relieve immediate pressure and although Arteta struggled and finished eighth that season he remained backed to the hilt, evident by the departure of Mesut Özil in January 2021. “That was totemic,” said one source. “It cost the club a lot of money [to pay up his contract], but they backed Mikel’s judgment.”
Arteta had made clear there were certain characters he would not tolerate; Özil’s friend Shkodran Mustafi left in the same window. A line had been drawn and when Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang attempted to cross it a year later he, too, was sold, even though Arsenal were in a race for Champions League places and desperate for his goals.
A key scene in the Amazon Prime documentary that chronicled the 2021-22 season was Rob Holding and Mohamed Elneny discussing Aubameyang’s departure. “Boss had balls,” says Elneny. “Yeah, boss had balls,” agrees Holding. The message had landed.
That said, the 2021-22 season started shambolically, Arsenal losing at promoted Brentford, to Chelsea at home to jeers and boos, then 5-0 at City, with Granit Xhaka sent off and indiscipline a clear problem. Insiders say Arteta did not waver. “Mikel is not the type of person to get overwhelmed about anything,” said one senior member of the football staff. “He’s very driven and very solid in his mind. There were difficult times and then obviously Arsenal had invested massively. But the Kroenkes deserve credit.”
Arteta has left his own distinctive stamp of the club – he is most definitely the manager not head coach, a development Arsenal initially wanted to avoid in the post-Wenger era to avoid the personality-cult syndrome – but was also bequeathed building blocks of a first-class side.
William Saliba had been signed by a scouting team subsequently dismantled by Edu, and Arteta almost lost him, sending him away on loan, unimpressed, until he was persuaded to take him back; a deal for Gabriel Magalhães had been put in place by the same scouts and he arrived in September 2020; and he had Bukayo Saka coming through from the academy.
No one at Arsenal doubts the significance of the summer of 2023 in making the step from good to great: the £200m spent to bring in Declan Rice, Kai Havertz, Jurriën Timber and David Raya indicated not only an intent to take on nation-state funded teams. It also showed Arteta’s charisma was a key part of a recruitment success story, with Rice rejecting Chelsea, Manchester United and City. “The project seemed more exciting and I believe we’re on to big things here,” he said.
Over the past couple of seasons, Rice might have privately questioned that. Now his words look uncannily prescient.
