Mikel Arteta: The Evolution from Player to Coach

Santi Cazorla can barely get the words out for laughing. The memory still floors him. Two injured Arsenal players, one sofa, one television – and one man who simply could not let a game breathe.

Mikel Arteta had the remote. Which meant no one else really had the game.

“He would grab the remote and pause it,” Cazorla recalls. “I would say: ‘What are you stopping it for?’ He would say: ‘No, go back, go back,’ rewind it 30 seconds, and then ask: ‘What do you see?’ I would say: ‘I see a paused screen. I don’t see anything!’”

Arteta, of course, saw everything.

“‘Don’t you think this player is badly positioned? … If he goes a bit deeper, this space opens up … if the pivot goes there, this happens … that line should be deeper …’” Cazorla says, still cracking up. The match would be over, yet somehow they were stuck in the 35th minute. “He was a coach already. All game, every game: pausing, rewinding. ‘Do you see it?’ ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, now come on, press play.’ But I didn’t see it. I love football, I can watch it all day, but I don’t notice those things. Mikel does. I think it’s a gift.”

From the sofa to the touchline, the line feels straight now. It did not back then.

A different kid from a small corner

Arteta comes from Gipuzkoa, Spain’s smallest province and a strange, fertile strip of land for elite coaches. He was always a bit different there. Everyone says so.

Not necessarily destined to be a coach. Not yet. But destined to be something.

“Mikel caught your attention very young,” says Jon Ayerbe. “The word I’d use is alive; you saw it in his eyes. He grasped everything fast, had character and was so competitive. Give him the ball, he’ll find a solution. And he was a year younger than us, eh.”

“Above all, he was the most intelligent,” adds Álvaro Parra. Mikel Yanguas remembers the same feeling: “You looked at him and thought: ‘Bloody hell, he’s got something special. If anyone makes it, it’s him.’ He had personality, ambition.”

They all played together at Antiguoko, the San Sebastián youth club that delighted in taking on professional academies and beating them. Arteta could have been a tennis player – he was that good – until his father forced a choice. Football won, and Antiguoko’s coach Roberto Montiel still delights in telling the story of a goal against Real Sociedad, cheeky and technical, that reminded him of Lionel Messi.

Arteta was tiny then, two-footed, a No 10 who would later drop back to become a No 4. “A born sportsman,” Montiel calls him. Parra remembers the steel behind the talent. “He was always clear he would make it and sacrificed his life for it,” he says. “He went to Barcelona, leaving everything behind. And later he turned down lucrative offers – Dubai, Qatar, the US – to work with Guardiola at Man City because it was the right step.”

Athletic, Barcelona and a mind that never lost the ball

By 14, Arteta was already on the road, travelling 100km west along the AP‑8 to train with Athletic Club. One of his coaches there was José Luis Mendilibar, future manager of Athletic, Eibar, Sevilla and Olympiakos, and even then something stood out.

This kid never lost the ball. He played with clarity, with sense.

“What you could imagine, thinking about it now, was that someone with that intelligence and understanding would also develop an ability to explain it to others, so they could understand too,” Mendilibar wrote later.

Luis Fernández, the coach who took an 18‑year‑old Arteta to Paris Saint‑Germain in 2001, felt the same. “When you told him what you wanted, he did it first time,” Fernández says.

By then, Barcelona had already left their mark. That was the first great leap: away from home, away from Gipuzkoa, into La Masia.

“It was 1997,” Yanguas recalls. “Someone saw us representing Gipuzkoa at an Easter tournament and invited us to a trial at Barcelona. We stayed near Pedralbes and at the end they said yes to the three of us: me, Mikel and Jon Álvarez. We left that summer: 17 August, the day of San Sebastián’s fiestas, so I remember it well.”

Life inside La Masia

They moved into the old farmhouse by Camp Nou, Barcelona’s spiritual cradle. Thirty‑two boys, a few basketball players among them, living above the beating heart of the club. Andrés Iniesta, Carles Puyol, Iván de la Peña. Pepe Reina would become one of Arteta’s closest friends. Through the window, they could see Bobby Robson’s team training – or half of it, at least, the rest hidden by a screen.

“It was just us, the cooks, the security guard and one guy overseeing everything,” says Roberto Trashorras, who became close to Arteta. “It’s totally different nowadays. We sorted things out among ourselves. Because we were alone, we looked after each other. There were no mobiles. I remember queueing at midnight to ring home from the payphone, Puyol and De la Peña ahead of me.”

They were kids. So there were jokes, water bombs, late‑night nonsense. “Mikel was funny, extroverted, but we were the victims usually … until you get a bit older and it’s your turn,” Trashorras says.

Days followed a strict rhythm. A bus to school – parents chose from three options – training, and then not much else. “We would go to El Corte Inglés; we were from San Sebastián, a small city, and we didn’t have an El Corte Inglés there,” Yanguas says. “Or we’d go to the cinema. I remember seeing Titanic with Mikel, Victor Valdés, Fernando Macedo. At weekends your parents would come.”

They were 15. For some, it was too much.

Yanguas admits he wasn’t ready. That cadete team became national champions, yet he returned home after a year. “It was hard for me,” he says. “I think about it now and I was an introvert. Mikel was different, better prepared: more outgoing, more adaptable, better at relating. Maybe inside he was struggling but we saw someone who handled it very well.”

On the pitch, the difference was sharper still. “He would demand the ball,” Yanguas says. “I thought it was natural then but I coach now and realise it’s not. No one offers, no one asks for the ball. Mikel did constantly. It’s hard to do that: ‘Give it to me, I’ll sort this.’ He was surrounded by great players but had the confidence and self assurance to do that.”

Crashing cars, calming fights

Not every memory is tactical chalkboard stuff. Some are gloriously ordinary.

Jofre Mateu, two years older and already with a first‑team appearance, played with Arteta in Barcelona B. “Mikel used to laugh about his hair. He said he had ‘bull’s hair’: so hard and it didn’t move,” Jofre says. Then he starts laughing himself.

“One day he took my car when he was learning or recently passed and crashed it into the Masia wall. It was three metres, impossible to crash. Impossible. And he goes: ‘Nah, nah, relax, I-don’t-know-what.’ He puts his arm on the window, looks back to reverse, but he’s putting it in first. ‘Yeah, I think you need more lessons. You can take taxis from now on.’ My car was only two months old: a VW Golf.”

Is he stupid? “Totally,” Jofre says, joking. But the car keys had gone to the most sensible of them all. “He wasn’t there to piss about, he was there to do the right thing,” Jofre insists. “He was super-responsible, he had something.”

Another scene reveals that “something” more clearly.

“Thiago Motta was hot-headed and in a training session he got in a fight, which wasn’t unusual,” Jofre says. “I don’t remember who with, but it wasn’t Mikel, yet he steps in: ‘Thiago, man, you’re teammates: you can’t do this.’ I remember it because Mikel didn’t really have the ‘weight’ to do that. It would be like Marc Bernal standing up to, say, Gavi now.”

He didn’t rant, didn’t shout. He just said it, clearly and firmly. Training stopped for a moment.

“Olé tus huevos,” the others thought. Good on you.

“He wasn’t the star, but he’s not going to let that happen,” Jofre says. That, too, felt like a coach in embryo, even if no one labelled it that way.

Football as a religion

La Masia offered more than a bed and a bus to school. It was a complete footballing re‑education.

“The players who arrive are the best in their teams but Barcelona make you think about tactics, space in a way that’s not normal,” says Luis Carrión, another Barcelona B teammate. “At Antiguoko, Mikel would have had the ball all the time; here he had to wait, occupy the right space. By standing still, you see a solution, a way out. They’d explain concepts – third man, triangles, final line – but it wasn’t ‘classes’, more repetition: passing drills every day.”

Trashorras remembers the shift in Arteta’s game. “Mikel was a dribbler, arriving in the area, but he learned to play one, two touches, not lose his position,” he says. One lesson in particular stayed with him.

“One of the things that most struck me when I first got there is they would say: ‘Don’t go looking for the ball, the ball will come to you.’ ‘Yeah, but, it’s just there, I can …’ ‘No, no, no. Don’t invade someone else’s space.’ It can be hard to adapt but Mikel was sharp. It’s really, genuinely different. Pffff, it’s like a religion. And then when you leave it’s different too.”

Barcelona’s creed shaped him, but it did not define his entire story. In Catalonia, two names blocked his path: Xavi Hernández and Iniesta. There was a world beyond them and Arteta went to find it, absorbing ideas and experiences in Spain, France, Scotland and England.

The pivot PSG wanted – and the coach Guardiola saw

When Luis Fernández took over at PSG, he knew exactly who he wanted in midfield. “I asked for Mikel because I watched him in the juvenil,” he says. “I followed Johan Cruyff’s ideas, the importance of the pivot, loved Pep Guardiola and wanted a player of that type.”

He found one.

“On the pitch you see Mikel’s intelligence, his understanding and, for sure, that comes out later when he becomes a coach,” Fernández says. “He had the perfect attitude to coach: professionalism. He was responsible, listened, learned and you didn’t need to keep telling him. He was an example for everyone. I admire him. I’m sensitive and when I see him and Gabi [Heinze], his very good friend in Paris, it makes me so happy.”

Would he have called him a future coach back then? “If you had asked me then if he would be a coach, I’d have said: ‘No.’ He wasn’t: ‘Do this, do that.’ I think he learned with Pep. I went to see him do a session and thought: ‘Bloody hell, look at Mikel.’ But it was always in him.”

It just needed the right stage, the right mentor, the right moment to come out.

Always football

Those who shared the early years with Arteta remember the same core traits: personality, focus, a mind tuned to the game.

“He was a kid with personality: polite, very professional for his age,” Carrión says. “A coach? You never know, but he watched a lot of football. I ran into him recently and we chatted about football; it’s always football.”

Yanguas puts it another way. With time, he says, you learn to express and analyse the spaces you once just felt. Arteta always saw those spaces. The vocabulary, the structure, the ability to transmit them came later.

Asked if he saw a future coach in Arteta, Jofre is blunt. “Zero,” he says. “But if you asked me about Xavi, I would have said zero. Luis Enrique, zero. Guardiola … OK, yes. But we were kids still, teenagers at La Masia more interested in the next game, some girl or where we’re going on Saturday.”

Trashorras nods to that same blind spot. “With Pep, you saw it; with Mikel I couldn’t claim to have done, but you can’t argue with what he’s done.”

Pep Guardiola could. He saw it early, brought Arteta into his staff at Manchester City, and watched that mind, that remote‑control brain, click into place on the training pitch.

From Gipuzkoa to La Masia, from Paris to Glasgow to London, the signs were always there, scattered through car crashes, late‑night phone queues and paused television screens. The boy who demanded the ball now demands something else: that everyone sees the game as he always did.