Mikel Arteta's Resilience Strategies for Arsenal
Mikel Arteta is not leaving Arsenal’s resilience to chance. He is engineering it.
The Spaniard has lifted the curtain on the unusual challenges he sets his players – from delaying meals before kick-off to cranking up the heat in the dressing room – all designed to harden his squad for the chaos that elite football throws at them.
That chaos arrived early in the week.
A five-hour delay, no excuses
Arsenal’s flight to Italy for their Champions League opener against Napoli was held up for more than five hours, forcing Arteta to scrap his pre-match press conference as the team finally landed in Naples just before 10pm local time.
The disruption barely left a mark. Arsenal ground out a 1-0 win, Martin Ødegaard settling it in the second half to secure a 13th consecutive league-stage victory in Europe.
Arteta insisted this was no accident. This is the point of the drills, the discomfort, the strange scenarios.
“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he explained. “So when they happen, we already experience them and we already know. So, get to the stadium very late, change the routine as soon as the players have to do something else.”
He rattled through the list of things that can go wrong: missed flights, delayed trains, traffic jams. He wants no panic. No wide eyes. No excuses.
“So, when that happens, adapt to it,” he said. “’OK, we have another two or three hours on the plane, how can we use them?’ Play together, spend some time together, sleep, use it, but certainly don’t complain and then use it as an excuse because that’s not helpful at all.”
Hotter rooms, fewer beds, sharper minds
Arteta’s reputation for inventive methods is already well established. He has previously hired pickpockets on pre-season trips to jolt players’ awareness and once prepared for a visit to Anfield by blasting crowd noise through speakers in training.
Now he has gone deeper into the detail of the controlled discomfort.
“Just delay the meals, delay the transport, take a different route,” he said. “We have done many things: make the dressing room hotter, more difficult, more challenging, less [massage] beds. Those kind of things.”
The aim is simple: strip away comfort, build adaptability.
“Because we are going to have to adapt to different contexts and we will try to anticipate it and create the best possible conditions. But when there is that element of stress or surprise on matchday, it’s important [to be prepared].”
Sunderland away and memories of last year
Next up is Sunderland away on Saturday night, a fixture that still carries a sting from last season. Arsenal were held to a 2-2 draw at the Stadium of Light, Leandro Trossard scoring their second before Brian Brobbey snatched a late equaliser.
Arsenal arrive this time with a perfect start to the league campaign on the line and with Trossard now watching from afar. The Belgium forward joined Besiktas in July but was back at the Emirates last week to see the win over Chelsea.
His exit – and his return as a spectator – offered a neat contrast for Arteta with another former forward, Gabriel Jesus.
Trossard, Jesus and the “bad cop” role
Jesus, now at Barcelona, recently claimed: “No one told me nothing,” when asked about his Arsenal departure. He was made to train away from the main group before leaving in the summer, and his comments have lingered.
Arteta sounded genuinely taken aback.
“Very surprised, to be fair, especially because with Gabriel I had an individual talk in the dressing room,” he said. “And the words that we used for each other, it was all about gratitude. So, I don’t know. It’s OK.”
He knows how these moments can play out when careers and emotions collide.
“Sometimes I understand when you have to deliver bad news or news that people don’t expect. Those things are reactive. Somebody has to be the bad cop; if I have to be, I have to be.”
Trossard’s behaviour since leaving, and his easy return to the dressing room as a visitor, is closer to the scenario Arteta wants to see.
“What is important is normally what happens three months later, six months later,” he said. “When Trossard comes in, he’s in the dressing room with all of us, the atmosphere and the relation you have with all the players that they left, at some point their relationship has been really good. I hope that’s the same case.”
Arteta has built a team to withstand turbulence, on the pitch and off it. Sunderland away, on a cold Saturday night with memories of dropped points and late equalisers, is exactly the kind of test he has been rehearsing for.
