Mikel Arteta: The Coach Who Sees Everything
Santi Cazorla can barely get the words out for laughing. In his version of events, there is no one worse to watch a football match with than Mikel Arteta. No one more infuriating with a remote control in his hand. And, in that, he always knew there was a coach trying to get out.
“When we were injured at Arsenal, we used to meet at home for games, and 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 continues, still cracking up. “He was a coach already. All game, every game: pausing, rewinding. The match is finished and we’re only in the 35th minute. ‘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 smallest province in Spain to the biggest stage
Gipuzkoa is tiny on the map, but it keeps spitting out elite managers as if there’s something in the soil. Mikel Arteta is one of its most curious exports. From early on, he was different. Everyone who knew him as a boy says it.
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.”
The three of them grew up with him at Antiguoko, a youth club in San Sebastián that routinely took on professional academies and beat them. There, Arteta was more than just talented. He was sharp, driven, and already making choices most teenagers never face.
He could have gone another way entirely. He was good enough at tennis to chase that career instead. His father made him choose. Football won.
Roberto Montiel, his former coach at Antiguoko, still delights in telling the story of a goal Arteta scored against Real Sociedad, all cheek and subtlety, that reminds him of Lionel Messi. Back then Arteta was tiny, two-footed, a classic No 10 who would later evolve into a No 4. “A born sportsman,” Montiel calls him. Parra adds the other side of it: “He was always clear he would make it and sacrificed his life for it. 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.”
Even at 14, when he began training at Athletic Club, 100km away along the AP-8, his game stood out. One of his coaches there was José Luis Mendilibar, later in charge of Athletic, Eibar, Sevilla and Olympiakos. Mendilibar remembers a boy who never lost the ball and always played with clarity and 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,” he wrote later.
Luis Fernández, who signed an 18-year-old Arteta for Paris Saint-Germain in 2001, saw the same thing from the dugout. “When you told him what you wanted, he did it first time,” Fernández says.
The Masia years: a farmhouse full of futures
By then, Barcelona had already left their mark. Arteta’s first great leap came in 1997, when he and two friends from Gipuzkoa – Yanguas and Jon Álvarez – were invited to a trial after an Easter tournament. They stayed near Pedralbes. At the end, Barça said yes to all three.
“We left that summer: 17 August, the day of San Sebastián’s fiestas, so I remember it well,” Yanguas says.
They moved into La Masia, the old Catalan farmhouse beside Camp Nou, the spiritual heart of Barcelona and a literal home for 32 boys aged 11 to 18. A few were basketball players. Andrés Iniesta, Carles Puyol and Iván de la Peña lived there. Pepe Reina became one of Arteta’s closest friends.
Each dorm had four bunks, with the odd camp bed squeezed in. Through the window they could see part of the training pitch where Bobby Robson’s team worked. The other half was hidden behind a screen.
“It was just us, the cooks, the security guard and one guy overseeing everything,” says Roberto Trashorras, another who grew 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. We were teenagers, so there’d be the usual messing about: jokes, water bombs. Mikel was funny, extroverted, but we were the victims usually … until you get a bit older and it’s your turn.”
The routine was simple and strict. A bus took them to school – parents had three options to choose from – then back for training. After that? Not much, Yanguas admits.
“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. 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. Looking back, Yanguas knows he wasn’t ready. That cadete side became national champions, but he returned home after one 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 too: he would demand the ball. 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.”
The sensible one who crashed the car
Jofre Mateu was two years older than Arteta and already had a first-team appearance for Barcelona when they played together in the B team. He remembers a running joke about Arteta’s hair – “bull’s hair,” Mikel called it, so hard it never moved – but one moment is burned into his memory.
“One day he took my car when he was learning or recently passed and crashed it into the Masia wall,” Jofre says, laughing. “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.”
So, are you stupid for handing him the keys?
“Totally,” Jofre answers. But that’s the point: lending Arteta the car never felt like a risk. If anything defined him, Jofre insists, it was how sensible he was.
“He wasn’t there to piss about, he was there to do the right thing,” he says. “He was super-responsible, he had something.”
Another scene tells the story better. “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 do it in an ugly way, but he did it. Clearly, firmly. And we just all stopped. Like: ‘Olé tus huevos.’ I think that said something about him: he wasn’t the star, but he’s not going to let that happen.”
Learning a different game
La Masia was a football education like no other. It forced even the most gifted boys to unlearn and relearn.
“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, a 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 saw the same transformation. “Mikel was a dribbler, arriving in the area, but he learned to play one, two touches, not lose his position. 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.”
There was a simple, brutal reason why Arteta never broke through at Barcelona: Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta. Two roadblocks in human form. But his education did not end in Catalonia. His ideas and character were shaped across four countries – Spain, France, Scotland and England – each stop adding something to the coach he would become.
“When I became PSG coach I asked for Mikel because I watched him in the juvenil,” Fernández says. “I followed Johan Cruyff’s ideas, the importance of the pivot, loved Pep Guardiola and wanted a player of that type.
“On the pitch you see Mikel’s intelligence, his understanding and, for sure, that comes out later when he becomes a coach. 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. 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.”
Always football
“It just had to come out,” says Carrión. “He was a kid with personality: polite, very professional for his age. 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.”
With time, as Yanguas points out, you learn to give shape and language to the spaces you once saw instinctively. Arteta always saw them. The focus and passion were built in.
Ask Jofre if he saw a future coach in him back then and he is blunt: “Zero. 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 truth. “With Pep, you saw it; with Mikel I couldn’t claim to have done, but you can’t argue with what he’s done.”
Because someone did see it. Guardiola saw it, and invited him to Manchester City instead of Dubai, Qatar or the US. The boy who once crashed a car into a wall at La Masia now walks into a Champions League final as Arsenal’s head coach, still pausing the game in his head, still asking the same question:
“What do you see?”
