Mikel Arteta's Unique Approach to Team Preparation
Mikel Arteta does not wait for chaos to find his team. He goes looking for it.
Cold meals, stifling dressing rooms, delayed buses, different routes to the stadium – Arsenal’s manager has turned inconvenience into a training tool, a habit he believes is now hardwired into a squad chasing every edge at the top level.
So when Arsenal’s flight to Italy for their Champions League opener against Napoli was held up for more than five hours this week, there was no sense of drama. No panic when they finally landed in Naples just before 10pm local time. No pre‑match press conference, no perfect schedule. Just another problem to solve.
They solved it. A second-half winner from Martin Ødegaard made it 13 successive league-stage victories in Europe. The disruption became just another story, not an excuse.
Arteta’s school of discomfort
Arteta has long carried a reputation for unusual methods. He once hired pickpockets during pre-season to jolt players’ awareness. Before a trip to Anfield, he blasted crowd noise through speakers at training to mimic the intensity of Liverpool away.
Now he has lifted the lid a little more on how he actively builds stress into Arsenal’s routine.
“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he said. “So when they happen, we already experience them and we already know.”
He wants his squad to feel the ground move under their feet and keep walking anyway.
“So, get to the stadium very late, change the routine as soon as the players have to do something else,” he explained. “Because when it happens, and it can happen, you can miss the flight, the train can be delayed, there’s so much traffic, and I don’t want the players, the staff as well, panicking.”
On the plane to Naples, the message was the same: no sulking, no excuses.
“So, when that happens, adapt to it. ‘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.”
Asked what else he has thrown at his players, Arteta reeled off a list that sounded more like a survival course than elite preparation.
“Just delay the meals, delay the transport, take a different route. We have done many things: make the dressing room hotter, more difficult, more challenging, less [massage] beds. Those kind of things,” he said.
The logic is blunt: if they have already suffered it in July, they will not freeze in October.
“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 next, and a tale of two exits
Arsenal head to Sunderland on Saturday night, intent on protecting their perfect start to the league campaign. The Stadium of Light carries a sting from last season, when a 2-2 draw saw Leandro Trossard’s goal cancelled out late on by Brian Brobbey.
Trossard is no longer in the dressing room. Nor is Gabriel Jesus. The way both forwards left the club has sharpened focus on how Arteta handles difficult conversations.
Jesus, now at Barcelona after being made to train away from the main group before his move, recently said: “No one told me nothing.” It jarred with the image of a manager who speaks so often about connection and clarity.
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 did not shy away from the harder side of his job.
“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 exit tells a different story. The Belgium international joined Besiktas in July but was back at the Emirates last week, watching Arsenal’s win over Chelsea, sharing handshakes and smiles.
For Arteta, that is the true test of how these decisions land.
“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.”
The manager who turns up the heat in the dressing room now walks into another kind of pressure at Sunderland: an unbeaten start to protect, expectations rising, and former players watching closely from afar. How many more storms can this group learn to enjoy?
