Mikel Arteta Embraces Challenges Ahead of Sunderland Clash
Mikel Arteta did not see a five‑hour delay on the runway as a problem. He saw a live exercise.
Arsenal’s flight to Naples for their Champions League opener against Napoli landed so late that the manager had to scrap his pre‑match press conference, the squad reaching their hotel close to 10pm local time. The kind of disruption that usually frays tempers and wrecks routines. Arsenal treated it as just another drill.
They went out the next day and claimed a 13th straight league‑stage win in Europe, Martin Ødegaard settling it in the second half. For Arteta, the victory was not just on the pitch. It was in how his players reacted long before they reached the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona.
Training for chaos
Arteta has spent years hard‑wiring his squad for nights like this. The odd methods that once raised eyebrows – hiring pickpockets during pre‑season to test players’ awareness, blasting Anfield crowd noise through speakers at London Colney – are part of a broader obsession: control what you can, embrace what you can’t.
“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he said, explaining why Arsenal took the delay in their stride. The point is simple: when things go wrong, they have already lived it.
So he messes with the basics. Meals pushed back. Team coach leaving later than expected. A different route to the stadium. Fewer massage beds. Dressing rooms cranked up to an uncomfortable heat. All of it designed to unsettle, all of it done on purpose.
“Get to the stadium very late, change the routine as soon as the players have to do something else,” he said. Flights can be missed. Trains can stall. Traffic can snarl a city to a standstill. He does not want panic when it happens for real.
The message is drilled in: adapt, don’t complain. “OK, we have another two or three hours on the plane, how can we use them?” he tells his players. Talk. Sleep. Play cards. Stay together. What they cannot do is reach for excuses.
The delay in Italy became just another scenario from pre‑season, replayed under real pressure. The result suggested the rehearsal worked.
Sunderland next, and scars from last year
The schedule offers no time to dwell. Arsenal travel to Sunderland on Saturday night, intent on preserving a perfect start to the domestic campaign. The Stadium of Light carries a sting for them. Last season’s 2-2 draw there, when Leandro Trossard’s goal was wiped out by Brian Brobbey’s late equaliser, still nags.
Arteta wants that memory to sharpen his players, not weigh them down. Sunderland away, under the lights, fits his taste for awkward environments. Different pitch, different crowd, different stresses. Exactly the kind of context he has been trying to simulate with those suffocating dressing rooms and mangled timetables.
Two exits, two reactions
The manager’s eye for psychology does not stop at travel plans. It stretches into how players leave the club, and how they remember it.
This week he drew an unprompted contrast between two forwards who departed in the summer: Gabriel Jesus and Trossard.
Gabriel, now at Barcelona after being made to train away from the main group before his move, claimed: “No one told me nothing.” Arteta was taken aback.
“Very surprised, to be fair, especially because with Gabriel I had an individual talk in the dressing room,” he said. The conversation, as he recalls it, was heavy on gratitude from both sides. The Brazilian’s later comments clearly jarred.
Arteta knows how these moments can turn. Deliver bad news, and emotions spike. “Somebody has to be the bad cop; if I have to be, I have to be,” he said. The immediate reaction, he accepts, is often raw and reactive.
Trossard’s exit played out differently. The Belgian moved to Besiktas in July, yet turned up at the Emirates last week to watch Arsenal beat Chelsea, sharing the dressing room again and catching up with former teammates. No bitterness, no distance.
“What is important is normally what happens three months later, six months later,” Arteta said. That is when the truth of a relationship shows itself. Players come and go, but he wants the bond to outlast the contract.
He points to the atmosphere when ex‑players return, the warmth in the room, as the real verdict on his regime. “At some point their relationship has been really good. I hope that’s the same case,” he added.
The next test of that culture comes in Sunderland, on a night that may be cold, hostile and awkward. Exactly the sort of evening Mikel Arteta has been quietly building his team to relish.
