Mikel Arteta: Embracing Chaos as a Training Tool
Mikel Arteta likes things to go wrong. At least, he likes his players to believe they might.
Delayed meals. Late buses. Detours to the stadium. Fewer massage beds. A dressing room cranked up to an uncomfortable heat. For Arsenal’s manager, inconvenience is not an accident of elite football – it is a training tool.
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 panic. No scrambling for excuses. The squad landed in Naples just before 10pm local time, Arteta’s pre‑match press conference was scrapped, and the rhythm of a European away game was thrown out of sync.
On the pitch, his players looked as if they had rehearsed the chaos.
They dug in, absorbed the disruption and made it 13 successive league‑stage victories in Europe, Martin Ødegaard delivering the decisive blow in the second half. A messy build-up to a clean result – precisely the kind of scenario Arteta has been trying to hard-wire into his squad.
“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he explained. He wants his players to feel the jolt before the real thing. Turn up late to the stadium. Break the routine. Strip away the comfort blanket of repetition.
Because, as he reminds them, real life gets in the way. Flights are missed. Trains are delayed. Traffic chokes the team coach. Schedules collapse. In those moments, he does not want to see anxiety ripple through the group or staff members fretting about lost minutes.
“So, when that happens, adapt to it,” he tells them. Another two or three hours on the plane? Then use it. Play cards. Talk. Sleep. Do anything except complain. Above all, do not reach for it later as an excuse.
This is Arteta’s edge: he turns irritation into preparation.
Asked what else he has thrown at his squad, he reeled off the list. Delayed meals. Delayed transport. Alternative routes to the ground. Dressing rooms made hotter, more uncomfortable, more awkward. Fewer massage beds. Minor details, but deliberately so. Each one forces a response. Each one strips away the illusion that matchday unfolds on Arsenal’s terms.
“We are going to have to adapt to different contexts,” he said. He will do everything he can to create the best possible conditions, but he also wants that flicker of stress, that element of surprise. On matchday, he wants his players to recognise it, not fear it.
The next test comes on Saturday night at Sunderland, where Arsenal will try to extend their perfect start to the new campaign. The Stadium of Light did not treat them kindly last season: a 2-2 draw, Leandro Trossard scoring what looked like the winner before Brian Brobbey’s late equaliser punctured their momentum.
That night still lingers, not as trauma but as a reminder. Control the controllables. Survive the rest.
Trossard’s name surfaced again this week for a different reason. The Belgium forward left for Besiktas in July yet was back at the Emirates for last week’s win over Chelsea, a visible symbol of a relationship that, in Arteta’s eyes, remains warm.
His departure stood in stark contrast to that of Gabriel Jesus. The Brazilian, now at Barcelona, claimed “No one told me nothing” about his exit, having been made to train away from the main group before the move went through. It was a pointed line, and it landed back in north London with a thud.
Arteta’s response was measured but laced with surprise. “Very surprised, to be fair, especially because with Gabriel I had an individual talk in the dressing room,” he said. Those conversations, he insisted, were full of gratitude on both sides.
He knows how it looks when a player is told he is no longer central to the project. Emotions flare. Words harden. “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.”
Time, he suggested, is the real judge. “What is important is normally what happens three months later, six months later.” That is why Trossard’s presence back at the Emirates mattered. The forward dropped into the dressing room, mingled with his former teammates, and the atmosphere felt natural. No tension. No distance. Just the easy familiarity of players who have shared a dressing room and still share a bond.
Arteta wants that to be the norm. Players come and go, but the relationships, he hopes, endure.
On the pitch, his methods are already clear. Arsenal are being taught to embrace the unexpected: the late arrival, the hot dressing room, the broken routine, the late equaliser. Off it, he is trying to manage the human fallout of elite decisions.
The margins at the top are thin. Arteta is trying to bend them his way – in the air on a delayed flight, in a stifling changing room, and in the silence that follows a difficult conversation with a player who is about to walk out of the door.
