Arsenal have spent the past week projecting confidence as an emerging power in world football, a club convinced it can sustain elite status for years to come. Their manager, the only Premier League boss with a winner’s medal in his possession, has just committed to a contract extending his tenure to 2030.
Yet that announcement barely qualified as the week’s main storyline. The gravitational pull of the Manchester City saga remains inescapable, and Mikel Arteta was always destined to be drawn into its orbit. Few managers have experienced the City era quite like Arteta. As a player, he arrived at the Emirates Stadium days after Samir Nasri’s departure for the Etihad. His coaching apprenticeship unfolded under Pep Guardiola, with two-and-a-half of his three-and-a-half years as assistant overlapping the period covering the 115 alleged Premier League rule breaches. Then came the defining chapter of his career to date: the prolonged, ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of City for Premier League supremacy.
There was much Arteta could have addressed. He chose to say little. The closest he came to a definitive statement on City arrived when asked whether his conscience was clear given his time at the club. “Yes,” he replied emphatically. Beyond that, the Spaniard was even more guarded than when discussing a high-profile injury. His reticence is understandable; Arsenal have reserved the right to pursue legal action against City once the Premier League’s case concludes. He was equally circumspect when reflecting on the seismic day the charges were announced.
“This has been going on for various years,” he said. “That process is still not finished. So it is very difficult to express how I feel, because it is not resolved. When it is resolved, I can talk with clarity and tell you exactly how I feel.”
He will be held to that promise. Few arrived at London Colney expecting Arteta to expound on the City situation. Even absent his Etihad ties, it is simply not his style to engage with matters beyond his immediate sphere, his crusade for additional substitutes notwithstanding. The media-room gravitas of a reigning champion sits less naturally on Arteta than it did on Jürgen Klopp, let alone Arsène Wenger.
Arteta was not alone in playing a dead bat to the City questions—a cricket reference for the uninitiated. Andoni Iraola was similarly circumspect ahead of his side’s clash with the champions, though it was notable that Manchester United manager Michael Carrick, who might have collected more winners’ medals had it not been for City’s alleged rule-breaking, called for the process to be expedited. That view is shared by many Premier League clubs, yet on Friday’s evidence Arteta was in no hurry to revisit his past.
His future appeared far more invigorating now that he is secured until 2030. An extension beyond his current deal, which expired this season, had long been anticipated; what stood out was the manner in which club and manager agreed to prolong their partnership past the decade mark. Even when the outcome makes one the highest-paid manager in the league, few describe contract negotiations as something they “loved.” Arteta is different.
He loved “the way we have analysed what we’ve done together and especially how we’re going to take this club to be the best in the world for many years… You just have a sense how you feel about each other, how we do things, and I feel really lucky and having [co-chairs] Stan and Josh [Kroenke] in front of you and talking to them and expressing still what they want to do, how they want to do it, especially is just inspiring.”
This is not the first time since signing that Arteta has set expectations at a stratospheric level. Last season’s Premier League title, he insisted, was merely the beginning. Meanwhile, chief executive Richard Garlick spoke of Arsenal “[dominating] football for the next number of years.” That is a lofty target for a club with one top-flight title in 22 years and no Champions League triumph—the prerequisite for true elite status. Such rhetoric can return to haunt a team, yet Arteta refuses to lower the bar.
“I don’t think you have to hide it; the thing is that you have to earn it every single day. Your aspirations and your dreams are where they are. I think it’s easier to get them… If I said to you the one that I had when I arrived [as manager in 2019], probably you would say what are you talking about?
“That was the ambition, that’s the drive, and it’s because we believe that we can do it, and then there will be many factors that would allow us or not to achieve it. Time will tell, but certainly that drive is there.”
And of course, the opportunity to establish Arsenal as the preeminent force in England and Europe is all the greater with their primary rivals facing potentially catastrophic sanctions. Not, naturally, that Arteta would frame it in those terms.
