Arteta Focuses on West Ham After Champions League Triumph
Mikel Arteta walked into his pre-West Ham press conference still riding the emotional high of a Champions League semi-final triumph – and immediately slammed the door on any talk of Paris.
The message was blunt: enjoy the moment, but forget it. The title race and a London derby come first.
No, everybody finished the game well and nothing to add,” he said when asked about fresh injuries. No drama, no late setbacks. Just a fully-fit group for a run-in that could define his tenure.
Merino and Timber? No romantic late-season twist. “No chance for the weekend,” Arteta confirmed, and even their chances of featuring before the season ends remain uncertain. “Everything has to be so smooth and quick if they want to have a chance to play any minutes,” he added, underlining how little margin for error remains.
Paris can wait
Talk of PSG and the Champions League final surfaced quickly, but Arteta refused to dress it up.
“It is what it is,” he said, acknowledging the inevitable quality of either Bayern Munich or PSG. Now the French champions await. No grand build-up, no early narrative. “We know the quality that they have… but obviously, we're also very confident that when we get to that moment, we're going to deliver what we need to.”
That moment, though, is parked. The Arsenal manager made it clear his mind snapped straight back into domestic mode almost as soon as the semi-final whistle blew.
“I was in a really high emotional state after the game,” he admitted. “Straight after that, my concentration, my focus, my energy was, ‘ok, West Ham, what do we have to do… to prepare in the best possible way to go there and win the game?’ That's it.”
No lingering, no basking. Just the next battle.
Unity as a weapon
Arteta knows the margins are brutal now. Four league games left. A title race alive. A Champions League final on the horizon. He keeps circling back to one thing: the bond between players and supporters.
“It's crucial, immense and needed,” he said of that connection. “What they can provide when we get the stadium into that emotional state… it's just incredible. The players described it like they never had that feeling before in the stadium, and they make them better.”
Criticism of Arsenal’s celebrations after beating Atletico Madrid has bubbled away in the background, but he brushed it aside with a shrug.
“I think you have to respect every opinion and place them where they belong,” he said, refusing to bite when pushed on where that was. “That’s not important.”
What does matter, in his eyes, is how the squad channels all that outside noise.
“You have to be prepared for that because you know the challenge and difficulty of it, and it does make you better, that's for certain,” he said, framing both praise and criticism as fuel for higher standards.
The message to players and fans heading into West Ham is stripped back and sharp: “Stay present, live the moment, prepare and show the same level of energy, hunger and desire that we've shown all season, or more… everything that we do now is going to matter to win it or not.”
A derby with real stakes
This isn’t just another London derby. For both clubs, the consequences are heavy.
“Understanding the context of the game for both clubs, it's huge, obviously,” Arteta said. “We know the importance of it, we know what we want, and what we have to do to win the game.”
He called Sunday a “battle” and insisted there has been no need to drag his squad back down to earth.
“We talked immediately after the game, and this is great. What a moment, we earned it,” he explained. “We'll have time to prepare and get ready for that final, but now the focus, the attention, the detail, the energy, everything has to be put into West Ham, there is nothing else there, and we made it very clear.”
These weeks, he admits, are the biggest of his career. But he refuses to drift into hypotheticals.
“Yes, but that's if and if football doesn't work, we have to do it,” he said. “What we're going to do today, what we've done today, that's a fact. That's the most important thing.”
Rice returns, but as a leader
The narrative almost writes itself: Declan Rice back at West Ham, this time as a driving force in a title and European campaign.
Arteta doesn’t lean into the sentiment. He leans into the status.
“Yes, he was already really well developed, I would say,” he noted of Rice on arrival. “He's been outstanding for us, he's one of our leaders, one of the main players without a doubt. What he's doing for the club, for the team, is just very powerful.”
Rice arrives at his old home transformed. Not just a former captain returning, but a cornerstone of a side chasing the biggest prizes.
Saka, White and the right-side engine
On Bukayo Saka, Arteta’s admiration runs deep. The relationship sounds as much personal as tactical.
“A joy,” he said simply. “I feel extremely lucky… to find somebody at the club that you can lean into at any level. Knowing that he's going to respond. Knowing that his heart is in the right place.”
He praised Saka’s values and principles as much as his football, describing his contribution as “remarkable” – not just this season, but especially “what he did the other night”.
There was also a nod to the rekindled partnership with Ben White.
“The amount of minutes that they've played this season has been extremely low for different circumstances,” Arteta pointed out. “It's great that they have a really good connection, a really good understanding… you can sense and notice that in a really positive way.”
Lewis-Skelly’s steep learning curve
Few stories inside this squad have accelerated as quickly as Myles Lewis-Skelly’s. Arteta’s decision to drop him into midfield against Fulham and Atletico, and to use Eze on the left at Manchester City, came from instinct sharpened by preparation.
“There is something related to your intuition – what the game is going to require, the state of the players, the way you can imagine the game and where the players will have the most impact,” he said. “You can get it right or wrong… but if you do what you feel, at least you have the certainty that you’ve done the preparation.”
On Lewis-Skelly himself, Arteta opened a window into the emotional and tactical demands placed on a teenager suddenly thrust into the spotlight.
“He's a boy that was playing with the under-18s, under-21s, sometimes he wasn't even playing, he was playing in a different position,” he explained. “He comes in, he comes through, he plays in a completely different position that he's ever played before, he's exceptional, everybody's talking about him, he goes to the national team.”
Then came the comedown.
“He comes back from pre-season, and then he starts to realise that maybe he's not going to be a starter,” Arteta said. “You need to go through those emotions… and that's not easy, I understand that.”
Arteta admitted he had to push the youngster, repeatedly.
“I need to guide him, and I need to give him my perspective, the reasons why he wasn't playing that much, and he took it on board. Not the first one, after three or four times, I think he realised, OK, I think if it’s not this way, I don't think it's going to happen.”
The reward has been a young midfielder suddenly playing with “confidence”, “energy” and “determination” despite limited minutes. “It's something that is surprising,” Arteta conceded – pleasantly so.
Gyokeres’ hard yards and the value of depth
Viktor Gyokeres’ improvement with his back to goal has not caught Arteta off guard.
“From the beginning,” he said when asked if he’d noticed the development. But he stressed that what looks like rapid progress has been months in the making.
“Maybe months ago, but it hasn’t happened overnight,” he said. “Viktor has been working extremely hard, the demands he puts on himself are extremely high. He always wants to learn, he’s always asking questions, he always wants to do extra things.”
Arteta highlighted how the striker seeks connections “in the canteen, in the dressing room or on the pitch,” and insisted that “when you have that kind of behaviour, you get rewards.”
He also pointed to the strength of his bench in the last game as a clear marker of how far the squad has come.
“It was to witness the quality that we had on the bench the other night, if you compare that to a year ago, that's a very different picture,” he said. “We have managed in the last week or so as well to have some more players fresher… if we have that, we have a bigger chance to achieve the goals.”
As for whether every remaining league match is now an audition for the Champions League final, he dismissed the idea.
“I don't think they think like this because they know the audition is every single day in training,” he said. The competition for places, he suggested, has been relentless “especially the last few weeks.”
Raya’s standard and the five-phase mystery
In goal, David Raya has quietly set a standard that, in Arteta’s view, risks being taken for granted.
“First of all, he’s been exceptional; his level of consistency since he joined the club has been something that probably nobody expected,” he said. “Sometimes I think we take some of the things he does as normal when they’re not – he has responded in crucial moments.”
Arteta stressed that the defensive unit deserves credit too, especially as Raya pushes again towards the Golden Glove for a third consecutive season.
The long-discussed “five-phase plan” of his project, though, remains locked away.
“Can we speak about it at the end of the season?” he replied when asked, before joking, “I don’t know, I’m lost! It doesn't matter, the phase.”
Pressed on being four games from realising what was laid out six years ago, he cut it off with the same theme that runs through every answer now.
“At the moment, it doesn’t matter. Let’s live in the present… the most important thing is what the outcome is when it comes to the end of May.”
The stakes are obvious. A title charge, a Champions League final, and a derby at West Ham that could tilt the mood of the whole run-in. Arteta’s view is simple: enjoy none of it too early, prepare for all of it completely. The rest will be decided on the pitch.
