Cesc Fàbregas Praises Arsenal's Patience in Modern Football
Cesc Fàbregas knows Arsenal from the inside. He captained them, carried them, left them. Now, standing back at the Emirates as a visitor, he looks at the club he once led and sees something rare in modern football: patience.
The Spaniard, who racked up 303 appearances for the Gunners, hailed the board for refusing to flinch during Mikel Arteta’s turbulent early years, when the project looked fragile and the noise around it was anything but.
“Congratulations to the club in general starting from seven, eight years ago when they first started with this project,” he said on the pitch after the match. “Because what you see in football every day, what Arsenal did, especially in the difficult moments, it doesn’t exist.”
Those difficult moments are etched into recent history. Arsenal stumbled to eighth place three seasons running under Arteta. The fourth year brought a surge towards the Champions League places, only for Tottenham to snatch fourth and leave Arsenal fifth and wounded.
For many clubs, that is the trigger. Panic. A sacking. A reset.
Arsenal went the other way.
“I told Edu, I told Andrea [Berta] when I came last year to a Champions League game, I said congratulations to the whole club for the patience, for sticking together, for sticking to the plan,” Fàbregas recalled. “When for three years in a row, correct me if I’m wrong, finished eighth, eighth, eighth, fourth year nearly Champions League, it was a big disappointment, Tottenham came, you finish fifth, but you keep going because you have a plan, because you have an objective, because you have progression, you keep going forward.”
That, for him, is the point. Not the instant hit, but the stubborn belief in a direction.
He contrasted Arsenal’s approach with the churn that has become standard across Europe. Lose a handful of games and the manager is out, the style flips, and the squad is dragged into another identity crisis.
“We lack this in football today,” he said. “You lose three games, change the coach, he was playing one style, now you play another, at the end of the day I don’t believe in this a lot.”
Fàbregas now lives that theory as a coach. At Como, he is trying to build something that echoes what he sees at his former club, even if he knows the scale is different.
“I’m very lucky I’m in a project, of course with much lower level, the history, everything, but we’re trying to look at the stability Arsenal had, the values, the culture that they are bringing,” he explained.
He kept circling back to Arteta. To the work, the detail, the dressing-room he has shaped.
“I think Mikel has done a tremendous job. So I can only wish them the best, really. Because most of the group, these guys now you talk to them, I don’t know… they’re good guys, they want to play good football, they are respectful, you can see how they stick to the plan all the time. Really, I’m super happy to come back here and smell this feeling.”
That “feeling” now carries expectation. Arsenal are no longer the plucky rebuild; they are champions with a target on their back.
Upcoming Fixtures
The next markers come quickly. Arsenal meet Manchester City in the Community Shield in Cardiff on Sunday, 16 August, a familiar early-season barometer against the side that has defined the Premier League era they are trying to break.
Six days later, the title defence begins in earnest, with newly promoted Coventry City visiting the Emirates. A soft landing on paper. Rarely that simple in reality.
While Arsenal tune up against the champions, Fàbregas will be working through his own dress rehearsal. Como face a double-header of friendlies against Liverpool on that same Sunday, the first game behind closed doors, the second opened up to supporters.
Then comes the real test for his project as well: a Serie A opener against Udinese the following Saturday.
Two clubs on different rungs of the ladder, one chasing titles, the other chasing stability. Both, in Fàbregas’ eyes, trying to prove that in a sport obsessed with the immediate, long-term conviction still wins.
