Mikel Arteta's Unorthodox Training Methods for Arsenal's Success
Mikel Arteta does not wait for chaos to arrive. He invites it in.
Delayed meals. Overheated dressing rooms. Fewer massage beds. Altered routes to the stadium. The Arsenal manager has turned inconvenience into a training tool, convinced that discomfort now will mean composure later, when the stakes are far higher and the margins far thinner.
His latest test came not from a whiteboard but from an airport departure board.
Arsenal’s flight to Italy for their Champions League opener against Napoli was delayed by more than five hours this week. The team eventually landed in Naples just before 10pm local time, late enough that Arteta had to scrap his pre-match press conference. The preparation looked wrecked on paper.
On the pitch, it looked like a plan.
Arsenal ground out a 1-0 win, their 13th consecutive league-stage victory in Europe, sealed by a second-half strike from Martin Ødegaard. The disruption never showed.
Arteta insisted that was no accident.
“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he said, explaining how Arsenal have been conditioned to expect exactly this kind of chaos. “So when they happen, we already experience them and we already know. So, get to the stadium very late, change the routine as soon as the players have to do something else.”
He rattled through the scenarios: missed flights, delayed trains, traffic jams. He wants none of it to come as a shock.
“I don’t want the players, the staff as well, panicking,” he said. “So, when that happens, adapt to it. ‘OK, we have another two or three hours on the plane, how can we use them?’ Play together, spend some time together, sleep, use it, but certainly don’t complain and then use it as an excuse because that’s not helpful at all.”
This is the Arteta method in full view. He has already become known for unorthodox ideas: hiring pickpockets on pre-season trips to sharpen players’ awareness, blasting crowd noise through speakers to mimic Anfield’s intensity. Now, even the thermostat and the catering schedule are part of the armoury.
Asked what else he has done to harden his squad, he did not hold back.
“Just delay the meals, delay the transport, take a different route,” he said. “We have done many things: make the dressing room hotter, more difficult, more challenging, less [massage] beds. Those kind of things. Because we are going to have to adapt to different contexts and we will try to anticipate it and create the best possible conditions. But when there is that element of stress or surprise on matchday, it’s important [to be prepared].”
The theory will be tested again on Saturday night at the Stadium of Light, where Arsenal face Sunderland. Arteta’s side have a perfect league record so far this season, but the ground carries a sting from last year: a 2-2 draw, Leandro Trossard seemingly winning it before Brian Brobbey’s late equaliser silenced the away end.
Trossard is gone now, off to Besiktas in July, but he was back at the Emirates last week, watching Arsenal’s win over Chelsea. His quiet return drew a sharp contrast with the noise around another departure: Gabriel Jesus.
The Brazilian forward, who joined Barcelona after being frozen out of first-team training, claimed: “No one told me nothing,” about his situation at Arsenal. He said he was made to train separately from the rest of the squad before the move.
Arteta sounded genuinely taken aback by that version of events.
“Very surprised, to be fair, especially because with Gabriel I had an individual talk in the dressing room,” he said. “And the words that we used for each other, it was all about gratitude. So, I don’t know. It’s OK. 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.”
There was no attempt to soften the reality of management. You make decisions. Some players accept them. Some do not. Time, Arteta suggested, is the real judge of those relationships.
“What is important is normally what happens three months later, six months later,” he said. “When Trossard comes in, he’s in the dressing room with all of us, the atmosphere and the relation you have with all the players that they left, at some point their relationship has been really good. I hope that’s the same case.”
For now, his focus returns to Sunderland, to the next hostile environment, the next unpredictable journey, the next thing that might go wrong.
Arteta will not be hoping for a smooth trip. He will be ready if it isn’t. The only question is whether his players keep turning those rehearsed crises into results.
