You could hear the chuckles in the newspaper headlines. As a reaction to their 8-2 humiliation by Manchester United, Arsenal had gone on a desperate trolley dash to buy any footballer available. One of the five players Arsene Wenger signed on transfer deadline day in 2011 almost did not make it. Paperwork delays meant there was no time for a medical. Arsenal were ready to give up on the signing. The player rang the club himself. Forget the medical, he said. If something goes wrong, hold me responsible. Trust me. Football clubs are not in the trust business, especially when they are about to spend millions on a footballer. Arsenal agreed anyway. That is how Mikel Arteta arrived at the club as a player. Fifteen years later, in a different role, he dragged them to their first Premier League title in 22 years. The theme connecting those two moments – separated by a career, a retirement, an apprenticeship under Pep Guardiola, and six increasingly agonising seasons in the dugout – is the same one he offered on day one. Trust. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Arsenal’s title was confirmed with one game left in the season, Manchester City held to a 1-1 draw by Bournemouth. North London erupted. The wait of 22 years was over. ALSO READ | Arsenal end 22-year wait — and this one was earned the hard way There was no obvious reason to trust him in the first place. Arteta was plucked from a seat in Guardiola’s dugout at Manchester City, an assistant with no prior managerial experience. His biggest achievement in his first season was winning the FA Cup. In the Premier League, Arsenal finished 8th twice, then 5th, then second three seasons running. By the conventions of modern football, he should have been gone long before the second-place finishes arrived. A glance at Arsenal’s rivals tells you how rare his tenure is – Chelsea have cycled through six managers since 2020, Manchester United through seven, including the same man twice. Only Liverpool and City, sustained by success, have shown similar patience. Arsenal had no such guarantee. They trusted anyway. Keeping trust in a manager through lean seasons is not new at Arsenal. The club endured many luckless years with Wenger, the clamour for his removal growing so loud that the club hired a personal bodyguard to protect him from his own fans. That anger came largely from Wenger’s rigid adherence to his philosophy – playing attractive football, refusing to splash the cash. Arteta offered no such comfort. He made hard calls instead.Story continues below this ad Arsenal’s manager Mikel Arteta reacts during the Premier League match against West Ham. (AP Photo) Out went Mesut Ozil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – crowd favourites, dazzling attackers, not the players he wanted. He hired a pickpocket to steal players’ wallets during a pre-season dinner, to hammer home the need for alertness. He walked into the dressing room once holding a physical lightbulb to make a point. He had noticed from Guardiola’s dugout, before he was even appointed, that the Emirates was half empty on matchdays. “That image, that feeling of emptiness really got into me,” he said. “If there’s no project then it’s not going to work. After COVID, we had to rebuild everything.” The project, when it arrived, looked nothing like what Arsenal fans had been conditioned to expect. Arteta is no Wenger. Wenger’s Arsenal tried to walk the ball into the net, disdaining the pragmatic and the ugly. Arteta’s Arsenal have set the Premier League record for most goals from corners in a single season – 18 – and have been criticised for it all year. They have also conceded just 26 goals in 37 games, the best defensive record in the league, going the entire season without conceding a penalty or receiving a red card. Where Wenger built around his forwards, Arteta built around his midfield. He spent £105 million on Declan Rice in 2023 and added Viktor Gyokeres, Eberechi Eze, Mikel Merino and Martin Zubimendi in subsequent windows to make the core more dynamic and complete. The result is a team that wins differently to any Arsenal side in living memory. Not the most beautiful. Not the most free-flowing. But relentless, organised, and extraordinarily hard to beat.Story continues below this ad There is still one more game to play – and one more prize available. Arsenal face PSG in the Champions League final in Budapest next week. A win there would make this the greatest season in the club’s history. Wenger, for all his brilliance, never got there. Arteta is one game away. And all he ever asked for, from the first phone call to the last training session, was the same thing: trust me.
How Arteta built Arsenal’s first title in 22 years – on trust and a medical he never had
