Mikel Arteta has never hidden his taste for control. Now he’s admitted he sometimes takes it away on purpose.
The Arsenal manager revealed he deliberately sabotaged the club’s pre-season travel plans and matchday routines, all to harden his players for nights like their disrupted Champions League trip to Napoli.
Delayed flights? Late arrivals? Uncomfortable dressing rooms? Arteta has been staging them for months.
Training for chaos
Arsenal’s journey to Italy this week was a mess before it even began. They were scheduled to leave Luton Airport at around 3pm on Tuesday. The Air Traffic Control crisis tore that plan up. The squad eventually landed in Naples roughly three hours behind schedule.
Asked whether that chaos had affected his players, Arteta’s answer was blunt: they’d seen it all before — because he’d made sure of it.
"I love those challenges. I tried to create them in pre-season!" he said. "So when they happen, we know how to experience them and we already know."
He has had his team turn up late to stadiums on purpose. He has ripped up carefully scripted routines on matchdays, forcing players to improvise. Routes to grounds have been changed at short notice. Meals have been pushed back. The small comforts that cushion elite footballers have been stripped away.
"Get to the stadium very late, change the routine so the players have to do something else," he explained. "When it happens, and it can: the flight can be cancelled, or the train is delayed, there is so much traffic, I don't want the players and staff panicking."
The message is clear: the chaos is coming, so feel it now.
No excuses
Arteta’s obsession isn’t just about logistics. It’s about mindset.
"When that happens, adapt to it," he said. "We have two or three hours on the plane - can we use it? Play together, spend some time together, sleep.
"But don't complain or use it as an excuse because it's not helpful at all."
So he turns up the heat. Literally.
"Just delaying the meals, delaying the transport, taking a different route. We've done many things," he said. "Make the dressing room hotter, more difficult, more challenging, less [massage] beds. Those kinds of things because we're going to have to adapt to different contexts. And we will try to anticipate this and adapt to difficult conditions.
"When there's no element of surprise or stress on a matchday, I think it's important."
This is preparation as provocation: remove the safety net, then see who still performs.
The pickpocket mentality
None of this is entirely new from Arteta. His methods have been raising eyebrows inside and outside the club for some time.
Last year, he instructed then head of sports science and performance Tom Allen to hire a pickpocket to steal from his own players during a team meal. The thief posed as a waiter, moved between tables, and quietly lifted personal items.
Only later, in a pre-match meeting, did Arteta reveal the trick. He presented the stolen belongings at the front of the room, turning embarrassment into a lesson.
The ploy was designed for a game against a side known for pushing every limit to gain an edge. Arteta wanted his players to live that feeling of being robbed — and to adopt what he called a pickpocket mentality: always alert, always aware, never allowing anyone to steal an advantage from them.
Lights, noise, and Anfield
The broader football world got a deeper look into his methods through the Amazon Prime documentary All or Nothing. The cameras captured more of the same: a manager who refuses to leave any psychological stone unturned.
Before a trip to Anfield, with Liverpool fans back in the stadium and the noise expected to be ferocious, Arteta filled Arsenal’s training sessions with "You'll Never Walk Alone" blaring from loudspeakers. It was his attempt to shrink the shock of that first roar on Merseyside.
For another match at the Emirates, he stood in front of his squad with a lightbulb in his hand. The metaphor was simple but vivid: he wanted his players to shine, to emit energy and light to each other, to illuminate the pitch as a collective.
From pickpockets to overheated dressing rooms, from delayed buses to anthems on loop, there is a clear pattern. Arteta is trying to build a team that doesn’t just play through adversity, but expects it, absorbs it, and then uses it.
On Europe’s biggest nights, when flights are late and plans fall apart, he wants Arsenal to feel not shock, but recognition.
