Mikel Arteta does not wait for chaos to find his team. He goes looking for it.
Delayed meals. Stifling dressing rooms. Fewer massage beds. Altered travel plans. All of it by design, all of it part of a manager determined to harden Arsenal against the kind of disruption that can unravel a Champions League night or a title run-in.
This week in Naples, the chaos arrived without invitation. Arsenal’s flight to Italy for their Champions League opener against Napoli was held up for more than five hours, forcing Arteta to scrap his pre‑match press conference as the team finally landed just before 10pm local time.
The result? A 13th straight league-stage win in Europe, sealed by a second-half strike from Martin Ødegaard and delivered with the composure of a team that had already lived this kind of day in their heads.
Arteta insists that is no coincidence.
“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he said, lifting the lid on the methods that have helped shape this Arsenal side. “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 wants the unexpected to feel familiar. Flights can be missed. Trains can be delayed. Traffic can choke the route to a stadium. The point, in his mind, is not to avoid those problems but to strip them of their power.
“So, when that happens, adapt to it,” he explained. “‘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 not new territory for Arteta. His reputation as one of the game’s great tinkerers has grown with every story that emerges from Arsenal’s training camps: hiring pickpockets in pre-season to jolt players’ awareness, blasting Anfield crowd noise through speakers to prepare for Liverpool away. Now he is pushing even deeper into the psychology of discomfort.
Asked what other tricks he has used, he reeled them off with the calm of a man describing a passing drill.
“Just delay the meals, delay the transport, take a different route. We have done many things: make the dressing room hotter, more difficult, more challenging, less [massage] beds. Those kind of things,” he said. “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 message is clear: if something can go wrong, Arteta wants his players to have already felt it, sweated through it, and found a way to win anyway.
That mindset now travels with Arsenal to Sunderland on Saturday night. The league leaders arrive at the Stadium of Light looking to protect a perfect start to the new campaign, but also with the memory of last season’s 2-2 draw still fresh. On that occasion, Leandro Trossard thought he had won it with Arsenal’s second goal, only for Brian Brobbey to snatch a late equaliser.
Trossard will not be involved this time. The Belgian left for Besiktas in July but was back at the Emirates last week, watching from the stands as Arsenal beat Chelsea. His quiet return to north London stood in stark contrast to the noise around Gabriel Jesus’s exit.
Jesus, now at Barcelona after being made to train away from the main group in his final days at the club, said: “No one told me nothing.” It was a pointed line, and one that clearly jarred with Arteta.
“Very surprised, to be fair, especially because with Gabriel I had an individual talk in the dressing room,” Arteta said. “And the words that we used for each other, it was all about gratitude. So, I don’t know. It’s OK.”
He did not dodge the reality of his role.
“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.”
Arteta’s focus, though, is not on the first reaction but the lasting one.
“What is important is normally what happens three months later, six months later,” he continued. “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, the relationships that matter most are inside a dressing room that might occasionally feel too hot, too cramped, or too late to the stadium for comfort. Arteta wants it that way. If Arsenal are to keep stretching this perfect start and carry their European form deep into the season, he is determined that nothing – not a delayed flight, not a late kick-off, not a bad route to the ground – will be the thing that breaks them.
