‘Super-responsible’: inside the years that shaped Arteta

Manager’s first footballing steps in the Basque Country and Barcelona are recalled by those who shared them before he attempts to lead Gunners to further success tonight

‘Mikel caught your attention. 

The word I’d use is alive: 

give him the ball and he’ll find a solution’

30 May 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Sid Lowe

The way Santi Cazorla tells it, rolling about laughing, Mikel Arteta may just be the worst person you could ever wish to watch a match with. Which is why he knew his friend would be a coach and why he told him to go away and become one, convinced great things were coming. “When we were injured at Arsenal, we used to meet at home for games, and he would grab the remote and pause it,” Cazorla recalls. “I would say: ‘What are you stopping it for?’ He would say: ‘No, go back,’ rewind it 30 seconds, and then ask: ‘What do you see?’ I would say: ‘I see a paused screen. I don’t see anything!’”

So Arteta would explain. “‘Don’t you think this player is badly positioned? … If he goes a bit deeper, this space opens up … if the pivot goes there, this happens … that line should be deeper …’ I would look at him and think: ‘What’s with this guy?’” Cazorla continues, still cracking up. “He was a coach already. All game, every game: pausing, rewinding. The match is finished and we’re only in the 35th minute. ‘Do you see it?’ ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, now come on, press play.’ But I didn’t see it. I love football, I can watch it all day, but I don’t notice those things. Mikel does. I think it’s a gift.”

Born in Gipuzkoa, the smallest province in Spain and an outlier producing a quantity of elite managers that invites an investigation, Arteta was always a bit different; everyone says so. Which isn’t to say that those who shared his first steps saw what Cazorla did, still less the coach who leads Arsenal into the Champions League final. Fond though they are, most didn’t see a coach just yet, but they saw something. Not talent exactly, although that too, but something else a little deeper.

“Mikel caught your attention very young,” Jon Ayerbe says. “The word I’d use is alive; you saw it in his eyes. He grasped everything fast, had character and was so competitive. Give him the ball, he’ll find a solution.”

“Above all, he was the most intelligent,” Álvaro Parra adds. Mikel Yanguas says: “You looked at him and thought: ‘Bloody hell, he’s got something special. If anyone makes it, it’s him.’ He had personality, ambition.” Ayerbe, Parra and Yanguas played with Arteta at Antiguoko, a youth club in San Sebastián that took on professional academies and won.

The former Antiguoko coach Roberto Montiel enjoys recounting an Arteta goal against Real Sociedad, all cheek and technique, that reminds him of Lionel Messi. Arteta was two-footed and tiny then, a No 10 who later became a No 4, and “a born sportsman”, Montiel says. He was dedicated and smart, too. “He was always clear he would make it and sacrificed his life for it,” Parra says. “He went to Barcelona, leaving everything behind. And later he turned down lucrative offers – Dubai, Qatar, the US – to work with Guardiola at Man City because it was the right step.”

At 14, Arteta had begun training at Athletic Club, 100km west along the AP-8. There, one of his coaches was the future Athletic, Eibar, Sevilla and Olympiakos manager José Luis Mendilibar, who was struck by this kid that never lost the ball and always played with clarity and sense. “What you could imagine, thinking about it now, was that someone with that intelligence and understanding would also develop an ability to explain it to others, so they could understand too,” Mendilibar wrote later. That sentiment is echoed by Luis Fernández, the coach who signed an 18-year-old Arteta for Paris Saint-germain in 2001. “When you told him what you wanted, he did it first time,” Fernández says.

By then, Barcelona had shaped him too. “It was 1997,” Yanguas recalls. “Someone saw us representing Gipuzkoa at a tournament and invited us to a trial. We stayed near Pedralbes and at the end they said yes to the three of us: me, Mikel and Jon Álvarez. We left that summer: 17 August, the day of San Sebastián’s fiestas, so I remember it well.”

They moved into La Masia, the traditional Catalan farmhouse alongside the Camp Nou that was Barcelona’s spiritual home and an actual home to 32 boys aged 11 to 18. Andrés Iniesta, Carles Puyol and Iván de la Peña were among them. Pepe Reina would become one of Arteta’s closest friends. Each dorm had four bunks, a couple of camp beds sometimes squeezed in too. Through the window they could see the pitch where Bobby Robson’s team trained. Well, part of it: a screen covered half.

“It was just us, the cooks, the security guard and one guy overseeing everything,” says Roberto Trashorras, who became close to Arteta. “There were no mobiles. I remember queueing at midnight to ring home from the payphone, Puyol and De la Peña ahead of me. We were teenagers, so there’d be the usual messing about: jokes, water bombs. Mikel was funny, extroverted, but we were the victims usually … until you get a bit older and it’s your turn.”

A bus took them to school, they would train and then … well, not much, Yanguas says. “We would go to [the department store] El Corte Inglés; we were from San Sebastián, a small city, and we didn’t have an El Corte Inglés there. Or we’d go to the cinema. I remember seeing Titanic with Mikel, Victor Valdés, Fernando Macedo. At weekends your parents would come.”

Jofre Mateu was two years older

than Arteta, with whom he would play in the B team, and had already made a first-team appearance. “Mikel used to laugh about his hair. He said he had ‘bull’s hair’: so hard and it didn’t move. But, honestly, the thing I most remember is that one day he took my car when he was learning or recently passed and crashed it into the Masia wall.” Jofre laughs. “He puts his arm on the window, looks back to reverse, but he’s putting it in first. ‘Yeah, I think you need more lessons. You can take taxis.’ My car was only two months old: a VW Golf.”

Which raises an obvious question: are you stupid? “Totally,” Jofre says. But, actually, handing over the keys wasn’t a risk: if anything defined Arteta, he says, it was how sensible he was. “He wasn’t there to piss about, he was there to do the right thing,” Jofre says. “He was superresponsible, he had something.”

Another scene defines Arteta better. “Thiago Motta was hotheaded and in a training session he got in a fight,” Jofre says. “I don’t remember who with, but it wasn’t Mikel, yet he steps in: ‘Thiago, man, you’re teammates: you can’t do this.’ Mikel didn’t really have the ‘weight’ to do that. It would be like Marc Bernal standing up to, say, Gavi. He didn’t do it in an ugly way, but he did it. Clearly, firmly. And we just all stopped. I think that said something about him: he wasn’t the star, but he’s not going to let that happen.”

La Masia was a footballing education, entirely new. “The players who arrive are the best in their teams but Barcelona make you think about tactics, space in a way that’s not normal,” says Luis Carrión, a Barcelona B teammate. “At Antiguoko, Mikel would have had the ball all the time; here he had to wait, occupy the right space. By standing still, you see a solution, a way out. They’d explain concepts – third man, triangles, final line – but it wasn’t ‘classes’, more repetition: passing drills every day.”

There is a simple reason why he didn’t make it in Catalonia, or two of them – Xavi Hernández and Iniesta – but there was a world out there, ideas and character shaped across four countries, experiences in Spain, France, Scotland and England. “When I became PSG coach I asked for Mikel because I watched him in the juvenil [under-19s],” Fernández says. “I followed Johan Cruyff’s ideas, the importance of the pivot, loved Pep Guardiola and wanted a player of that type.

“On the pitch you see Mikel’s intelligence, his understanding and, for sure, that comes out later when he becomes a coach. If you had asked me then if he would be a coach, I’d have said: ‘No.’ He wasn’t: ‘Do this, do that.’ I think he learned with Pep. I went to see him do a session and thought: ‘Bloody hell, look at Mikel.’ But it was always in him.”

It just had to come out. With time, Yanguas suggests, you learn to express, understand and analyse the spaces you saw naturally, and Arteta always saw those. Focus and passion came as standard. Jofre, asked if he saw a coach in Arteta, replies: “Zero. But if you asked me about Xavi, I would have said zero. Luis Enrique, zero. Guardiola … OK, yes.” Trashorras agrees: “With Pep, you saw it; with Mikel I couldn’t claim to have done, but you can’t argue with what he’s done.” In part because Pep did see it.

And so, via Paris, Glasgow and Liverpool to Santi’s sofa in London, an offer and a new era, the other Arteta that was always inside somewhere. “We confided in each other; he was the captain, always looked after me and my family and helped so much during my injury,” Cazorla recalls. “He said: ‘What should I do, Santi? Keep playing, which I like most, or take the opportunity as Pep’s assistant?’ I love playing but there’s no better place to start coaching and I have a good relationship with him.’ I said: ‘Mikel, if that’s what moves you, go for it.’ It’s a difficult step but I was sure it would work. I would watch him pausing games and think: this guy is already a coach. I’d tell him: ‘You’re thinking beyond what a player does.’ And he would say: ‘Yeah, I see things that make me think I should be a coach. I feel that I am.’”

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Midfield symphony is key to taming PSG’S devastating wingers 1

If Gunners do not have their best full-backs there will be more onus on central players helping out in defence

Arsenal cannot let Doué or Kvaratskhelia get a run on whoever they have at full-back

30 May 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Jonathan Wilson

It would be easy to look at tonight’s Champions League final between Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal and see it as a battle of attack versus defence, of beauty against pragmatism, of French elan against English doughtiness, as some sort of tussle for the soul of football. But it would not entirely be true. And where after all was the honour at Agincourt? In the vainglorious charges of the dashing French cavalry or the stoic defiance of the British archers arrayed, naked from the waist down, behind their defensive stakes?

On the one hand, the stats look stark. In the Champions League this season, Paris Saint-germain have averaged 63.4% possession, higher than anybody apart from Barcelona; Arsenal’s figure is 52.6%, the 11th-highest of the 36 sides who made the league stage. PSG’S pass completion has been 89.3% to Arsenal’s 85.7% (third-highest to 14th-highest). PSG have scored 44 goals to Arsenal’s 29. But on the flipside, Arsenal have conceded six goals to PSG’S 22 and won 13.4 aerial duels per game to PSG’S 9.4 (sixth-highest to 29th-highest).

The implication would seem to be that PSG will boss possession, that Arsenal will sit deep and look to go long. And perhaps there may be an element of that, although that was not how either leg of the semifinal between the teams last season played out: PSG shaded possession at the Emirates and Arsenal at the Parc des Princes as they chased the game. Although PSG have scored more goals from non-penalty set plays than Arsenal in the Champions League this season (eight to five), it probably is reasonable to assume that corners and free-kicks offer Arsenal’s best chance of a goal. But the biggest danger to Arsenal is probably a counterattack. Most opponents sit deep against PSG, especially in Ligue 1, but the evidence of PSG’S wins over Chelsea, Liverpool and Bayern Munich is that they are lethal in transition.

Arsenal cannot let Désiré Doué or Khvicha Kvaratskhelia get a run on whoever they have at full-back. Both are rapid, supreme dribblers and terrifyingly direct. And full-back is a problem position for Arsenal, especially on the right.

Ben White is out with a knee injury and Jurriën Timber, though declared fit to start, has not played since sustaining a groin injury in mid-march. Martín Zubimendi started at right-back against Crystal Palace but it would seem more likely that Cristhian Mosquera operates there if Timber begins on the bench, if only because he is a more natural defender. He has played on occasion at right-back this season and is relatively confident on his left foot, which may be important in checking Kvaratskhelia’s darts infield but, fundamentally, the Georgian would be playing against a player who is not a full-time full-back.

That’s not the only problem on that flank for Arsenal, though. White links better with Bukayo Saka than any of Arsenal’s other full-backs. Unless the tactically astute Timber plays, the rightback problem is likely to diminish them from a defensive and an attacking point of view.

Riccardo Calafiori has seemed Mikel Arteta’s preferred option on the left. His role will be twofold: to stop Doué and to invert into midfield, particularly out of possession, to try to prevent the counter. It may be that Myles Lewis-skelly is used ahead of Zubimendi alongside Rice, in part because he is familiar with playing at left-back and so could help double up on Doué, or would be comfortable covering for Calafiori were he caught upfield.

Chelsea’s success against PSG in the Club World Cup final perhaps offers, if not a template, then at least inspiration for how Arsenal can hurt the defending European champions. Enzo Maresca’s approach was asymmetric, using Cole Palmer almost as an inside-right, haunting the channel between Nuno Mendes and the left-sided centre-back (Lucas Beraldo then but probably Willian Pacho today) while getting in behind the left-back wherever possible. That, though, required Malo Gusto to drive forward from right-back in a way that Timber may be able to replicate but Mosquera probably can’t.

On the left, Marc Cucurella regularly tucked into midfield, just as Calafiori surely will, with Pedro Neto tracking back almost as a wing-back to check Achraf Hakimi’s thrusts in support of Doué. If Arteta sees things similarly, that is probably more of a job for Leandro Trossard than Eberechi Eze, who may end up on the bench if Arteta, as he surely must, prefers 4-3-3 to 4-2-3-1.

The first leg of PSG’S semi-final against Bayern was remarkably open, almost basketball-like in its end-to-end attacking. But that should not necessarily be regarded as characteristic. PSG can at times seem a little sloppy, too reliant on their attacking prowess, but their performance away to Bayern, when Fabián Ruiz returned, showed how effective PSG’S midfield can be. And that means that Arsenal either have to sit deep and accept PSG will dominate the ball or need to ensure their midfield has a destructive edge.

There is an irony in this. The stereotype of Arsenal this season has been of a defensive side reliant on set plays, but that is not entirely accurate; rather they are a side whose defensive qualities have been highlighted because of deficiencies of creativity and attacking quality. But to beat PSG, it may be that they have to embrace the narrative and be the side critics say they are.