Mikel Arteta: coach with ‘British DNA’ who learned from McLeish and Moyes

David Moyes wasn’t 100% sure when Mikel Arteta arrived at Everton. “He was a quiet boy and at the start we had to play him off the right of midfield,” he recalls. “I was thinking: ‘This is a young Spanish boy who might not be ready for the rigours of the Premier League and Goodison Park, for what is expected.”

Alex McLeish sent his assistant Andy Watson to watch Arteta at Paris Saint-Germain when Rangers were considering signing him a few years earlier. “Different class, two good feet, quick enough, nimble,” Watson said. But there was a kicker. “He was never tested because PSG just rolled the ball out and it then took them 20 minutes to get to the halfway line!” It didn’t immediately scream “Scottish Premiership midfielder”, thought McLeish, picturing Aberdeen away on a wild, wet, winter’s afternoon.

But there’s something about Arteta, who started his Arsenal managerial career on Boxing Day five years ago at Bournemouth and takes on Ipswich on Friday. McLeish would realise early on. “He was on the receiving end of a few reducers but he rode those challengers,” he says.

When Rangers, in a head‑to‑head title race with Celtic in Arteta’s first season, won a late penalty on the final day against Dunfermline with the championship on the line, it was the Spaniard who stepped up to score, even though the club captain, Barry Ferguson, and Ronald de Boer were penalty takers. Rangers finished top on goal difference. “Mikel was unbelievably mature for a 21‑year‑old and just grabbed it,” McLeish recalls.

The next season, when high-profile players such as Ferguson were sold to balance the books, it was “a wee bit of a struggle”, says McLeish, and Arteta ended up back home in the Basque Country at Real Sociedad, which was when Moyes took a chance on him.

Mikel Arteta won the title in his debut season at Rangers, flourishing under the management of Alex McLeish. 

“There was a lot of discussion about him among the staff,” Moyes says. “We were getting someone who had not got his career up and running. We had him on loan. You could try on the suit and if you didn’t like it, you could send it back. He did OK. He didn’t set it alight at the start. But some of my staff were poring over him and thought he was a fabulous player.”

Spoiler alert, it ended well for him at Everton and Moyes made him central to an Everton side that only once finished outside the top eight before Arteta left in 2011. Yet if Arteta’s career has never been as gilded as that of his coaching mentor Pep Guardiola, there is a steeliness about him that is perhaps indicated by the fact that he was willing to leave San Sebastián at 15 and join the Barcelona academy, where he cried himself to sleep every night with homesickness in the early days.

David Moyes said about Mikel Arteta: “We were always told: ‘If you’re going to take any of the boys from Spain, take the Basque boys.’” Photograph: PA Images/Alamy

The same might be said of his managerial career. That he has survived and thrived is testament to his durability. He is often initially underestimated. “I remember driving back from a game [when Arteta was appointed] and listening to people talking about whether he would still be there in the long term,” Moyes says.

That scepticism reached a climax on Boxing Day four years ago, the so-called El Sackico clash with Frank Lampard’s Chelsea. Arteta had lost seven and drawn two of their preceding 10 Premier League games. Arsenal won 3-1 and Lampard was dismissed a month later. The start to the 2021‑22 season, when Arsenal lost 2-0 at promoted Brentford, 2-0 against Chelsea and 5-0 against Manchester City didn’t suggest progress was being made. “Arsenal were big enough to continue to support him,” Moyes says.

But there is another aspect of Arteta that is perhaps significant, according to Moyes, who has also managed Real Sociedad and lived in San Sebastián, and that is his cultural roots which make him tactically flexible. “We were always told: ‘If you’re going to take any of the boys from Spain, take the Basque boys. They’re the ones with a little bit more fight and hunger in them.’”

The British influence on Basque football has been pronounced since English sailors stepped off a ship in the 19th century and bemused the locals by kicking a ball around on the Bilbao harbourside close to where Athletic’s San Mamés stadium now stands. And Arteta seems to have been a willing student of McLeish, Moyes and the British game.

For all his roots at the Barça academy and working under Guardiola at City, Arsenal have become a team maximising set pieces, playing rugged centre‑halves across the back four and happy to play with 22% possession at City this season, which really seemed to get under their opponents’ skin.

“Ultimately he is a Spanish coach and has been brought up in their culture at Barcelona and in going to work with Pep,” Moyes says. “But a lot of his footballing career was played under Alex McLeish and myself. He’s an incredibly talented Spanish coach with ideas of one of the best in Pep but he also has traits of British culture because of his playing career and maybe a wee bit because of the managers he worked under as well. He certainly has some British character and DNA running through him.”

Mikel Arteta and Arsenal have benefited from the arrival of the set-piece coach Nicolas Jover. 

Arsenal’s reliance on set pieces feels very “Made in England” even if it has taken a Germany-born, France-raised coach in Nicolas Jover to get there. ”It’s feels like the old days revisited,” McLeish says. “‘Get the ball in the box!’”

Moyes says: “Everyone has always been interested in set pieces but we didn’t have set-piece coaches and taking Nicolas Jover was a great piece of business. Ultimately you need good delivery and if you are a small team you’re probably not going to score as many. But Arsenal are a powerful team and Mikel has also looked at Manchester City and that they have four centre-halves playing in the back four.”

Arteta has waited a long time to rise above Guardiola in football’s hierarchy. Few recall it, because it wasn’t recorded in official games, but Arteta played a game for the Barça first team in a pre-season friendly against Hertha Berlin in 1999. He came on for the second half. The man he replaced in holding midfield? Guardiola.

“With Xavi, Iniesta and Arteta, everything suggests Barça won’t have problems in this position for the next 20 years,” Guardiola said after that game. But the ugly duckling from that trio turned out well in the end. He failed to oust his mentor then but he may yet succeed him as Premier League champion. And do so with a very modern European mix of Catalan, Basque and British ingredients.