Mikel Arteta's Resilience Tactics for Arsenal

Mikel Arteta doesn’t just coach footballers. He stress-tests them.

The Arsenal manager has revealed how he deliberately throws obstacles in his players’ way – from delaying pre-match meals to cranking up the heat in the dressing room – to harden them for nights when everything goes wrong and excuses are easy.

His methods were put to the test this week. Arsenal’s flight to Italy for their Champions League opener against Napoli was held up for more than five hours, the delay so severe that Arteta had to cancel his pre-match press conference as the squad finally landed in Naples just before 10pm local time.

No rhythm, no normal build-up, no neat schedule. Just disruption.

It didn’t matter. Arsenal ground out a 1-0 win, Martin Ødegaard striking in the second half to secure a 13th straight league-stage victory in Europe. For Arteta, it was the kind of scenario he has been quietly preparing his squad for since pre-season.

“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he said. “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.”

This is not a new obsession. Arteta has long been known for his unconventional ideas: hiring pickpockets during pre-season camps to sharpen players’ awareness, blasting crowd noise through speakers to mimic the chaos of Anfield. All of it with one aim – remove comfort, build resilience.

Because, as he sees it, chaos is inevitable.

“You can miss the flight, the train can be delayed, there’s so much traffic, and I don’t want the players, the staff as well, panicking,” he said. “So, when that happens, adapt to it. ‘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.”

So the small details get twisted on purpose. Routines that most clubs protect, he disrupts.

Asked what else he has done, Arteta reeled off a list: “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.

“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 theory will be tested again on Saturday night when Arsenal head to Sunderland, aiming to preserve their perfect start to the league campaign. The Stadium of Light did not treat them kindly last season: a 2-2 draw, Leandro Trossard scoring what looked like the winner before Brian Brobbey snatched a late equaliser.

That game still lingers, but Sunderland is now also a backdrop to a different kind of tension – how players leave and what remains once the dust settles.

Arteta was asked about the contrasting exits of Gabriel Jesus and Trossard in the summer. Jesus, now at Barcelona, claimed: “No one told me nothing,” after being made to train away from the main group before his move. Trossard, by contrast, has already been back at the Emirates, watching last week’s win over Chelsea after joining Besiktas in July.

“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. 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.”

The Arsenal manager didn’t dwell on it. His gaze is longer-term, beyond the sting of a transfer, into what follows.

“What is important is normally what happens three months later, six months later,” he said. “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.”

Arteta wants a squad that doesn’t just play his football but lives his mentality: no complaints, no crutches, no hiding behind circumstance. Delayed flights, hot dressing rooms, awkward departures – all part of the same unforgiving landscape.

The question now is whether that edge, honed in discomfort, can carry Arsenal through nights far more hostile than a five-hour wait on a runway.