Mikel Arteta's Unconventional Training Methods for Arsenal
Mikel Arteta does not wait for chaos to find his team. He goes looking for it.
Hot dressing rooms. Late meals. Delayed transport. Fewer massage beds. The Arsenal manager has turned discomfort into a training tool, a deliberate edge in a sport where the smallest detail can tilt a night one way or the other.
His latest test came not in a controlled pre-season camp, but 30,000 feet in the air.
A five-hour delay, no excuses
Arsenal’s flight to Italy for their Champions League opener against Napoli was stuck on the tarmac for more than five hours. By the time the squad finally reached Naples, it was close to 10pm. Arteta had to scrap his pre-match press conference. Preparation time vanished. Routines were shredded.
The result? A 13th straight victory in the Champions League league phase, secured by a second-half winner from Martin Ødegaard.
This is exactly the kind of night Arteta has been rehearsing.
“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he explained. “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 his players to walk into chaos and feel nothing but familiarity.
“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.”
The message is ruthless and simple: the problem is not the disruption. The problem is how you react to it.
Heat, hunger and stress by design
Arteta’s methods have long been unconventional. He has hired pickpockets during pre-season to test his players’ awareness. He has flooded training with crowd noise from speakers to mimic Anfield’s roar.
Now he is pushing further into the psychological margins.
“Just delay the meals, delay the transport, take a different route,” he said, listing off the tweaks that jar the squad out of comfort. “We have done many things: make the dressing room hotter, more difficult, more challenging, less [massage] beds. Those kind of things.”
The logic is clear: if the first shock comes on matchday, you are already behind.
“We are going to have to adapt to different contexts and we will try to anticipate it and create the best possible conditions,” he said. “But when there is that element of stress or surprise on matchday, it’s important [to be prepared].”
So the temperature rises. The food arrives late. The bus takes a different road. The squad learn to live with irritation, to fold it into their rhythm rather than fight it.
In Naples, the theory met reality. The delay was real, the stakes higher, the cameras on. Arsenal still found a way.
Sunderland away and the memory of last year
Next comes Sunderland on Saturday night, a domestic test with its own emotional undertones. Arsenal arrive with a perfect start to the league campaign on the line and a reminder of how fragile control can be at the Stadium of Light.
Last season, they were held to a 2-2 draw there. Leandro Trossard thought he had won it with Arsenal’s second goal, only for Brian Brobbey to snatch a late equaliser. Two points slipped, momentum checked.
Arteta will not have forgotten. Nor will he ignore the contrast between two forwards whose paths have since diverged.
Trossard left for Besiktas in July but was back at the Emirates for last week’s win over Chelsea, watching his former teammates and moving easily around a dressing room he once shared. The relationship, Arteta insists, remains strong.
“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.”
Gabriel Jesus and the “bad cop”
The situation with Gabriel Jesus has been more strained. The Brazilian, now at Barcelona, claimed: “No one told me nothing,” when asked about his Arsenal exit, saying he had been made to train away from the main group before the move.
Arteta sounded genuinely taken aback.
“Very surprised, to be fair, especially because with Gabriel I had an individual talk in the dressing room,” he said. “And the words that we used for each other, it was all about gratitude. So, I don’t know. It’s OK.”
There was no attempt to soften 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.”
The line could just as easily apply to his work with the current squad. Strip away the comforts. Push them into awkward situations. Force them to confront the kind of setbacks that can derail a season.
Arteta is not chasing harmony for its own sake. He is chasing resilience.
Naples offered proof that his players can live inside that tension and still win. Sunderland away will ask a different question: can they keep doing it when the season tightens and the margins shrink again?
