Mikel Arteta's Arsenal: Preparing for Chaos and Challenges

Mikel Arteta doesn’t just prepare Arsenal for opponents. He prepares them for chaos.

Delayed flights, late arrivals, boiling dressing rooms, disrupted routines – the Spaniard wants his players to feel all of it before it really matters. So when their Champions League trip to Napoli descended into a five‑hour wait on the runway this week, Arsenal simply treated it like another drill.

They landed in Naples just before 10pm local time, Arteta’s pre-match press conference scrapped, the schedule shredded. Then they went out and won anyway, Martin Ødegaard’s second-half strike sealing a 13th straight league-stage victory in Europe.

For Arteta, that was no accident. It was the point.

“I love those challenges. I try to create them in pre-season,” he said, lifting the curtain on a regime that has long gone beyond standard diet sheets and tactical briefings. “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 rattled off the scenarios: missed flights, delayed trains, gridlocked traffic. All the tiny disasters that can derail a game before a ball is kicked.

“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.”

This is the same manager who once hired pickpockets on a pre-season tour to jolt his squad’s awareness, and who tried to recreate Anfield’s noise by blasting crowd sound through speakers at training. The methods can look unusual from the outside. Inside, they are part of a clear theme: remove the comfort blanket.

Asked what else he has thrown at his players, Arteta did not hesitate.

“Just delay the meals, delay the transport, take a different route,” he said. “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 pressure finally told in Naples with Ødegaard’s winner. Now Arsenal head to Sunderland on Saturday night trying to keep their perfect league start intact, returning to a ground that left a mark last season.

They were held 2-2 at the Stadium of Light, Leandro Trossard putting Arsenal 2-1 up before Brian Brobbey snatched a late equaliser. That game underlined the physical and emotional swings of a title chase. This weekend offers a chance to show how much they’ve learned.

It also comes at a time when Arteta’s handling of departures is under scrutiny again.

Trossard left for Besiktas in July but was back at the Emirates last week, watching the win over Chelsea from the stands. The Belgian’s relationship with his former team-mates and staff remains warm. Arteta made that contrast clear when the subject of Gabriel Jesus came up.

Jesus, now at Barcelona after being frozen out and made to train away from the main group before his move, recently claimed: “No one told me nothing.”

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. 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.”

He didn’t dwell on it. For him, the real verdict comes later, when emotions cool and careers move on.

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

Arsenal now walk into another hostile evening in the North East, another test of resilience, routine and nerve. Under Arteta, they won’t just be ready for Sunderland. They’ll be ready for whatever goes wrong on the way there.