Mikel Arteta Transforms Travel Chaos into Training Opportunity

Mikel Arteta turned Arsenal’s midweek travel chaos into something close to a training drill – because, in his mind, they’d already lived it.

The Premier League champions landed in Italy three hours later than planned before their Champions League tie at Napoli after air traffic control problems disrupted their flight. Delays, uncertainty, broken routines – most managers dread them. Arteta has been rehearsing them.

“I love those challenges, I try to create them in pre-season,” he said on Friday, ahead of Arsenal’s Premier League trip to Sunderland on Saturday night (20:00 BST).

For Arteta, disruption isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a tool.

Chaos by design

The Spaniard has made a habit of bending, and sometimes breaking, the normal rhythms of elite preparation. He will push back meals. Hold up the team coach. Change routes to stadiums. Even crank up the heat in the dressing room to make it more uncomfortable.

The idea is simple: if players have already been dragged out of their comfort zone in July, they won’t freeze when it happens in February.

“So when they happen, we have already experienced them and we are ready,” he explained. “Get to the stadium very late, change the routine so the players have to do something else.”

He rattled off the kind of scenarios that can unravel a matchday: a cancelled flight, a delayed train, traffic gridlock. Situations that leave staff checking watches and players staring at their phones.

Arteta wants the opposite of panic.

“When that happens, adapt to it,” he said. “We have two or three hours on the plane – can we use it? Play together, spend some time together, sleep.

“But don’t complain or use it as an excuse because it’s not helpful at all.”

For him, the work is psychological as much as tactical. Reduce surprise, reduce stress. If the chaos feels familiar, it loses its power.

A manager of methods – and metaphors

Arteta’s taste for the unconventional is well known inside Arsenal’s dressing room. The travel drills are just the latest chapter.

He once walked into a team talk carrying a light bulb, asking his players to be energetic and shine. It was a prop, but also a message: switch on.

On another occasion, he went even further. Professional pickpockets were hired to mingle at a team dinner and quietly lift phones and wallets from players. Only later did the squad discover what had happened – a staged theft turned into a lesson about staying alert and switched on at all times.

In 2023, he introduced a new presence at the training ground: a dog named Win. Not a mascot in the traditional sense, but a symbol, as Arteta framed it, of the squad as a family unit and the mentality he wanted to build around the club.

Strange? Sometimes. Memorable? Always. And that’s the point.

Arteta’s Arsenal have become used to the unexpected. So when a Champions League flight stalls on the runway and a three-hour delay looms, the manager doesn’t see a crisis.

He sees something they’ve already trained for.