Some extracts from a recent, long, article on The Athletic by Amy Lawrence.
Lunchtime at London Colney. Charged by the current of Arsenal’s nine-game unbeaten run and resulting rise to sixth in the Premier League table, every person going about their day projects an air that hits the sweet spot between relaxed and motivated.
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang leans against the stairs next to reception as he makes a joke. Granit Xhaka’s booming voice appears before he walks around the corner. Jack Wilshere, back at base while seeking a new club, says hello as he strolls past.
Some of the players are hard at it in the gym, others winding down with a massage. Aaron Ramsdale grabs a freshly-made smoothie but looks so powerful, like a boxer, he doesn’t appear to need much vitamin boosting. Takehiro Tomiyasu wanders up to the canteen for lunch and shares a few words about how he feels he is getting into the swing two months after joining the club but is eager to do so much more.
All around, everyone looks like they are totally into what they are doing. It is an indefinable thing, but to one of the long-term staff who has seen it all observes, there is something noticeably switched-on about the atmosphere. He suggests the spirit around the place is the best it has been for 10 years.
The chatter is lively on one of the bigger tables at lunch. Mikel Arteta joins Edu, Josh Kroenke, Vinai Venkatesham, Richard Garlick, Tim Lewis, Jonas Eidevall and Clare Wheatley. They look like they could be friends meeting up at the River Cafe. It looks like a casual, sociable affair. Particularly after the darkest days of COVID-19, when contact was limited and electronic, you can sense the enjoyment of being together, talking together, working together. While the youth and inexperience of the club’s hierarchy is criticised when the going is tough, in better times, like now, there is a detectable progressive energy.
Arteta puts it down to striving for one aim — unity. It is a word he uses a lot. And when he says it, he really means it. The club executives, through the strategy they have formulated, are trying to engineer a quiet but effective revolution in that way. Towards the latter end of the Arsene Wenger era, through the short chapter of Unai Emery’s stay, and into the early steps of Arteta’s time as manager, there were too many imperfections that were not so easily ironed out.
It demanded commitment to a change of mindset to work towards the environment he feels is absolutely necessary.
“Without unity, you can’t achieve what we want to achieve,” Arteta says. “Unity means every person that works in the organisation. It’s our way of playing, it is our way of transmitting our values, our way of connecting with our fans, our ownership. Everybody, uniform, thinking in the same way, with the same purpose, without any individual agendas, without any egos, just ‘That’s the task’. That’s what we want to get, and I am going to push the boat very, very fast.”
Arteta was known for attention to detail even when he was at Arsenal as a player — constantly asking questions, always digging deep into the purpose for a particular decision around the club.
There have been extensive changes to the training ground at London Colney recently, with more to come. One of the things Arteta noticed when he rejoined the club in December 2019 after three and a half years on Manchester City’s coaching staff was a lack of feel, a lack of connection across the environment — physically and emotionally — and he wanted that fixed.
Arteta lobbied for an injection of Arsenal sentiment into the building. He wanted to build much stronger ties for the players and staff — ties with the history of the club, ties with the stadium — to feel like their training home and match-day home are linked.
There has been considerable interior decoration since. Murals of past successes and Arsenal icons now adorn the walls, lists of trophy-winning squads are celebrated, huge imagery of the Emirates Stadium faces the players as they come out of the gym, mentions of the Clock End and North Bank at former ground Highbury and the old motto Victoria Concordia Crescit — Victory Through Harmony — edge the glass windows of the canteen that overlook the pitches. The idea is to knit back together things that had become frayed, to boost things that had become flat, to make people feel Arsenal.
Sean O’Connor, the football services manager at London Colney, has been eagerly helping with the training ground’s facelift and he feels it makes a difference. “What Mikel brought is energy. It needed a lift, and he understood that,” he says.
It means a lot to Arteta. “I want people to come back here in a few years’ time and feel that it was an inspiring atmosphere and that it transformed their way of thinking how a team should live or a way of thinking how football actions happen and the reasons behind it.”
The manager’s office has also been upgraded, and is now part of a coaching area with various rooms and departments leading off from a main meeting space for Arteta and his staff. On the far wall is an engraved tree. For Arteta, it symbolises the roots and trunk that form the club, the branches represent the staff, and the leaves are the players who grow thanks to all below that is supporting them.
Significantly, the first thing you see at the main entrance is a supersized floor-to-ceiling image of a smiling Wenger with his left hand raised.
It has become routine that all the players, as they come in, high-five the picture of the man who basically built this place.
Arsenal are not afraid of the Wenger legacy. Indeed, Arteta consciously wanted the club to embrace it. The club reached out to their long-time manager to explain the impact of his image effectively greeting everyone as they arrive and asked if he would provide a message for the players, present and future.
His words now jump out from the red wall: “Here you have the opportunity to get out the greatness that is in each of you.”
Walking past that is not a bad way to start work.
The rest of the article is a bit of "a day in the life of Mikel Arteta".
I like the sound of the physical changes that have been made to the training centre - those sort of things are an important part of building, or rebuilding, a culture.
