Mikel Arteta: The Gifted Coach Who Analyzed Football Early

Santi Cazorla can’t get the story out without laughing. Mikel Arteta, he insists, is the last man you ever want to watch a match with. Not because he talks too much, but because he turns your living room into a video analysis suite.

“Injured at Arsenal, we’d watch games at home and he’d grab the remote and pause it,” Cazorla recalls. “I’d say: ‘What are you stopping it for?’ He’d rewind 30 seconds: ‘What do you see?’ I’d say: ‘I see a paused screen. I don’t see anything!’”

Arteta did. He always did.

“‘Don’t you think this player is badly positioned? If he goes a bit deeper, this space opens up … if the pivot goes there, this happens … that line should be deeper …’” Cazorla says, still cracking up. “He was a coach already. All game, every game: pausing, rewinding. The match is finished and we’re only in the 35th minute. ‘Do you see it?’ ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, now come on, press play.’ But I didn’t see it. I love football, I can watch it all day, but I don’t notice those things. Mikel does. I think it’s a gift.”

From the smallest province in Spain to the biggest stage in Europe, that “gift” has driven him.

A different kid from Gipuzkoa

Gipuzkoa, a sliver of land in the Basque Country, keeps churning out elite coaches at a rate that begs for a thesis. Arteta grew up there, at Antiguoko in San Sebastián, and from the start he stood apart. Not just because he was good. Because he was alive to the game in a way others weren’t.

“Mikel caught your attention very young,” says Jon Ayerbe, a former teammate. “The word I’d use is alive; you saw it in his eyes. He grasped everything fast, had character and was so competitive. Give him the ball, he’ll find a solution. And he was a year younger than us, eh.”

“Above all, he was the most intelligent,” adds Álvaro Parra. Mikel Yanguas remembers the same feeling: “You looked at him and thought: ‘Bloody hell, he’s got something special. If anyone makes it, it’s him.’ He had personality, ambition.”

Antiguoko was no ordinary youth club. It took on professional academies and beat them. Within that fiercely competitive environment, Arteta still found a way to stand out. Two-footed, tiny, a classic No 10 who would later evolve into a No 4, he could have gone another way entirely. He was good enough at tennis for his father to make him choose between sports.

Roberto Montiel, who coached him there, still delights in telling the story of a goal against Real Sociedad, all cheek and technique, that reminded him of Lionel Messi. The talent was obvious, but the mindset impressed even more.

“He was always clear he would make it and sacrificed his life for it,” Parra says. “He went to Barcelona, leaving everything behind. And later he turned down lucrative offers – Dubai, Qatar, the US – to work with Guardiola at Man City because it was the right step.”

At 14, Arteta was already training with Athletic Club, 100km along the AP-8. One of his coaches there was José Luis Mendilibar, future manager of Athletic, Eibar, Sevilla and Olympiakos, and he still remembers the clarity of that skinny teenager in midfield.

He barely lost the ball. He always played with sense.

“What you could imagine, thinking about it now, was that someone with that intelligence and understanding would also develop an ability to explain it to others, so they could understand too,” Mendilibar later wrote.

Luis Fernández, who took Arteta to Paris Saint-Germain in 2001, saw the same thing from the touchline. “When you told him what you wanted, he did it first time,” he says.

La Masia and the education of a pivot

Before Paris, before Glasgow, before London, there was Barcelona. The old Masia, the stone farmhouse by Camp Nou, where 32 boys lived and breathed football under a very particular creed.

“It was 1997,” Yanguas recalls. “Someone saw us representing Gipuzkoa at an Easter tournament and invited us to a trial at Barcelona. We stayed near Pedralbes and at the end they said yes to the three of us: me, Mikel and Jon Álvarez. We left that summer: 17 August, the day of San Sebastián’s fiestas, so I remember it well.”

They moved into La Masia and into a different world. Andrés Iniesta, Carles Puyol, Iván de la Peña and Pepe Reina were among the residents. Each dorm had four bunks, sometimes with camp beds squeezed in. Through the window, they could glimpse Bobby Robson’s Barcelona training on the pitch next door, half-hidden behind a screen.

“It was just us, the cooks, the security guard and one guy overseeing everything,” says Roberto Trashorras, another who grew close to Arteta. “It’s totally different nowadays. We sorted things out among ourselves. Because we were alone, we looked after each other. There were no mobiles. I remember queueing at midnight to ring home from the payphone, Puyol and De la Peña ahead of me. We were teenagers, so there’d be the usual messing about: jokes, water bombs. Mikel was funny, extroverted, but we were the victims usually … until you get a bit older and it’s your turn.”

A bus took them to school. Training followed. Then long, empty hours in a new city.

“We would go to El Corte Inglés; we were from San Sebastián, a small city, and we didn’t have an El Corte Inglés there,” Yanguas says. “Or we’d go to the cinema. I remember seeing Titanic with Mikel, Victor Valdés, Fernando Macedo. At weekends your parents would come.”

They were 15. For some, too young.

“Looking back, I wasn’t ready,” Yanguas admits. “Although that cadete team were national champions, I returned to San Sebastián at the end of the first year. It was hard for me. I think about it now and I was an introvert. Mikel was different, better prepared: more outgoing, more adaptable, better at relating. Maybe inside he was struggling but we saw someone who handled it very well. On the pitch too: he would demand the ball. I thought it was natural then but I coach now and realise it’s not. No one offers, no one asks for the ball. Mikel did constantly. It’s hard to do that: ‘Give it to me, I’ll sort this.’ He was surrounded by great players but had the confidence and self assurance to do that.”

Jofre Mateu, two years older and already with a first-team appearance to his name, has his own snapshot of the young Arteta. It starts with a car and ends in a wall.

“Mikel used to laugh about his hair. He said he had ‘bull’s hair’: so hard and it didn’t move. But, honestly, the thing I most remember is that one day he took my car when he was learning or recently passed and crashed it into the Masia wall.”

Jofre can’t help laughing. “It was three metres, impossible to crash. Impossible. And he goes: ‘Nah, nah, relax, I-don’t-know-what.’ He puts his arm on the window, looks back to reverse, but he’s putting it in first. ‘Yeah, I think you need more lessons. You can take taxis from now on.’ My car was only two months old: a VW Golf.”

So, are you stupid for giving him the keys?

“Totally,” Jofre answers. Yet he insists that, if anything, the moment is misleading. Arteta, he says, was the most sensible of the lot.

“He wasn’t there to piss about, he was there to do the right thing. He was super-responsible, he had something.”

Another scene captures him better. “Thiago Motta was hot-headed and in a training session he got in a fight, which wasn’t unusual,” Jofre says. “I don’t remember who with, but it wasn’t Mikel, yet he steps in: ‘Thiago, man, you’re teammates: you can’t do this.’ I remember it because Mikel didn’t really have the ‘weight’ to do that. It would be like Marc Bernal standing up to, say, Gavi now. He didn’t do it in an ugly way, but he did it. Clearly, firmly. And we just all stopped. Like: ‘Olé tus huevos.’ I think that said something about him: he wasn’t the star, but he’s not going to let that happen.”

On the pitch, La Masia rewired him. At Antiguoko he had been the boy who always had the ball. In Barcelona, he had to learn to live without it.

“The players who arrive are the best in their teams but Barcelona make you think about tactics, space in a way that’s not normal,” says Luis Carrión, a Barcelona B teammate. “At Antiguoko, Mikel would have had the ball all the time; here he had to wait, occupy the right space. By standing still, you see a solution, a way out. They’d explain concepts – third man, triangles, final line – but it wasn’t ‘classes’, more repetition: passing drills every day.”

Trashorras saw the same transformation. “Mikel was a dribbler, arriving in the area, but he learned to play one, two touches, not lose his position. One of the things that most struck me when I first got there is they would say: ‘Don’t go looking for the ball, the ball will come to you.’ ‘Yeah, but, it’s just there, I can …’ ‘No, no, no. Don’t invade someone else’s space.’ It can be hard to adapt but Mikel was sharp. It’s really, genuinely different. Pffff, it’s like a religion. And then when you leave it’s different too.”

The ones in his way: Xavi and Iniesta

Barcelona shaped him, but Barcelona also blocked him. There are two very simple reasons why Arteta never truly broke through there: Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta.

There was nothing wrong with his talent or his temperament. There was just a generation of genius already installed in his position. So his education continued elsewhere, across four countries: Spain, France, Scotland, England. Each stop added a layer.

“When I became PSG coach I asked for Mikel because I watched him in the juvenil,” Fernández says. “I followed Johan Cruyff’s ideas, the importance of the pivot, loved Pep Guardiola and wanted a player of that type.

“On the pitch you see Mikel’s intelligence, his understanding and, for sure, that comes out later when he becomes a coach. He had the perfect attitude to coach: professionalism. He was responsible, listened, learned and you didn’t need to keep telling him. He was an example for everyone. I admire him. I’m sensitive and when I see him and Gabi Heinze, his very good friend in Paris, it makes me so happy. If you had asked me then if he would be a coach, I’d have said: ‘No.’ He wasn’t: ‘Do this, do that.’ I think he learned with Pep. I went to see him do a session and thought: ‘Bloody hell, look at Mikel.’ But it was always in him.”

Carrión saw that same obsession from close quarters. “He was a kid with personality: polite, very professional for his age,” he says. “A coach? You never know, but he watched a lot of football. I ran into him recently and we chatted about football; it’s always football.”

Yanguas believes the ideas were always there, waiting to be put into words. “With time, you learn to express, understand and analyse the spaces you saw naturally,” he suggests, and Arteta always saw those. The focus, the passion, came as standard.

Ask his former teammates at La Masia if they saw a future manager and the answer is almost always the same.

“Zero,” Jofre replies. “But if you asked me about Xavi, I would have said zero. Luis Enrique, zero. Guardiola … OK, yes. But we were kids still, teenagers at La Masia more interested in the next game, some girl or where we’re going on Saturday.”

Trashorras nods to that. “With Pep, you saw it; with Mikel I couldn’t claim to have done, but you can’t argue with what he’s done.”

Someone else did see it, though. Pep Guardiola, the man whose ideas had been drummed into Arteta as a boy in Barcelona, later brought him to Manchester City as his assistant and helped turn that quiet, relentless midfielder into a touchline presence of his own.

Years earlier, Cazorla sat on a sofa with him, watching a game that never seemed to move past the 35th minute, and realised the truth: Arteta had been coaching long before he ever put on a tracksuit.