Genuinely nice to read but at the end of the day we are 11th or 10th or whatever.
Emery vs Arteta at Arsenal: 'Unai lives in his head; Mikel gets in other people's'
Mikel Arteta acts like a 'manager', while Unai Emery wanted to be 'head coach' - The Athletic compares the approach of two Arsenal bossestheathletic.co.uk
“Unai lives in his head; Mikel gets in other people’s.” That is the way one training ground observer summarises the distinction between Unai Emery and Mikel Arteta.
Others dispute whether they’re so different at all. In conversations around the club, The Athletic hears the same adjectives applied to both Spaniards: “hard-working”, “focused”, “demanding”, “warm”, “funny”. The key differentiator, it seems, is that Emery never managed to project that publicly.
This week, the current Arsenal manager comes up against his predecessor in a Europa League semi-final.
Much will be made of their respective records in the Emirates Stadium dugout, but how do they differ as coaches? As colleagues? As people? The Athletic spoke to people who have worked with both to get a sense of the distinct impressions each has made during their time in charge of Arsenal.
The general impression Emery left among Arsenal’s backroom staff was of a man so consumed by the game he did not always find it easy to relate to others. He worked long hours, and would often be at the club’s London Colney training ground till late. His head bubbled with tactical ideas — his issue was communicating them concisely.
Part of the problem, of course, was the language. Emery had a translator at the training ground, but preferred to communicate directly. If he asked one of his assistants, such as Juan Carlos Carcedo or Julen Masach, to pass on instruction there would generally be no problems — their English was better than his. When Emery spoke himself, clarity was sometimes an issue. “He wanted to do everything in English, which was great,” says one source. “But I had to really switch on to understand what he was saying — and English is my first language. For the foreign boys, it must have been a nightmare.” Occasionally, Emery would default into Spanish, but he tried to avoid it, believing it essential to communicate in his adopted language.
Arteta, by contrast, has a natural facility and flair for language. Even on the touchline, he flits seamlessly between English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. While team talks are led in English, he is happy to be flexible.
Emery’s language issues were compounded by one of the fundamentals of his coaching technique. “The thing is, Unai’s style is very ‘talky’,” The Athletic is told. “When he was doing a tactical presentation, there was a lot of chat. With Mikel, you can just watch the board and you know exactly what he’s trying to tell you just from the images.”
The squad became accustomed to Emery animatedly narrating a series of clips that demonstrated the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses. Arteta takes a more precise, more visual approach: “He creates a basic tactical image using the whiteboard or markers, and then shows you an exact clip of that happening.”
There we hit upon another key difference: whereas Emery was keen to pass on as much tactical information as possible, Arteta believes that less is sometimes more. Usually, Arteta’s game preparation is tailored to the 48 hours before the game. If Emery had five days free in the run-up to a game, then he would be tempted to use them. “It takes discipline for a manager to say, ‘No, we are going to have a rest day’,” explains one staff member. “I remember one league fixture where we trained four or five days on the bounce coming into it. Afterwards, the players felt really leg-heavy.
“Mikel has his formula for the final 48 hours before a game, but everything else is negotiable. He’s happy to take a rest here and there. With Unai, it was more like cramming for an exam: ‘We can do more. We can do more’.”
Emery’s focus on the strategic side of the game led to longer, more tactical sessions. At first, that was a welcome change — he was substantially more tactical than predecessor Arsène Wenger. In time, however, the patience of the players wore thin.
Sometimes, the day before a game, the team would spend two to three hours on the grass as Emery attempted to drill them on structure or shape. There were times when it became a vicious cycle: the longer the session went, the more frustrated and drained the players became, and the less likely they were to absorb the lesson. Some accepted Emery’s tactical emphasis as an example of typical Spanish coaching, but for other sections of the squad, it was anathema.
That’s not to say Arteta’s training is lax. If anything, it is more physically demanding. One of the issues Emery encountered was that the tactical nature of his sessions meant there was sometimes a disconnect between the intensity required for training and that required for matches.
Arteta’s focus is on shorter, sharper, clearer sessions. While Emery brought Masach, his own fitness specialist, the current manager has forged closer relationships with the existing performance department. Consequently, there is more attention paid to recommendations on load management and periodisation. Arteta and club doctor Gary O’Driscoll have also made a concerted effort to not talk about injuries too much in the public sphere, outside of the club’s weekly injury bulletin. They believe this has helped end the perception of Arsenal as a soft, injury-prone club.
For players, Arteta has brought a greater correlation between what happens on the training ground and in match scenarios. “Clarity” is the word you will hear again and again. That was most apparent when it came to playing out from the back. Under Emery, once goalkeeper Bernd Leno had passed to one of the centre-halves, there wasn’t much more structure or planning underpinning it. When Arteta came in, he applied a clear set of principles that the team quickly adopted.
Arteta has applied a clear set of principles at Arsenal (Photo: Getty Images)
Emery was generally liked, but not widely loved. Some attribute that to the fact that his style of management was such a marked departure from what the club had become accustomed to in over two decades under Wenger.
To understand the perception of Emery, it is first necessary to understand the circumstances he walked into in the summer of 2018. Wenger was a charismatic coach, manager and senior executive rolled into one, someone who left an imprint on club staff every time he walked through the building. Under the Frenchman, Arsenal had a clear hierarchy, one in which many members of staff felt comfortable — arguably too comfortable. His influence extended everywhere and his personality was pervasive.
Emery was never that man. He wanted to be a head coach and a head coach alone — he believed that was his strength, and that narrow focus was partly the reason he was hired. People warmed less to Emery, not because he isn’t a warm person, but because he didn’t see it as his job to do what Wenger had done. Consequently, that created a gap between him and other departments. Emery came into an executive structure that was still shifting, still evolving. The model changed; Arsenal as a company were changing — and Emery inherited some of that chaos.
When Arteta arrived just before Christmas 2019, things were more settled. What’s more, by that point, the organisation had been starved of things that were easy for him to deliver: communication, connection, contact. Arteta has a broader range of interests than Emery, perhaps because — having worked under Wenger, as an Arsenal player, and Pep Guardiola — he recognises that holding wider responsibilities enables him to consolidate power. From the day Arteta came back in through the door, he acted as the “manager”, not the “head coach”.
Emery’s focus was fixed firmly on match days — players who were out injured might go weeks without hearing from him. If you were not available to play for him, you were not on his agenda. Some have described it as a kind of “tunnel vision”. Emery felt he was simply granting other departments autonomy, but in reality, they began to feel alienated.
Arsenal is a big club, with a lot of information flying around. Every department is filing reports, and sometimes it is not easy for a manager to keep across it all. You have to digest a lot of information in a very short period of time — it comes at you in English, or numerically. If you don’t engage with it, you risk isolating certain departments, and they cease to feel valued. People start to feel disconnected. That, in part, is what happened with Emery.
The suggestion is that one of the reasons Arteta’s stock is so high within the club is that he is skilled at both managing up and managing down. He understands how to make people feel like a team, like they are part of something. In an organisation as big and sprawling as Arsenal Football Club, that can be invaluable.
Almost immediately, Arteta sought to win the hearts and minds of the backroom staff. Under Emery, some of these people had felt ignored, or grown resentful about the gruelling training schedule and lack of days off. Arteta had observed how quickly Emery’s support base within the club had dissipated after the disastrous Europa League final loss to Chelsea in 2019, and did not want the same fate.
A warm-weather training camp trip to Dubai in February 2020 effectively became a big bonding session between players and staff.
On one occasion, the players were told to prepare for what sounded like a fairly arduous set-piece session.
When they arrived on the training field, they were told they’d be defending dead-balls and crosses not against fellow first-team players, but against the backroom staff. Masseurs, physios and more laced up their boots and slung ball after ball into the box, all trying desperately to score past Leno.
“The players probably got a little bit out of it, but it was brilliant,” says one witness. “By the end of it, the club doctor nutmegged someone, and all 40 people on the pitch started running after him and cheering.” On a trip marred by a disciplinary incident involving Matteo Guendouzi, this one session immediately made everyone feel at ease and unified again.
Those outside the club sometimes question why, in spite of disappointing results, Arteta retains such popularity. It is a phenomenon partly explained by skilled interpersonal management.
The reason some felt Arteta’s promotion from head coach to manager became a “formality” is that he takes an interest in fine details across departments. In transfer negotiations, Emery was more interested in the outcome, but Arteta would be more involved in the process. Again, this was in part down to the language issue — Arteta was able to follow negotiations more closely, more intimately.
With the players, too, he was more hands-on. When Hector Bellerin and Kieran Tierney were in recovery from long-term injury problems, the manager would frequently check on their progress and mental state.
It is not, however, a soft environment. Where some staff felt Emery’s assistants tended to align with him, Arteta tries to create an atmosphere where people are constantly challenging each other.
Certainly, he is uncompromising when it comes to the pursuit of his football principles: staff recall him interrupting basic rehab drills to make sure players received the ball in the manner he wanted. Every drill must have a direct correlation to what the team do on match day — and if he’s not happy, he’ll let you know. “He’ll study what you’re doing, walk over and say very plainly, ‘No! No! Stop!’” says a source. “There’s no ****ing around.”
Emery and Arteta both had an interest in bringing discipline to the squad, although they had different ways of going about it. Generally, Emery was less confrontational, prepared to let things slide if it kept morale high. He would issue warnings rather than jump straight to imposing fines. In his first season, that firm-but-fair approach won him a lot of credit with the players.
Arteta has a more black-and-white attitude — one that is only possible, some argue, because of the foundations laid by Emery: “If Mikel had come in straight after Arsène and tried to apply these kinds of hard and fast rules, it would never have worked”.
One disciplinary element revealed by The Athletic was Arteta’s decision to introduce the “wheel of fortune”. If a player committed a minor indiscretion, such as being late for a team meeting, they had to spin the wheel. On the wheel were a series of forfeits, ranging from a modest fine to cleaning the dressing room, or even having to polish the captain’s car.
That has since fallen by the wayside — partly because many of the punishments are difficult to perform in a COVID-19-secure fashion, but also because repeat offenders saw the novelty wearing off. “It was becoming a bit too much of a joke,” explains a member of staff. “‘We shouldn’t be laughing about this now because somebody is doing it too often’. It wears a bit thin when there are the same three players every week doing it.”
Arteta’s man-management skills mean he is broadly more popular at Arsenal. There are those, however, who insist Emery served his purpose, that he was the ideal bridge between Arteta and Wenger; someone whose narrow-focused approach was exactly what was required to disrupt and break away from the previous era.
What remains somewhat shocking is how quickly it unravelled for Emery after that loss to Chelsea in Baku.
If results do not go your way, relationships quickly crumble. Before this vital Europa League semi-final against Emery’s Villarreal, that should serve as a warning to Arteta.
Alex Ferguson was a big boy European trophy winning manager before that, he rejected quite a few big clubs before United finally got him in.
I certainly wouldn't be on Arteta's case. It's not even Arteta I am mad at, I think whether he's a good manager or not is a very nuanced conversation.
Emery vs Arteta at Arsenal: 'Unai lives in his head; Mikel gets in other people's'
Mikel Arteta acts like a 'manager', while Unai Emery wanted to be 'head coach' - The Athletic compares the approach of two Arsenal bosses
“Unai lives in his head; Mikel gets in other people’s.” That is the way one training ground observer summarises the distinction between Unai Emery and Mikel Arteta.
Others dispute whether they’re so different at all. In conversations around the club, The Athletic hears the same adjectives applied to both Spaniards: “hard-working”, “focused”, “demanding”, “warm”, “funny”. The key differentiator, it seems, is that Emery never managed to project that publicly.
This week, the current Arsenal manager comes up against his predecessor in a Europa League semi-final.
Much will be made of their respective records in the Emirates Stadium dugout, but how do they differ as coaches? As colleagues? As people? The Athletic spoke to people who have worked with both to get a sense of the distinct impressions each has made during their time in charge of Arsenal.
The general impression Emery left among Arsenal’s backroom staff was of a man so consumed by the game he did not always find it easy to relate to others. He worked long hours, and would often be at the club’s London Colney training ground till late. His head bubbled with tactical ideas — his issue was communicating them concisely.
Part of the problem, of course, was the language. Emery had a translator at the training ground, but preferred to communicate directly. If he asked one of his assistants, such as Juan Carlos Carcedo or Julen Masach, to pass on instruction there would generally be no problems — their English was better than his. When Emery spoke himself, clarity was sometimes an issue. “He wanted to do everything in English, which was great,” says one source. “But I had to really switch on to understand what he was saying — and English is my first language. For the foreign boys, it must have been a nightmare.” Occasionally, Emery would default into Spanish, but he tried to avoid it, believing it essential to communicate in his adopted language.
Arteta, by contrast, has a natural facility and flair for language. Even on the touchline, he flits seamlessly between English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. While team talks are led in English, he is happy to be flexible.
Emery’s language issues were compounded by one of the fundamentals of his coaching technique. “The thing is, Unai’s style is very ‘talky’,” The Athletic is told. “When he was doing a tactical presentation, there was a lot of chat. With Mikel, you can just watch the board and you know exactly what he’s trying to tell you just from the images.”
The squad became accustomed to Emery animatedly narrating a series of clips that demonstrated the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses. Arteta takes a more precise, more visual approach: “He creates a basic tactical image using the whiteboard or markers, and then shows you an exact clip of that happening.”
There we hit upon another key difference: whereas Emery was keen to pass on as much tactical information as possible, Arteta believes that less is sometimes more. Usually, Arteta’s game preparation is tailored to the 48 hours before the game. If Emery had five days free in the run-up to a game, then he would be tempted to use them. “It takes discipline for a manager to say, ‘No, we are going to have a rest day’,” explains one staff member. “I remember one league fixture where we trained four or five days on the bounce coming into it. Afterwards, the players felt really leg-heavy.
“Mikel has his formula for the final 48 hours before a game, but everything else is negotiable. He’s happy to take a rest here and there. With Unai, it was more like cramming for an exam: ‘We can do more. We can do more’.”
Emery’s focus on the strategic side of the game led to longer, more tactical sessions. At first, that was a welcome change — he was substantially more tactical than predecessor Arsène Wenger. In time, however, the patience of the players wore thin.
Sometimes, the day before a game, the team would spend two to three hours on the grass as Emery attempted to drill them on structure or shape. There were times when it became a vicious cycle: the longer the session went, the more frustrated and drained the players became, and the less likely they were to absorb the lesson. Some accepted Emery’s tactical emphasis as an example of typical Spanish coaching, but for other sections of the squad, it was anathema.
That’s not to say Arteta’s training is lax. If anything, it is more physically demanding. One of the issues Emery encountered was that the tactical nature of his sessions meant there was sometimes a disconnect between the intensity required for training and that required for matches.
Arteta’s focus is on shorter, sharper, clearer sessions. While Emery brought Masach, his own fitness specialist, the current manager has forged closer relationships with the existing performance department. Consequently, there is more attention paid to recommendations on load management and periodisation. Arteta and club doctor Gary O’Driscoll have also made a concerted effort to not talk about injuries too much in the public sphere, outside of the club’s weekly injury bulletin. They believe this has helped end the perception of Arsenal as a soft, injury-prone club.
For players, Arteta has brought a greater correlation between what happens on the training ground and in match scenarios. “Clarity” is the word you will hear again and again. That was most apparent when it came to playing out from the back. Under Emery, once goalkeeper Bernd Leno had passed to one of the centre-halves, there wasn’t much more structure or planning underpinning it. When Arteta came in, he applied a clear set of principles that the team quickly adopted.
Arteta has applied a clear set of principles at Arsenal (Photo: Getty Images)
Emery was generally liked, but not widely loved. Some attribute that to the fact that his style of management was such a marked departure from what the club had become accustomed to in over two decades under Wenger.
To understand the perception of Emery, it is first necessary to understand the circumstances he walked into in the summer of 2018. Wenger was a charismatic coach, manager and senior executive rolled into one, someone who left an imprint on club staff every time he walked through the building. Under the Frenchman, Arsenal had a clear hierarchy, one in which many members of staff felt comfortable — arguably too comfortable. His influence extended everywhere and his personality was pervasive.
Emery was never that man. He wanted to be a head coach and a head coach alone — he believed that was his strength, and that narrow focus was partly the reason he was hired. People warmed less to Emery, not because he isn’t a warm person, but because he didn’t see it as his job to do what Wenger had done. Consequently, that created a gap between him and other departments. Emery came into an executive structure that was still shifting, still evolving. The model changed; Arsenal as a company were changing — and Emery inherited some of that chaos.
When Arteta arrived just before Christmas 2019, things were more settled. What’s more, by that point, the organisation had been starved of things that were easy for him to deliver: communication, connection, contact. Arteta has a broader range of interests than Emery, perhaps because — having worked under Wenger, as an Arsenal player, and Pep Guardiola — he recognises that holding wider responsibilities enables him to consolidate power. From the day Arteta came back in through the door, he acted as the “manager”, not the “head coach”.
Emery’s focus was fixed firmly on match days — players who were out injured might go weeks without hearing from him. If you were not available to play for him, you were not on his agenda. Some have described it as a kind of “tunnel vision”. Emery felt he was simply granting other departments autonomy, but in reality, they began to feel alienated.
Arsenal is a big club, with a lot of information flying around. Every department is filing reports, and sometimes it is not easy for a manager to keep across it all. You have to digest a lot of information in a very short period of time — it comes at you in English, or numerically. If you don’t engage with it, you risk isolating certain departments, and they cease to feel valued. People start to feel disconnected. That, in part, is what happened with Emery.
The suggestion is that one of the reasons Arteta’s stock is so high within the club is that he is skilled at both managing up and managing down. He understands how to make people feel like a team, like they are part of something. In an organisation as big and sprawling as Arsenal Football Club, that can be invaluable.
Almost immediately, Arteta sought to win the hearts and minds of the backroom staff. Under Emery, some of these people had felt ignored, or grown resentful about the gruelling training schedule and lack of days off. Arteta had observed how quickly Emery’s support base within the club had dissipated after the disastrous Europa League final loss to Chelsea in 2019, and did not want the same fate.
A warm-weather training camp trip to Dubai in February 2020 effectively became a big bonding session between players and staff.
On one occasion, the players were told to prepare for what sounded like a fairly arduous set-piece session.
When they arrived on the training field, they were told they’d be defending dead-balls and crosses not against fellow first-team players, but against the backroom staff. Masseurs, physios and more laced up their boots and slung ball after ball into the box, all trying desperately to score past Leno.
“The players probably got a little bit out of it, but it was brilliant,” says one witness. “By the end of it, the club doctor nutmegged someone, and all 40 people on the pitch started running after him and cheering.” On a trip marred by a disciplinary incident involving Matteo Guendouzi, this one session immediately made everyone feel at ease and unified again.
Those outside the club sometimes question why, in spite of disappointing results, Arteta retains such popularity. It is a phenomenon partly explained by skilled interpersonal management.
The reason some felt Arteta’s promotion from head coach to manager became a “formality” is that he takes an interest in fine details across departments. In transfer negotiations, Emery was more interested in the outcome, but Arteta would be more involved in the process. Again, this was in part down to the language issue — Arteta was able to follow negotiations more closely, more intimately.
With the players, too, he was more hands-on. When Hector Bellerin and Kieran Tierney were in recovery from long-term injury problems, the manager would frequently check on their progress and mental state.
It is not, however, a soft environment. Where some staff felt Emery’s assistants tended to align with him, Arteta tries to create an atmosphere where people are constantly challenging each other.
Certainly, he is uncompromising when it comes to the pursuit of his football principles: staff recall him interrupting basic rehab drills to make sure players received the ball in the manner he wanted. Every drill must have a direct correlation to what the team do on match day — and if he’s not happy, he’ll let you know. “He’ll study what you’re doing, walk over and say very plainly, ‘No! No! Stop!’” says a source. “There’s no ****ing around.”
Emery and Arteta both had an interest in bringing discipline to the squad, although they had different ways of going about it. Generally, Emery was less confrontational, prepared to let things slide if it kept morale high. He would issue warnings rather than jump straight to imposing fines. In his first season, that firm-but-fair approach won him a lot of credit with the players.
Arteta has a more black-and-white attitude — one that is only possible, some argue, because of the foundations laid by Emery: “If Mikel had come in straight after Arsène and tried to apply these kinds of hard and fast rules, it would never have worked”.
One disciplinary element revealed by The Athletic was Arteta’s decision to introduce the “wheel of fortune”. If a player committed a minor indiscretion, such as being late for a team meeting, they had to spin the wheel. On the wheel were a series of forfeits, ranging from a modest fine to cleaning the dressing room, or even having to polish the captain’s car.
That has since fallen by the wayside — partly because many of the punishments are difficult to perform in a COVID-19-secure fashion, but also because repeat offenders saw the novelty wearing off. “It was becoming a bit too much of a joke,” explains a member of staff. “‘We shouldn’t be laughing about this now because somebody is doing it too often’. It wears a bit thin when there are the same three players every week doing it.”
Arteta’s man-management skills mean he is broadly more popular at Arsenal. There are those, however, who insist Emery served his purpose, that he was the ideal bridge between Arteta and Wenger; someone whose narrow-focused approach was exactly what was required to disrupt and break away from the previous era.
What remains somewhat shocking is how quickly it unravelled for Emery after that loss to Chelsea in Baku.
If results do not go your way, relationships quickly crumble. Before this vital Europa League semi-final against Emery’s Villarreal, that should serve as a warning to Arteta.
It's a year long sub when you pay - plus you say that but the interview Özil did with the Athletic did a great deal on my views towards him.
Ah the Fergie example
We’ve gone past the Klopp example and 99% of all other precedents so now the Fergie trump card gets pulled out.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that before Utd, Ferguson got to the SPL with a third tier minnow.
Then he went to Aberdeen and won the SPL which hadn’t been won by any club outside the old firm for 15 years and won it twice more.
He also won a major European trophy beating Bayern Munich and then Real Madrid in the final as well as winning the Super Cup the next year against the then European Champions Hamburg.
He literally had the strongest CV pre-Utd of anyone you could imagine so you could see he had a history of managing himself out of tough situations and actually over performing.
Compare that with Arteta and what do we have from his career? Was assistant manager for the richest club in the league that is now favourite for a treble the year after he’s left.
Winning trophies and making finals wasn’t enough to keep Wenger in the job when we finished 6th ffs
But now it’s fine when we might not finish top half?
