Mikel Arteta has admitted he felt “terrified” on his first day as Arsenal manager but was determined to change the culture of the club to enable them to challenge for trophies.
Arteta celebrated the fifth anniversary of being thrust into his first managerial role on Friday and was in reflective mood before Saturday’s trip to Crystal Palace. The Spaniard was only 37 when he was appointed at the Emirates in December 2019 and is now the Premier League’s third longest-serving manager behind Pep Guardiola – whom Arteta worked for as an assistant at Manchester City – and Brentford’s Thomas Frank. But he acknowledged that while it had been “a dream come true” to be named Arsenal manager, the prospect of taking over a club that were languishing in 10th place had proven a challenge given his lack of experience.
“I was probably terrified,” Arteta said of his first day in the role. “You haven’t coached anybody at the highest level. It was the middle of season, without any preparation, without a coaching staff, you get asked to take this amazing and big job. I was looking around at the people making that decision and they were so convinced.
“First of all, you want to respond to that trust, and I had very strong feelings towards the club. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t disappoint anybody, that I was capable of doing it. The only way of doing it is to start day by day, to start to experience that, to start to get close to the players and the staff and see if it can work.”
Arteta has displayed his ruthless streak throughout his time at Arsenal. Mesut Özil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang are among the star names to have been moved on because they didn’t fit his approach. Arteta refused to give away the identity of a member of his staff who was tasked with changing the club’s culture when he first took over but revealed those findings had played an important role in shaping his approach.
“The first thing is understanding what is a good culture and a bad culture,” he said. “To do that what I did was basically ask, through somebody I employed, to give me their opinion of how they feel to work in this football club. Whether it’s players, as staff, in all kinds of roles, in all kinds of responsibilities. Then I had a very clear picture of what they thought and how they felt about it. And it was clear that it had to be changed.”
“That was the roots of the football club,” Arteta added. “If those roots were damaged at that level, there was nothing to build without that. So in the first season, we had to put the energy and the big decision it was to make sure those roots were clean and were in the right context and in the right place to be able to create and build what we wanted to build.”
Riccardo Calafiori and Declan Rice are both expected to return at Palace, with Gabriel Jesus also pushing to retain his place after his hat-trick against Oliver Glasner’s side in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday.
