Mikel Arteta's Unconventional Preparation for Chaos
Mikel Arteta knew the chaos was coming. Maybe not the exact three-hour delay on the runway, or the air traffic control problems that held Arsenal up on their way to Italy, but the disruption? The broken routine? That, he had planned for.
Arsenal’s midweek trip to face Napoli in the Champions League was thrown off course before they had even landed. The Premier League champions arrived in Italy three hours later than scheduled, their preparations chopped up by forces completely out of their control.
Arteta’s response? This is exactly why he trains his players to live with disorder.
“I love those challenges, I try to create them in pre-season,” he said on Friday, ahead of Arsenal’s Premier League visit to Sunderland on Saturday evening (20:00 BST). “So when they happen, we have already experienced them and we are ready.”
He has turned unpredictability into a training tool. Flights, buses, meals, even the walk into a stadium – nothing is guaranteed to run smoothly under Arteta. He wants his squad to feel the jolt, then steady themselves.
“Get to the stadium very late, change the routine so the players have to do something else,” he explained. “When it happens, and it can – the flight can be cancelled, or the train is delayed, there is so much traffic, I don’t want the players and staff panicking.”
The message is blunt: accept it, then use it.
“When that happens, adapt to it. 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.”
So he leans into discomfort. Meals are delayed on purpose. Transport leaves later than expected. Sometimes the team take different routes to grounds. Even the dressing room becomes part of the experiment, made hotter and more uncomfortable so that kick-off never feels like a shock to the system.
Arteta believes that when the real disruption arrives on a matchday – a delayed bus, a traffic jam, a late arrival at the stadium – the stress levels drop because his players have already lived through versions of it.
This is not a new quirk in his management. The Spaniard has long embraced unusual methods to hard-wire mentality into his squad.
He once walked into the dressing room carrying a light bulb, asking his players to be energetic and shine. On another occasion, he hired professional pickpockets to attend a team dinner, quietly lifting phones and wallets from players to hammer home a lesson about awareness and concentration.
In 2023, a dog named Win started padding around the training ground. Arteta introduced the dog to boost morale and to symbolise the idea of Arsenal as a family, a living reminder of togetherness embedded into daily life.
To outsiders, some of it might look eccentric. To Arteta, it is preparation. Delayed flights, late arrivals, awkward dressing rooms – none of it, he insists, should ever be the reason Arsenal fall short.
