“I remember that Pep made the first call,” Mikel Arteta claims Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola wanted him as assistant even before retiring
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta talks about his former employer Pep Guardiola during a recent interview.
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When Pep Guardiola was in charge of Barcelona and Bayern Munich, Mikel Arteta recalled how his Spanish counterpart would phone and seek tactical guidance on English clubs. Additionally, the former midfielder claimed that Guardiola had wanted him to be his No. 2 since 2012 and that they had ultimately teamed up after the latter’s retirement from playing at the Emirates in 2016.
At Manchester City, they worked for more than three years before Arteta returned to north London in 2019 to succeed Unai Emery. Despite clinching the FA Cup in his inaugural campaign, Arteta has faced intense criticism thus far in his brief management career. But now that Arsenal are in first position in the Premier League, nobody questions his credibility.
Walid Regragui, the manager of Morocco, was recently found to have gained tactical advice from Arteta, although Guardiola has been doing it for the past ten years. When Guardiola first met Arteta in the late 1990s while he was a member of Barça’s academy, the Spaniard gave him valuable advice for crucial Champions League matches.
Arteta discussed his route into coaching with Sky Sports pundit Jamie Carragher and said: “I decided at 28 to start doing my coaching badges. I started doing it when I was at Arsenal, Arsene [Wenger] was very supportive with it and I started to really enjoy that process. When I was 30, I remember that Pep made the first call to say, ‘I might be coming to England, would you become my assistant?’.”
“I said: ‘I’m still playing! It’s still too early…’ But that gave me more motivation to understand that whenever I decided to stop playing, I wanted to start the coaching.” he added.
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Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola endured a tough first season at Manchester City
Guardiola arrived in England the same year that Arteta retired, and despite having the chance to work in the Arsenal system, he chose to go to the Etihad instead. After failing to win a trophy in Guardiola’s first season with the team, it was a challenging first year for the pair but Arteta claims his faith in his coach never wavered. He asserted: “We had to change a lot of the departments. We had to understand the culture of English football, how the referees act, how the media work.”
“There was a lot of things that Pep was very interested [in] and I spent 14-15 years of my life in this country, so he was very interested in that. Some of the things we were going to go against it straight away because it’s against the culture of English football, and it’s going to take a while to break that wall. But when you have a person who is so determined, so clear, so focused and has such strong beliefs, you just die for him.”
“And it took a while, the first year it wasn’t easy, but I think the process that we put in place and the roles that we had and the clarity that we had in the coaching staff, it was helping,” he added. Before Arteta left City, the club won back-to-back league titles. He is now attempting to end the domination of his previous club by leading Arsenal to the first top flight title since 2004.
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Sujeeth Shetty
(766 Articles Published)