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One of the great stories from the early days of Mikel Arteta’s tenure at Arsenal was told by the club’s former midfielder Granit Xhaka a few years later. Xhaka revealed how, on Arteta’s first day at the training ground, the new manager took his players into a meeting room and knocked over all the chairs, scattering them all over the floor.
Surveying this unintelligible mess of furniture, Arteta told the team: This is how you play. “It was chaos,” Xhaka said. “Great chaos”.
So Arteta began collecting and restructuring the chairs, using them to demonstrate where Arsenal needed to be after one year, two years and three years. It was a typically inventive way of making his team understand their lack of structure and the time it would take to rebuild the club.
It’s easy to forget now, five years later, but Arteta has really taken time to implement the style of play associated with his team in recent seasons. He didn’t arrive at the club and immediately produced the attacking 4-3-3 we see today, with its flying wingers and high defensive line. The reconstruction of Arsenal was completed brick by brick, window by window.
After all, in his first year at the club, Arteta won the FA Cup playing a defensive back three (which was often a back five) and possessing just 29 and 40% of the ball in matches against Manchester City and Chelsea, respectively. Arsenal hired Pep Guardiola’s former assistant but, at that time, Arteta was much more similar in style to another of his previous bosses, David Moyes, than to City’s great Catalan mastermind.
In the winter of 2020, a year after his appointment, Arteta said: “We want to move to a 4-3-3, but for that you need a lot of specificity in each position. Today, out of five or six positions, we no longer have it.
And in an interview earlier that year, Arteta said: “I don’t want to rush the process and take them [the players] somehow they can’t do it, because it wouldn’t be productive.
It seems timely to consider this now, ahead of Arsenal’s meeting with Manchester United on Sunday, as Arteta has effectively taken the opposite approach to Ruben Amorim at Old Trafford. There are many similarities between the two managers – both were hired in their late 30s, both were brought in in the middle of a campaign – but their strategies could hardly be more different.
Compare, for example, Arteta’s reluctance to play a 4-3-3 without the appropriate players, to Amorim’s insistence on deploying his preferred three-man defense despite his United team’s shortcomings. “I have to sell my idea,” Amorim said in recent weeks. “I don’t have another one.”
Arteta, in his early days, saw adaptability and flexibility as a necessity. Amorim, much like Ange Postecoglou at Tottenham Hotspur, seems to view this as a sign of weakness. “There is no second doubt, no second way,” Amorim told the media for the first time as United head coach. “It’s a way forward and we’re going to do it.”
The table below shows how Arteta has gradually evolved Arsenal’s style over the seasons. For example, their “average starting distance,” a measure of how high their defensive line moves up the field, has increased with each campaign. Likewise, their shots and expected goals – a measure of attacking intent – gradually improved as they moved towards Arteta’s preferred 4-3-3 shape.
In early December, Amorim warned that “the storm would come” for United as they tried to adapt to his demands. To extend his analogy, Amorim decided to let this storm hit his players and see how they fare, while Arteta chose to shield Arsenal from it. Only after being fully prepared for several years and when new recruits arrived were Arsenal players deemed ready to go out in the rain.
None of this is to say that one approach is better than the other. On that front, only time will tell. Indeed, based on United’s performance against Liverpool last weekend, there are signs that the storm may already be passing for Amorim. But it creates a curious and stark contrast between the two managers, and it also speaks to a broader trend in coaching.
It seems that adaptability has gone out of fashion. Coaches are sticking to their philosophies more strictly than ever, with Amorim, Postecoglou and former Southampton manager Russell Martin among the best examples.
This is obviously what the big clubs are looking for these days. Vincent Kompany maintained his principles so religiously that Burnley were relegated under his leadership, and then he got the job at Bayern Munich. On the other hand, there is Thomas Frank, who has made Brentford one of the most versatile and adaptable teams in the Premier League, keeping them in the division for three consecutive seasons. But unlike Kompany, Frank was not picked up by a giant of European football. It seems that philosophy sometimes matters more than points.
For Amorim, there are good reasons to be intransigent. His predecessor, Erik ten Hag, quickly became more pragmatic after a rocky start, but couldn’t keep up with Arteta in evolving that style into something bigger. After years of turmoil, it is entirely understandable that Amorim and United feel that a defined identity is necessary from the start.
Arsenal v United on Sunday is therefore more than a knockout battle between two of England’s biggest clubs. It’s also a clash of styles on the touchline. The slow-building pragmatist, who gradually added layer after layer to create the team he wanted, clashes with the strong-willed ideologue, who will not compromise on a single vision.
