Tactical Analysis: Mikel Arteta's Promising Start to Life at Arsenal

It’s often considered difficult to consider how a new manager will do at a club, particularly in the case of Mikel Arteta. A coach at Manchester City, the most successful English club of the decade and record breaking point holders, under the tutelage of one of the best managers ever, Pep Guardiola, but Mikel himself has no managerial pedigree at the top level, making it very difficult and essentially guesswork to figure out how he’ll do.

Based on the evidence at hand, before Arteta took the job, it would be considered an educated guess to say he’d play ‘expansive football’. This is good because, unlike Unai Emery, it gave the club a clear direction of what style and philosophy the club would take on. However, when you match expansive football with Arsenal’s squad, it doesn’t seem like a good fit - possession football is primarily surrounded by how compact you are without the ball. You have to win the ball back as quickly as possible and if that’s not possible, make sure you’re compact centrally so you’re not vulnerable in defensive transition. Arsenal have unathletic players in defence and midfield making it very difficult to counterpress (win the ball back as quickly as possible) and to recover/stay compact in defensive transitions.

Now of course it’s a long-term project and just because Arteta’s philosophy doesn’t match up well with Arsenal’s current squad, doesn’t mean the appointment was bad or anything like that because the players themselves aren’t good enough in relation to where the club would ideally want to be (challenging for titles) so no matter who was appointed, a clearance was required.

In short, before a ball was kicked under Arteta’s Arsenal tenure, it looked like an elite manager was required to get Arsenal back to the top level playing expansive football. So let’s judge, based on what we’ve seen so far, if he has the potential to be that.