Mikel Arteta's Unorthodox Methods to Prepare Arsenal for Chaos

Mikel Arteta turned Arsenal’s midweek Champions League disruption into something he had already rehearsed.

The Premier League champions landed in Italy three hours later than planned before facing Napoli on Wednesday, delayed by air traffic control problems. For most managers, that is an unwanted complication. For Arteta, it was almost part of the script.

He had built it into their summer.

“I love those challenges, I try to create them in pre-season,” he said on Friday, before Arsenal’s Premier League trip to Sunderland on Saturday night.

The smile that usually accompanies that line tells its own story. This is not a coach who wants comfort. He wants chaos, on his terms.

Arteta has spent pre-seasons deliberately disrupting training and travel plans, dragging his players out of their routines so that when real trouble hits – a cancelled flight, a delayed train, gridlocked traffic – the squad doesn’t flinch.

“So when they happen, we have already experienced them and we are ready,” he explained.

Get to the stadium very late? Fine. Change the routine at the last minute? Good. It all becomes another drill, another scenario they’ve already lived through.

The message is relentless: adapt or fall behind.

He urges his players to use the dead time. “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.”

That line cuts to the core of his methods. Arteta is trying to strip away the sense of injustice that often follows elite teams when things go against them. No excuses. No emotional leakage. Just another situation to manage.

So the details of his preparation have become increasingly extreme.

• He has delayed meals.
• Held back team transport.
• Taken different, longer routes to stadiums.
• Tweaked the smallest aspects of the matchday environment, including turning up the heat in dressing rooms and making them more uncomfortable.

All of it, he says, is designed to blunt the shock factor on the days that really matter. If the unexpected keeps happening in August, it feels far less dramatic in April.

This is not a new theme in Arteta’s Arsenal, either. The Spaniard has never been afraid to lean on symbolism or unorthodox ideas to drive home a message.

He once walked into the dressing room holding a light bulb, asking his players to be energetic and to shine. The image was simple, almost theatrical, but it stuck. That is the point.

On another occasion, he went even further. Arteta hired professional pickpockets to attend a team dinner and remove phones and wallets from players. The shock at discovering their belongings gone became a live demonstration: stay alert, on and off the pitch, or something important will be taken from you.

In 2023, he introduced a dog named Win to the training ground, a permanent presence around the squad. Officially, it was there to boost morale and represent the idea of Arsenal as a family. Unofficially, it was another reminder of what he demands every day: togetherness, loyalty, and a shared instinct to protect what they have built.

To some, these methods look eccentric. To those inside the camp, they are now part of the club’s competitive edge. A delayed plane to Italy is no longer a crisis. It is a scenario they have already run, a test they have already passed.

The real question is how many more of these controlled storms Arteta has planned as Arsenal chase more trophies in a season that will ask everything of them.