Bukayo Saka
Mikel Arteta will celebrate his fifth anniversary as Arsenal manager on Friday with Bukayo Saka admitting he has had enough of finishing second and wants to win trophies this season.
The Spaniard returned to the Emirates in December 2019 promising to be “ruthless” with players not ready to show the required passion and commitment. From the first starting team he picked against Bournemouth, only Saka remains at the club.
Former Gunners midfielder Arteta, 42, is now the third longest serving manager in the Premier League and has a net transfer spend of half a billion pounds. But since the 2020 FA Cup final where Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang scored twice, the Gunners have failed to win a major trophy. Or the Premier League since the Invincibles back in 2004. In the last two seasons, the Gunners have finished runners-up to Manchester City in the Premier League despite setting a club Premier League record of wins (28) and goals scored (91).
And England star Saka said: “It’s horrible man, I’ll be honest. Finishing runners-up in two European finals for England and runners-up twice in the Premier League with Arsenal. It is that extra fuel for me, that extra motivation for me. I definitely want to get it over the line this season and try and lift a trophy for sure.”
The Carabao Cup quarter-final win over Crystal Palace means the Gunners are still in four competitions this season - -including the Champions League - and four-in-a-row champions City look out of the Premier League running.
“We are not scared to say we want to win,” Saka told the BBC. “We feel we are ready to compete for a trophy. This season we really want to take the next step and win something.”
Arsenal led the Premier League by eight points in April 2023 before finishing five points behind City. After 16 games this season, Arsenal’s tally of 30 is 10 less than at the same stage in 2022-23 and six worse than last year.
The first half performance against Crystal Palace without Saka and captain Martin Odegaard showed how reliant they are on their two best players. And before Gabriel Jesus’ hat-trick, the Gunners had been too dependent on setpiece goals while Arteta deploys "dark arts" on and off the pitch with his tactics and media briefings.
But Arteta, Pep Guardiola's former City assistant, has completed a cultural change at the club which was drifting after the 2018 departure of Arsene Wenger. And has a young squad with total belief in his methods.
Former Real Madrid star Odegaard, who first joined in January 2021, said: “I came here on loan and we were struggling a little bit with a lot of noise around the club and we didn’t perform as well as a club like Arsenal should, but I believed so much in the project after speaking to him and speaking to the club and seeing everything that was going on around here.
“Everyone around the team is really confident and you get that confidence from what you see here every day. He just gets everyone to work together and in the same direction, it’s unbelievable.”
After signing a new three-year contract in September - and despite the departure of sporting director Edu - Arteta has the total support of his club for his intensive management style.
Mikel Merino added: “Mikel is a coach who speaks with players every single day, there’s not a single detail in training sessions that he doesn’t take a look at.”
Myles Lewis-Skelly, the 18-year-old who joined the Arsenal Academy a decade ago, is part of the next generation of talent now in the first team along with Ethan Nwaneri. “It’s incredible, the team he has built with the coaches,” said the England youth defender. “You can just sense around the ground that the energy is always high, positive vibes.”
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