When Mikel Arteta joined Arsenal, they were well outside the game’s elite, but he has since turned them into one of the best teams on the planet.
To say Arsenal have come a long way in the six and a half years since Mikel Arteta was appointed as manager is about as gross an understatement as they come.
The same can be said of Arteta himself, too. He has improved immeasurably as a manager, as a motivator, as a figurehead who says all the right things, and he has now proved beyond any doubt that he deserves the respect any other title-winning manager is given.
The truth is, though, throughout his time at Arsenal, he has been something of a lightning rod for ridicule and while much of that has been unfair, it’s also the case that he hasn’t always helped himself.
When your team is winning, you can get away with saying just about anything, but when things weren’t going so well on the pitch, as was the case for much of his early reign, rivals jumped at every opportunity to put him down. And he gave them a fair few.
There was the sketch he drew of a heart and a brain holding hands, captured on Amazon’s All or Nothing series.
There was the time, also filmed in that documentary, when he chose to prepare his players for a testing trip to Anfield by blasting out You’ll Never Walk Alone at full volume during training.
There was the time that Arsenal put in 33 crosses in a December 2020 defeat to Wolves, and Arteta said afterwards, “I’m telling you that if we do that more consistently, we’re going to score more goals. If we put the bodies we had in certain moments in the box, it’s maths, pure maths and it will happen.” Arsenal lost three of their next four games, including a 1-0 home defeat to Burnley.
Most prominently, and most regularly resurfaced by his detractors, was his early insistence to “trust the process” in the face of disappointing results.
But finally, with the Premier League title that was confirmed when Manchester City drew at Bournemouth on Tuesday night, he was vindicated irrevocably.
Everything Arteta has ever done since he took over has been proven totally, utterly worthwhile.
More on Arsenal’s title win
The job he has done is up there with the very best by any manager in Premier League history. Arsenal’s story isn’t exactly one of some plucky underdog rising through the ranks against all odds – Arteta has had vast financial backing to get the job done at one of the Premier League’s biggest clubs – but he has also faced extreme adversity both on and off the pitch, and he has nevertheless turned Arsenal into one of the best teams in the world, when they were a million miles from that when he took over.
He was appointed on 22 December 2019, with Arsenal reeling from a dreadful start to the 2019-20 season under Unai Emery. The squad was low on quality, poorly built in terms of balance, and results were dire. They had won just five of their 18 Premier League games so far that season and were way down in 11th place in the table.
Premier League table when Arteta took over
They were way off where Arsenal will have considered their rightful place in the footballing hierarchy, playing a third successive season in the Europa League and without a trophy other than the FA Cup or Community Shield in 15 years. The Emirates Stadium wasn’t a nice place to be; just a few weeks before Arteta arrived, Granit Xhaka was booed off the pitch by the home fans. The disconnect between the club and the fanbase was as big as it has ever been.
On the pitch, Arsenal had only recently sunk to their lowest ebb in recent times. According to the Opta Power Rankings, which rate thousands of teams worldwide on the same scale, Arsenal dropped to 27th on 30 December 2019 – their lowest position at any time since 2010, just a week after Arteta had joined. They had spent the vast majority of the previous decade in the world’s top 20, but when Arteta arrived, they were well outside it.
Their improvement – and simultaneous rise up the Power Rankings – has been far from linear.
After a first year which included a morale-boosting FA Cup victory, but a poor eighth-place league finish, Arsenal again sunk to 26th place in the rankings.
In his second season, Arsenal again finished eighth. They were the club’s lowest two league finishes since 1994-95.
Arsenal power ranking since 2010
Danny Dinsdale / Data Scientist
An improvement in their third season came but they still missed out on Champions League football – painfully, to north London rivals Spurs – after finishing fifth. There had been progress, but it is fair to say that there was far from universal belief that the club should indeed “trust the process” with Arteta. They were still, at that stage, behind their closest rivals.
The club deserve credit for sticking by him, though, because their faith was soon to be repaid.
Few would have foreseen the unlikely events of 2022-23, when Arsenal made a shock run for the title, spending 248 days top of the table, but ultimately succumbing to Manchester City. It was a record for a team that didn’t win the title.
248 – Arsenal led the Premier League table for 248 days in 2022-23, the most for a team who failed to win the title in English top-flight history. Agonising. pic.twitter.com/KR1E2DgjNS
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) May 20, 2023
Plenty of pretenders have come along before, surprised everyone with one good season, and swiftly disappeared into history. It would have been understandable had Arsenal been so heartbroken by their late stumble, having been top of the league as late as 2 May, that they could not go again the following year.
But Arteta saw the opportunity his team had. He knew the foundations were there and, with the backing of the club, doubled down on what he was doing. They went big that summer with, among others, the transformative signing of Declan Rice, who has since developed into a Ballon d’Or contender.
Arteta has sought over the years to maximise the potential of the squad with a level of attention to detail that has at times appeared overbearing, too controlling, even, but now looks nothing short of masterful. He has overseen small yet noteworthy changes like making the away dressing room at the Emirates less hospitable, and has ensured the club works closely with fan groups to improve the atmosphere at the stadium. All the little changes have combined to help contribute to making Arsenal the best team in the Premier League.
There were three consecutive second-place finishes from 2022-23 to 2024-25 – just the second time ever a team has finished as runners-up for three seasons in a row, after Arsenal between 1999-2000 and 2001-02. As late as the summer of 2025, there were still those who doubted that Arteta would ever be able to get them over the line. “Second again,” was the mocking chant from opposition supporters. Again, though, Arteta persisted, and the club did, too.
He addressed issues that he saw as fundamental to the team’s inability to last the distance, most notably by improving the back-up players he had in the squad with the signings of the likes of Cristhian Mosquera, Piero Hincapié and Noni Madueke. That was when he finally turned this squad into title-winners, even if his hard work had started long before that.
On the pitch, he had turned Arsenal into the best defensive unit the Premier League had seen in years. There were legitimate comparisons being made with José Mourinho’s Chelsea, and an early suggestion this season that Arsenal might challenge their record for 15 goals conceded in a season. They ultimately fell way short of that, but in conceding only 26 goals (so far) this season, they have been exceptional at the back.
There has been the much-discussed set-piece proficiency, with Arsenal breaking the Premier League record for goals scored from corners (18) this term, and unrivalled squad depth, with substitutes providing more goals and assists for Arsenal than any other team in the top flight this season (22).
They have outrun their opponents in 35 of their 37 games so far this season, and that may well be the statistic that pleases Arteta the most, because it is the best indication there is that the players have fully bought into what he wants.
Arsenal running vs opponents - each Premier League game 2025-26
For all of the outside noise around Arteta, others willing him to fail and using every quirk of his to put him down, the players are, quite rightly, fully on board. As a result, Arsenal have been turned into one of the very best teams in the world. They have spent most of 2026 at the top of the Opta Power Rankings for the first time since the ranking system was created in 2010, only toppled in recent weeks by Bayern Munich.
It means they go into the Champions League final as the better team – according to the model – than European champions Paris Saint-Germain, and therefore as favourites.
It is a set of circumstances unthinkable only a few years ago, and while Arteta didn’t do this all alone, he is unquestionably responsible for their remarkable rise.
Staying up there alongside the very best and continuing to win trophies for years to come will be the task at hand over the next few years, but Arteta has shown with his meticulous work over the last seven seasons that he’ll have Arsenal more than ready for the challenge.
Premier League Stats Opta
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