Mikel Arteta, it turns out, has been using a “creativity consultant” to help make Arsenal more imaginative – which, after Sunday’s win over Nottingham Forest, does raise certain obvious questions. It’s not the first time Arteta has come across like somebody who spends a lot of time on LinkedIn. From Win the Dog to the fire at the training ground to pickpockets at a team meal, he loves a gimmick and, given Arsenal are league champions, it can’t really be claimed that it doesn’t work.
From the outside, obviously, it seems absurd. But then it’s not really for us. This sort of thing always sounds ridiculous to me, but maybe journalists are never going to be willing recipients. In the almost three decades I’ve been in the industry, there’s never been enough money and never been enough time; gimmicks would always have been resented as wasting resources that could have been better spent or getting in the way of actually doing the job. I struggle to believe that’s different in most professions; the team-building aspect of the corporate awayday is surely most successfully achieved afterwards in the hotel bar.
It may be, though, that footballers are different. Dedicated as the vast majority are these days to training and self-improvement, they do have a lot of a spare time and where an all-day session in Pat Crerand’s pub or an afternoon in the bookies might have served for team bonding in the past, there probably is a space now for activities that might help convince players that they’re not just a group of random mercenaries but that they’re playing for a higher cause. And given the ends to which players go to get the best out of themselves – private chefs, bespoke gym routines psychologists etc – they probably are more open to team-building strategies than bitter and cynical journalists.
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The 20th anniversary edition of Behind the Curtain came out on August 6, with a new introduction. If you want the new material, make sure you get the version with the pink cover.
The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.
Issue Sixty-Two of The Blizzard is available here, featuring a World Cup review, Mikel Arteta, Eric Cantona, Pep Guardiola, multi-club ownership, Balkan migration, captaincy, fatigue, Nikita Simonyan, Brazil’s women’s team and Mani.
On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we consider Arsène Wenger’s arrival in English football, 30 years ago. Members can binge all episodes now, and hear this week’s Book Club episode with Simon Kuper. Join up here. Listen here.
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In that sense, Arteta fits in a great tradition of coaches who would seek advantages in unusual ways. Often, you sense, what matters is less the gimmick or the strategy itself than the belief generated that the coach, who even in the modern world of sporting directors and data, retains a magus-like quality, has access to some special powers that allow him to untap the full capacity of players.