‘He was alive – you saw it in his eyes’: inside the years that shaped Mikel Arteta

The way Santi Cazorla tells it, rolling about laughing, Mikel Arteta may just be the worst person you could ever wish to watch a match with. Which is why he knew his friend would be a coach and why he told him to go away and become one, convinced great things were coming. “When we were injured at Arsenal, we used to meet at home for games, and he would grab the remote and pause it,” Cazorla recalls. “I would say: ‘What are you stopping it for?’ He would say: ‘No, go back, go back,’ rewind it 30 seconds, and then ask: ‘What do you see?’ I would say: ‘I see a paused screen. I don’t see anything!’”

So Arteta would explain. “‘Don’t you think this player is badly positioned? … If he goes a bit deeper, this space opens up … if the pivot goes there, this happens … that line should be deeper …’ I would look at him and think: ‘What’s with this guy?’” Cazorla continues, still cracking up. “He was a coach already. All game, every game: pausing, rewinding. The match is finished and we’re only in the 35th minute. ‘Do you see it?’ ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, now come on, press play.’ But I didn’t see it. I love football, I can watch it all day, but I don’t notice those things. Mikel does. I think it’s a gift.”

Born in Gipuzkoa, the smallest province in Spain and an outlier producing a quantity of elite managers that invites an investigation, Arteta was always a bit different; everyone says so. Which isn’t to say that those who shared his first steps saw what Cazorla did, still less the coach who leads Arsenal into the Champions League final. Fond though they are, and there is warmth in every word, most didn’t see a coach just yet, but they saw something. Not talent exactly, although that too, but something else a little deeper, lasting.

“Mikel caught your attention very young,” Jon Ayerbe says. “The word I’d use is alive; you saw it in his eyes. He grasped everything fast, had character and was so competitive. Give him the ball, he’ll find a solution. And he was a year younger than us, eh.”

“Above all, he was the most intelligent,” Álvaro Parra adds. Mikel Yanguas says: “You looked at him and thought: ‘Bloody hell, he’s got something special. If anyone makes it, it’s him.’ He had personality, ambition.” Ayerbe, Parra and Yanguas played with Arteta at Antiguoko, a youth club in San Sebastián that took on professional academies and won.

Mikel Arteta could have pursued a career in tennis if it were not for Antiguoko’s coach Roberto Montiel (pictured top left, next to Arteta).

Arteta was good enough at tennis to have pursued a different path, his father making him choose his sport, and Antiguoko’s former coach Roberto Montiel enjoys recounting an Arteta goal against Real Sociedad, all cheek and technique, that reminds him of Lionel Messi. Arteta was two-footed and tiny then, a No 10 who later became a No 4, and “a born sportsman”, Montiel says. He was dedicated and smart, too. “He was always clear he would make it and sacrificed his life for it,” Parra says. “He went to Barcelona, leaving everything behind. And later he turned down lucrative offers – Dubai, Qatar, the US – to work with Guardiola at Man City because it was the right step.”

At 14, Arteta had begun training at Athletic Club, 100km west along the AP-8. There, one of his coaches was the future Athletic, Eibar, Sevilla and Olympiakos manager José Luis Mendilibar, who was struck by this kid that never lost the ball and always played with clarity and sense. “What you could imagine, thinking about it now, was that someone with that intelligence and understanding would also develop an ability to explain it to others, so they could understand too,” Mendilibar wrote later. That sentiment is echoed by Luis Fernández, the coach who signed an 18-year-old Arteta for Paris Saint-Germain in 2001. “When you told him what you wanted, he did it first time,” Fernández says.

By then, Barcelona had shaped him too, the first formative experience away from home. “It was 1997,” Yanguas recalls. “Someone saw us representing Gipuzkoa at an Easter tournament and invited us to a trial at Barcelona. We stayed near Pedralbes and at the end they said yes to the three of us: me, Mikel and Jon Álvarez. We left that summer: 17 August, the day of San Sebastián’s fiestas, so I remember it well.”

They moved into La Masia, the traditional Catalan farmhouse alongside the Camp Nou that was Barcelona’s spiritual home and an actual home to 32 boys aged 11 to 18, three or four of whom were basketball players. Andrés Iniesta, Carles Puyol and Iván de la Peña were among them. Pepe Reina would become one of Arteta’s closest friends. Each dorm had four bunks, a couple of camp beds sometimes squeezed in too. Through the window they could see the pitch where Bobby Robson’s team trained. Well, part of it: a screen covered half.

Mikel Arteta is said to have grasped instructions quickly as a young player.

“It was just us, the cooks, the security guard and one guy overseeing everything,” says Roberto Trashorras, who became close to Arteta. “It’s totally different nowadays. We sorted things out among ourselves. Because we were alone, we looked after each other. There were no mobiles. I remember queueing at midnight to ring home from the payphone, Puyol and De la Peña ahead of me. We were teenagers, so there’d be the usual messing about: jokes, water bombs. Mikel was funny, extroverted, but we were the victims usually … until you get a bit older and it’s your turn.”

A bus took them to school – parents chose between three options – they would train and then … well, not much, Yanguas says. “We would go to [the department store] El Corte Inglés; we were from San Sebastián, a small city, and we didn’t have an El Corte Inglés there. Or we’d go to the cinema. I remember seeing Titanic with Mikel, Victor Valdés, Fernando Macedo. At weekends your parents would come.”

They were 15 and, looking back, Yanguas admits he wasn’t ready. Although that cadete (under-16) team were national champions, he returned to San Sebastián at the end of the first year. “It was hard for me,” he says. “I think about it now and I was an introvert. Mikel was different, better prepared: more outgoing, more adaptable, better at relating. Maybe inside he was struggling but we saw someone who handled it very well. On the pitch too: he would demand the ball. I thought it was natural then but I coach now and realise it’s not. No one offers, no one asks for the ball. Mikel did constantly. It’s hard to do that: ‘Give it to me, I’ll sort this.’ He was surrounded by great players but had the confidence and self assurance to do that.”

Mikel Arteta (back row, fourth from right) celebrates a title win with Barcelona teammates including Mikel Yanguas (back row, second from left). Photograph: No credit

Jofre Mateu was two years older than Arteta, with whom he would play in the B team, and had already made a first-team appearance. “Mikel used to laugh about his hair. He said he had ‘bull’s hair’: so hard and it didn’t move. But, honestly, the thing I most remember is that one day he took my car when he was learning or recently passed and crashed it into the Masia wall.” Jofre laughs. “It was three metres, impossible to crash. Impossible. And he goes: ‘Nah, nah, relax, I-don’t-know-what.’ He puts his arm on the window, looks back to reverse, but he’s putting it in first. ‘Yeah, I think you need more lessons. You can take taxis from now on.’ My car was only two months old: a VW Golf.”

Which raises an obvious question: are you stupid? “Totally,” Jofre says. But, actually, handing over the keys wasn’t a risk: if anything defined Arteta, he says, it was how sensible he was. “He wasn’t there to piss about, he was there to do the right thing,” Jofre says. “He was super-responsible, he had something.”

In fact, another scene defines Arteta better. “Thiago Motta was hot-headed and in a training session he got in a fight, which wasn’t unusual,” Jofre says. “I don’t remember who with, but it wasn’t Mikel, yet he steps in: ‘Thiago, man, you’re teammates: you can’t do this.’ I remember it because Mikel didn’t really have the ‘weight’ to do that. It would be like Marc Bernal standing up to, say, Gavi now. He didn’t do it in an ugly way, but he did it. Clearly, firmly. And we just all stopped. Like: ‘Olé tus huevos [Good on ya].’ I think that said something about him: he wasn’t the star, but he’s not going to let that happen.”

Mikel Arteta and his Antiguoko teammates on tour.

La Masia was a footballing education, entirely new. “The players who arrive are the best in their teams but Barcelona make you think about tactics, space in a way that’s not normal,” says Luis Carrión, a Barcelona B teammate. “At Antiguoko, Mikel would have had the ball all the time; here he had to wait, occupy the right space. By standing still, you see a solution, a way out. They’d explain concepts – third man, triangles, final line – but it wasn’t ‘classes’, more repetition: passing drills every day.”

Trashorras says: “Mikel was a dribbler, arriving in the area, but he learned to play one, two touches, not lose his position. One of the things that most struck me when I first got there is they would say: ‘Don’t go looking for the ball, the ball will come to you.’ ‘Yeah, but, it’s just there, I can …’ ‘No, no, no. Don’t invade someone else’s space.’ It can be hard to adapt but Mikel was sharp. It’s really, genuinely different. Pffff, it’s like a religion. And then when you leave it’s different too.”

Not that Barcelona’s creed was Arteta’s only faith. There is a simple reason why he didn’t make it in Catalonia, or two of them – Xavi Hernández and Iniesta – but there was a world out there, ideas and character shaped across four countries, experiences in Spain, France, Scotland and England. “When I became PSG coach I asked for Mikel because I watched him in the juvenil [under-19s],” Fernández says. “I followed Johan Cruyff’s ideas, the importance of the pivot, loved Pep Guardiola and wanted a player of that type.

“On the pitch you see Mikel’s intelligence, his understanding and, for sure, that comes out later when he becomes a coach. He had the perfect attitude to coach: professionalism. He was responsible, listened, learned and you didn’t need to keep telling him. He was an example for everyone. I admire him. I’m sensitive and when I see him and Gabi [Heinze], his very good friend in Paris, it makes me so happy. If you had asked me then if he would be a coach, I’d have said: ‘No.’ He wasn’t: ‘Do this, do that.’ I think he learned with Pep. I went to see him do a session and thought: ‘Bloody hell, look at Mikel.’ But it was always in him.”

It just had to come out. “He was a kid with personality: polite, very professional for his age,” Carrión says. “A coach? You never know, but he watched a lot of football. I ran into him recently and we chatted about football; it’s always football.” With time, Yanguas suggests, you learn to express, understand and analyse the spaces you saw naturally, and Arteta always saw those. Focus and passion came as standard. Jofre, asked if he saw a coach in Arteta, replies: “Zero. But if you asked me about Xavi, I would have said zero. Luis Enrique, zero. Guardiola … OK, yes. But we were kids still, teenagers at La Masia more interested in the next game, some girl or where we’re going on Saturday.” Trashorras agrees: “With Pep, you saw it; with Mikel I couldn’t claim to have done, but you can’t argue with what he’s done.” In part because Pep did see it.

And so, via Paris, Glasgow and Liverpool to Santi’s sofa in London, an offer and a new era, the other Arteta that was always inside somewhere. “We confided in each other; he was the captain, always looked after me and my family and helped so much during my injury,” Cazorla recalls. “He said: ‘What should I do, Santi? Keep playing, which I like most, or take the opportunity as Pep’s assistant?’ I love playing but there’s no better place to start coaching and I have a good relationship with him.’ I said: ‘Mikel, if that’s what moves you, go for it.’ It’s a difficult step but I was sure it would work. I would watch him pausing games and think: this guy is already a coach. I’d tell him: ‘You’re thinking beyond what a player does.’ And he would say: ‘Yeah, I see things that make me think I should be a coach. I feel that I am.’”