Mikel Arteta shares first Artetaism of the season with ‘attacking the title’ quote
Mikel Arteta has hit us with the first Artetaism of the year as he said Arsenal are not defending the Premier League, rather attacking it.
Whether the Spanish manager likes it or not, Arsenal are the defending Premier League champions but he has seemingly taken issue with that word and that mindset.
In an interview with Men in Blazers, it was put to him that Arsenal were “defending” the title, to which he replied with a big smile “attacking” it.
“Attacking! That’s where we’re going,” he said. “Now I’ve got inside an experience that I will remember the rest of my life which is sharing that with all the players, all the staff on that bus. Now we go for more and I want to create something much bigger than that.
“We created the foundation we wanted and now it’s something much bigger that we want to achieve as a club.”
Arteta is not the first non-native manager to trip over this particular English turn of phrase. Jurgen Klopp in 2020 questioned the use of the word defensive in regard to a new season.
“Somebody told me we have to defend the title, and I don’t understand that,” he said in a press conference. “Maybe I’m not smart enough, but I didn’t understand that.
“So if there’s a title out there, we obviously showed that we were able to go for it last year. We did it the year before as well.
“That doesn’t mean we will be this year because we don’t take these things for granted. But the titles out there, we attack them.”
Klopp did though fail to defend the title and now Arteta is tasked with being the first Arsenal manager to do so. Complacency is often raised as the key issue for a team retaining the Premier League title but the Arsenal boss suggested his players were the opposite.
“I think obviously the energy that everybody has is like ‘I want to do it again. I want to go through that emotion again,’ he said.
“So it’s almost like something that gets instilled in your base and I said I really want to live that again.
“We need to start from day one, and we need to realise that it’s going to be something that’s going to demand a lot from everybody. But we have the ability to do it, and we can go through that again.
“This is what we want to create right now, and it has to be the ambition, and it is the ambition from the owners of this football club, from everybody on the board, to every staff member, and ultimately from the players.
“And then you have to show that with facts and with actions. And when the staff wants to come early, the staff is putting more hours in the summer to see, ‘okay where can we go?’
