Student manager Mikel Arteta has lost control of the classroom

Mikel Arteta may come good but the stakes are too high for Arsenal to be his training ground.

Mikel Arteta is struggling to make himself heard in the rowdy Arsenal classroom

So seductive was the unveiling of Mikel Arteta a year ago that the doubters were immediately disarmed. To those who wondered if Arsenal’s former captain was too young, at 37, and too inexperienced to take the helm, he simply smiled his Mona Lisa smile and said such worries did not matter for as long as the players accepted his authority.

This was smoke and mirrors — it had to be because there was no track record for him to fall back on. Just his love for the club. It was all, inevitably, messianic.

Of a divided dressing room, Arteta said: “I need to understand how they’re feeling, what they’re lacking. If I get to reach that point, I can help them. Then they will trust me and then they will follow me.”

Such self-confidence is bewitching and there is no evidence to suggest the players wanted anything other than for him to succeed. Change is fun. Change brings energy.

Change can calm down an unruly classroom, but gradually the real attributes of the teacher shine through and if the man in charge is young enough to have been sitting on the other side of the desk not so long ago, to have been learning alongside a few of the pupils, then his authority can become diminished.

No club’s players have been shown more red cards in the period since Arteta’s appointment at the Emirates Stadium, with Gabriel the latest to be sent off in the draw with Southampton. It points to issues with discipline, the football equivalent of students throwing paper planes even when the headmaster enters the room.

At the beginning of last month Arteta revealed he did not like being called “boss”. Roy Keane had expressed dismay that in a post-match interview Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, the Arsenal striker, had called his manager by his first name. Arteta played it down, saying the players were free to call him what they liked, which works just fine when results are passable but may be indicative of a lack of authority when your team are drifting towards the relegation places.

Only in films starring Robin Williams does such blurring of the lines between pupil and teacher work but, even then, the ultimate outcome was tragic.

When Arsenal prised Arteta from Manchester City, the club were annoyed and felt he had been announced as the new head coach sooner than the two parties had agreed. This served Arteta very well indeed. If Pep Guardiola was unhappy to lose him then he must be a darned good coach.

Guardiola this week tried to help out, but in suggesting that Arsenal should give their manager time he served only to undermine his protege further by reminding the world that Arteta’s known strengths lie in his role as an assistant.

The City manager, speaking after his side had defeated Arsenal 4-1 in Tuesday’s Carabao Cup quarter-final, said he could not have achieved his magnificent successes at City without Arteta at his side. “It would not be possible without him,” Guardiola said. “To create something like this you need time, like I had in my first season.”

Guardiola had time, yes, but not that much, and had a phenomenal CV allied to a highly distinctive coaching style. That he would have floundered without Arteta is unlikely but it is also irrelevant, unless the younger man was really calling all the shots — which he was not.

There is a way of conducting oneself in defeat that can reassure both the board and the supporters but Arteta, because this is his first crisis, and a high-profile one, has not learnt how to exude a calm determination under fire.

As results have deteriorated, so has Arteta’s post-match demeanour. He has looked tired and haunted of late, and after shrugging and wondering out loud what could possibly be done to change the club’s fortunes, opted to go on the offensive after the weekend’s defeat by Everton, producing some statistics.

It was the mathematician’s version of Jose Mourinho’s “the best team lost” jibe after his Tottenham Hotspur side were defeated by Liverpool. Arteta declared his side had only a 3 per cent chance of losing to Burnley and a 7 per cent chance of losing to Tottenham, “and we lost them both”.

Does that not make the defeats even worse? If everything is going for you but you still lose, does that not shift the focus on to the intangibles? Where is the team cohesion, camaraderie, the will to win, to fight? It is the manager who instils these qualities.

Arteta will have watched Guardiola and his exacting approach — the Catalan’s belief that to be good is not good enough, his demand that even the most productive and feted players should improve and never coast — and seen the cult of personality at work. The players largely buy into that environment because they know what Guardiola has already achieved as a player and coach. They sign for City because they believe he can improve them as players.

At Arsenal, the players have inherited an untested manager and those who have signed for him have not done so because they believe he is among the best of coaches but because the deal — Aubameyang’s new $98m contract, aged 31; Willian’s three-year contract worth $390,000 a week, signed aged 32 — suited them rather well.

Arteta is gaining invaluable experience — you learn a lot from defeat — but there is little sign he can inspire the team to make an immediate dash for mid-table and beyond.

The Times