Arsenal and Mikel Arteta: Consistency is king

Against Crystal Palace, Mikel Arteta fielded an Arsenal lineup that matched the one against Manchester United, accomplishing in four games a feat it took Unai Emery over 50 to complete. Here is why that consistency is so crucial.

One of the reasons Pep Guardiola has achieved such success over his career is because the style of football he has coached is primarily unchanged from its original form. A 4-3-3 formation, he uses fast, fluid football, a goalkeeper and centre-backs with extremely good distribution, and a dynamic midfield with prolific wide attackers to accomplish a style of football that has rendered itself unbeatable over the last decade or so. Consistency is his modus operandi.

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Of course at each team he coaches, it changes a bit. He pioneered the modern tiki-taka style at Barcelona, using Andres Iniesta and Xavi as a creative double-pivot bordering the holding Sergio Busquets. He then created a destructive force with Bastian Schweinsteiger, Javi Martinez, and a lethal partnership of Franck Ribery and Arjen Robben at Bayern Munich.

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He has since moved to Manchester City, where he has two of the top creators in the world — David Silva and Kevin de Bruyne — sitting on top of a human wrecking ball in Fernandinho, or more recently Rodri. His use of personnel has evolved, but his dominance remains unchanged. His teams are the best on the planet because he takes each of them he coaches to the pinnacle of their abilities. His teams are tactically fine-tuned to the point where, no matter the odds, they simply dominate.

The same is true for Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool. His Borussia Dortmund team employed the same stifling ‘Gegenpress’ which Klopp so adores. It featured attacking full-backs overlapping central wingers. He too has a set style, and it works for him, both at Dortmund and now so brilliantly with Liverpool.

Unai Emery’s biggest issue at Arsenal, despite all of the good things he did, was a lack of consistency. He was an insatiable tinkerer, seemingly never happy with his team. They would dominate one week, and then come out with six changes the next. It ultimately led to confusion.

This inconsistency would get Emery fired. But under his successor, Mikel Arteta, a protege of Guardiola, it is a different story. The Spaniard seems to finally have something he believes in, or can at least work with: a 4-2-3-1 shape that has not changed throughout his tenure thus far, with one midfielder serving as a screen of the back four while the other acts as a pivot and an orchestrator, with a creative attacking midfielder, Mesut Ozil.

His wingers advance high and tuck in on one side, allowing for the forward movement of the full-back, while the other full-back stays slightly further back. When one advances, the central midfielder on that side slots into the wider channel vacated by the defender, creating an overload. The winger on the far side stays high and wide, drawing the defensive shape apart, opening up pockets of space for Ozil and centre-forward Alexandre Lacazette to drop into and receive the ball.

Arteta has a system that works and, for the most part, the personnel to operate it. And at the heart of it is consistency. It is the extent in his every word: his main critique of the players against Crystal Palace was their lack thereof. Here’s what he said after the match:

"“I was pleased with how we started the game, with the way we dominated the first half. We saw things that we’d worked on in training and the way they executed them was good. But obviously after the break we knew they were going to push, they had more bodies forward, they put us under pressure more. We started to give bad free-kicks away and that’s something that we have to avoid. Then we switched off for the goal. We completely switched off and allowed them to put the cross in. We turned and conceded the deflection, and I was very disappointed with that. After that, I must say that we reacted really well again after conceding the goal. After Auba’s red card, we reacted even better in my opinion.”"

He expressed his disappointment with Arsenal’s lack of consistency. End of story. He identified the phases of the game, what he liked and didn’t like. But he chose to focus on the inconsistency of his team as the problem. For Arteta, like Guardiola, he demands that his team executes as they should in each and every moment.

Arteta knows what he wants. And that is more crucial than any early success. He has a vision and he wants to implant it on Arsenal. And for now, that is all that matters.