On Wednesday afternoon Arsenal’s players will hold their team meeting at one of London’s airports, fly to the north-west, board two buses while maintaining distance from each other and file into an echoey Etihad Stadium. They will get changed in several different rooms and there will be little of the usual ceremony surrounding a Premier League fixture.
The “new normal” discourages overnight stays, frowns upon pre-match strolls and has no time for the presence of hangers-on around the players’ area. But it desperately needs to bring something more constructive for Mikel Arteta, who knows a continuation of existing ways may be fatal to the ambitions outlined upon his appointment in December.
The old way was, at venues like this, one of near-perpetual disappointment. Arsenal have not won at a “big six” club in the league since January 2015, when Santi Cazorla and Olivier Giroud felled a City side yet to be revolutionised by the influences of Pep Guardiola and, indeed, Arteta. It is a diabolical record but such an uncertain time brings opportunities for whoever can adapt the most nimbly.
“We have to change that straightaway,” Arteta said on Monday. “The mentality should be to be in those grounds just to win. That’s how we’ll travel to Manchester.”
It was exactly the line anyone would expect, but Arsenal have scant margin for error and the added urgency was clear. Victory would suggest Project Restart might, for Arteta and his charges, constitute project reset: it would accelerate the momentum that had slowly built before the shutdown and transform their prospects of a serious Champions League push. Anything else will surely reduce them to the scrap for Europa League spots and the same old neuroses will keep rumbling on.
Those doubts have been magnified, more than for any other top-half club, by the Covid-19 crisis. Arsenal could already ill afford a season without any kind of European football and they now have been stripped indefinitely of a matchday revenue that generates 24.3% of their turnover. Tottenham and Manchester United, both at 17.7%, are the only clubs to come remotely close on that count. In that context it was eye-opening to hear Arteta openly admit to the added burden he and his players must carry.
“The fact we’ve not been in the Champions League for the past three seasons has put an enormous amount of pressure on the club in financial terms,” he said. “We know our responsibility and the aims, and how much that would relax the financial situation we are in.”
Is it an exaggeration to say Arsenal’s prospects of remaining among the Premier League’s elite hinge on how they meet the challenge? Should they make the top four – or five if City lose their battle with Cas – then Arteta will be able to pursue interest in top-class talents such as Atlético Madrid’s Thomas Partey and the Red Bull Salzburg prodigy Dominik Szoboszlai. He would have hard evidence, not to mention cash, to persuade Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to finish his top-level career at Arsenal and the vultures hovering around Bukayo Saka would more easily be warded off with a new deal. While Chelsea, the team they must chase down for fourth place, spend £85m on Hakim Ziyech and Timo Werner, Arsenal risk quickly being left behind.
“We haven’t been able to achieve the goals we wanted in the last three years and there is a reason behind it,” Arteta said. “If we stand still that gap will become bigger and bigger. I haven’t come here to accept that. The challenge for us is to improve the players we already have, and find ways to improve the squad in the right positions to give us the best possible chance to compete at that level. It’s getting higher and higher every year.”
Aubameyang’s situation is widely viewed as the bellwether for Arsenal’s prospects, and for their standing among leading players. But the speed with which they can persuade Saka to commit beyond next season seems more important. Losing such a rare academy-grown talent would be a disastrously bad look and send out the message that, if Arsenal are indeed forced to lean on their youth players as a substitute for spending, their better products have a swifter pathway to the top elsewhere. But keeping Saka and dovetailing him in 2020-21 with Gabriel Martinelli, another exceptional youngster, and the newly arriving William Saliba would ensure they maintain a core of first-rate prospects who look capable of delivering now, too.
So Arteta is correct that the pressure is on and, in the Premier League era, it has probably never been higher. Coronavirus has meant Arsenal’s biggest problems, on and off the pitch, must now be faced down over a vanishingly small window this summer and the days when, back in March, the main storyline around a visit to the Etihad Stadium was the reunion between Arteta and Guardiola could hardly seem further away. Guardiola has his own reasons to fear what next season brings but, for Arteta, it begins a 10-game walk along a knife edge.
“We know what we have to do to improve the team,” he said. “Whether we’ll be able to the way we want will be a different story. My focus right now is just to … get the result we need to give us the best possible chance to get into Europe and convince the players this is the right environment for them.” Putting their barren run to bed at City might mean they start to convince themselves.