Arteta aims high and looks to build on winning foundations

Morning all.

Some Wednesday bits and pieces for you, starting with Mikel Arteta’s sit down with Rog from Men in Blazers. It’s typically engaging stuff, with the manager even making quips about Win the dog is now ‘Won’ the dog. Dogs live in the moment though, so I’m sure she’ll be all right with being called Win again. Or ‘Win Again’. It’s fine, she’s a dog. We all love her.

One of the big questions about this upcoming season is how does he keep the motivation high after winning the title. It wasn’t even just the fact we won it after 22 years, it was more about how hard we had to push to go from second three times in a row to first. I think those were, if not unique, pretty exceptional circumstances for a team to win it. Of course Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal team that won the Double in 2002 did so after finishing second in 99, 00, and 01, but they had the 98 Double under their belts, and previous title winning history with some of the older players, so it wasn’t quite the same.

As ever with Arteta, he’s aiming high, saying:

We created a foundation, we won it, but now it’s something much bigger that we want to achieve as a club. Obviously the energy that everybody has, it’s like, I want to do it again, I want to go through that emotion again. It’s almost like something that gets installed as your base and it’s like, I really want to live that again.

And he was asked if he wanted to create a dynasty:

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, every staff member and ultimately from the players.

Regardless of what we haven’t yet done in the transfer market, we have to remember we’re adding to a team that was good enough to beat everyone else last season, and a club that is – right now – in a really stable place, unlike many of our potential title rivals. There are new managers at Chelsea and Liverpool (a side that have lost key players), Man Utd now have to face the challenge of playing more than 40 games in a season, and we’ve already touched on Man City this week and the challenges they face after losing Pep Guardiola and, essentially, their two most foundational players in Rodri and Bernardo Silva.

Which isn’t to suggest it’s going to be easy, just that we are well positioned to build on what we did last season as others try to play catch-up. Anyway, you can watch the whole thing below, it’s worth 15 minutes of your time, if you’re lucky enough to have that much time to spare.

—

Elsewhere, if you want to broaden your view of the other sides in the Premier League before the kick off, I really recommend Lewis Ambrose’s ‘cheat sheet’ posts on his newsletter. There’s part 1 here, and part 2 here, and assume parts 3 and 4 will follow at some point today and tomorrow- but keep an eye on the main page for the update. It gives you some insight into each team, the manager, formations, and lots more.

At the very least, it could be useful for Fantasy Football fans.

—

For stats fans, those of you who use the StatsZone app, Colm (the man behind it and an Arsenal fan!), has put together an fantastic piece of work covering Mikel Arteta’s time in charge at Arsenal. He’s called it ‘The Arteta Epic: a visual history of Arsenal’s journey from eighth to champions under Arteta‘, and it’s an incredibly in-depth look at every season with player stats, data visualisations, downloadable and printable charts, and loads more.

Check it out at TheArtetaEpic.com – and use the code ARSEBLOG50 at checkout for 50% off.

—

Speaking of Fantasy Football, we run a league every year exclusively for our Patreon members, with some big prizes on offer. You can see the details below.

As it’s more or less the eve of the new season, I have to give our Patreon a proper plug, because via the support of members/community, we’re able to do everything we do on Arseblog throughout each campaign. The main blog is free, Arseblog News is free, our in-depth coverage of Arsenal Women is free, the Arsecast, Arsecast Extra and Arsenal Women Arsecast are all free, and will always be free.

We don’t have any advertising on our site at all, neither desktop or mobile, nor on our apps for iOS or Android. It means your reading experience is unencumbered by pop-ups or video ads or things that get in the way. Bringing you the best content is our aim, and we don’t want to spoil that with anything intrusive. It also means we don’t have to go chasing clicks for ad revenue, so there’s no clickbait or ragebait or anything like that. We’re about quality, not quantity.

Of course, if you sign up to Patreon, you don’t just support what we do, you get extra stuff, including preview podcasts for almost all of our games, our Premier League round-up podcast every week ‘The 30’, Waffle podcasts, Discord chat, advanced notice for live events, Fantasy Football as I mentioned, an audio book of ‘Together: The Story of Arsenal’s Unbeaten Season’, and more.

Crucially, what you’re getting is made by real people, by Arsenal fans who love the club and the teams. We don’t use Ai to generate any of our content, everyone gets paid, and we can only do that with your support. The price is just $6 per month, plus VAT/sales tax depending on where you are, and that’s the same price it was when we launched in 2018. There’s also an annual option which gives you a 10% discount. Everything else is more expensive these days, we’re not, and on top of all that, we’ve been able to give something back, donating a total of €290,000 to various good causes since 2022, with more to come. Details on that here.

So, if all of that sounds good to you, you can sign up at patreon.com/arseblog and we’d be delighted to have you along.

Finally, if you want Arsenal updates but you don’t want to have your phone pinging all the time, we’re kicking off our WhatsApp channel again. We’ll bring you a daily round-up of the best Arseblog stories and links, as well as immediate notifications for any important breaking news (like new signings, departures, and Win the Dog related info). You can subscribe here: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaLBHpIJJhzQXcOPvW0p

Right, I’ll leave it there for this morning. We’ll have an Arsecast for you tomorrow, and on Patreon a preview pod not just looking at our game against Coventry, but at the Premier League as a whole. Lots to come, stick with us, and thank you as ever for being here.

The countdown to the new season is well and truly on now.

The post Arteta aims high and looks to build on winning foundations appeared first on Arseblog ... an Arsenal blog.