When Mikel Arteta walked off the pitch at Anfield on the evening of May 11, 2025, having just watched his Arsenal side concede the second-place trophy to Liverpool’s first-place trophy for the third consecutive season, the polite institutional verdict on his project was that he had taken Arsenal as far as a Guardiola apprentice could be expected to take them. The word that recurred in the post-season analysis was plateau. Three second-place finishes, one Carabao Cup, no Premier League title, no Champions League final. A team built in the image of the manager Arteta had spent three years coaching under, judged — fairly or otherwise — against the standard that mentor had set.
Twelve months later, the argument has aged badly. The Arsenal team that lined up at the Etihad on April 19, 2026 — depleted, missing Saka and Calafiori and Merino, beaten 2-1 by a Cherki goal and a Donnarumma error — is on the underlying evidence still the most consistent league side in the country. They are also, more interestingly, no longer recognisably a Guardiola team. They are something the football media has been slow to name, and slower still to credit Arteta for building.
This is the case that the Arteta-as-Guardiola-disciple framing has been wrong for at least eighteen months, and that what Arsenal are doing in 2025-26 is, finally, identifiably his.
Why This Evolution Matters Now
Arteta took the Arsenal job in December 2019 with a distinct CV problem: he had no head-coaching experience and three years as Guardiola’s No.2 at City. The natural assumption — institutional, journalistic, and within the Emirates dressing room itself — was that he would build a smaller, less expensive version of the team he had just left. For roughly two years he obliged. The 2019-20 Arsenal was a faithful positional-play imitation. The build-up shape was Pep’s; the inverted full-back idea was Pep’s; the obsession with rest-defence numbers and progressive carries from the centre-backs was Pep’s. The eighth-place finish in 2020-21 was, on the public record, the lowest moment of his managerial career and the moment at which the City template came under its first serious internal review.
What has happened since — and what 2025-26 has, in my reading, decisively confirmed — is that the second half of Arteta’s Arsenal project has been the gradual abandonment of orthodoxy in favour of a hybridised system that takes specific elements from Guardiola, specific elements from the Klopp-influenced gegenpressing tradition, and a third tranche that comes from somewhere else entirely: the set-piece economy, the duel-winning culture, and the structural physicality that Pep’s City have never prioritised and that Arsenal in 2025-26 prioritise more aggressively than any team in Europe.
The reason this evolution matters now is that it is the difference between a manager who has internalised one school of football and a manager who has built one. Arteta, on the evidence of the current season, is the second.
Year One: The Faithful Clone
The 2019-20 and 2020-21 Arsenal teams were, structurally, a junior-varsity Manchester City. Arteta inherited a squad that did not have the personnel for the system he wanted, and his first eighteen months were spent retrofitting players who had been signed for one football into the football he intended to play. Granit Xhaka was reconfigured as a left-sided eight rather than a defensive-mid screen. Kieran Tierney was used as the kind of overlapping inverted full-back the system required, with mixed sporting success. The centre-back partnership rotated between David Luiz, Rob Holding, Pablo Marí, and the early version of Gabriel Magalhães as Arteta searched for two players capable of progressing the ball under pressure.
The eighth-place finish in 2020-21 was the result. The system was recognisable to anybody who had watched Pep’s City. The personnel were not capable of executing it at the required level. The football media’s verdict, at the time, was that Arteta had attempted to install a top-of-table tactical system on a mid-table squad and had been found out.
That verdict was — and this is the part of the story that has dropped out of the standard retelling — substantially correct as a description of 2020-21 specifically. What it missed was the institutional learning that took place during the period of failure. Arteta’s tactical adjustments in the second half of 2020-21 and across 2021-22 represented the first substantive divergence from the Guardiola template. He stopped trying to play the City build-up with non-City personnel. He simplified the progression patterns. He introduced a stronger physical-duel emphasis in midfield that, by Pep’s standards, was almost retrograde. The fifth-place finish in 2021-22, for which Arteta was widely criticised, was on the substance the first season of the Arteta-as-his-own-coach project. Most observers missed it because the system, on first viewing, still looked Guardiola-like.
Years Two and Three: The Pragmatism Pivot
The 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons were the period in which Arteta’s Arsenal first became title-relevant, and the period in which the most distinctive element of his current system was developed. They were also the period in which the football media most aggressively misunderstood what was happening.
The label that attached to those Arsenal sides was positional play. The reality, on careful viewing, was positional play with a series of departures from positional orthodoxy that Pep’s City would not have countenanced. The first and most important of those departures was the set-piece economy. Nicolas Jover — French, German-born, and recommended to Arteta from his City days — had been hired as set-piece coach in July 2021. The decision was not initially treated as a major tactical statement. By 2022-23 it was the most distinctive element of Arsenal’s offensive game. By 2023-24 it had been weaponised into something Pep’s City had never had and, on the public record, never wanted: an offensive sub-system that produced a quarter to a third of Arsenal’s league goals from dead-ball situations.
The set-piece routines themselves, on the public-record analysis, are not simply better than the league average — they are structurally different. Jover’s sides do not run single-action corner routines. They run multi-phase choreographies in which the first delivery is often a feint, the receiving group is positioned to win second balls rather than first contacts, and the offensive unit operates as a five- or six-man cluster rather than as discrete attackers. The deliberate creation of contact and disruption in the six-yard box, the use of blocking screens that walk the line of legality, the prioritisation of second-phase chances on the edge of the area — all of these are recognisably Jover’s work, and all of them are tactical commitments that Guardiola has, on the public record, declined to make at City. Pep prefers to score from open play. Arteta has accepted that an elite team in the modern Premier League cannot afford to leave thirty per cent of the goal-scoring economy on the table, and has structured his squad accordingly.
The second pragmatism pivot was the physicality of midfield. The £105m signing of Declan Rice from West Ham in summer 2023 was the moment at which Arsenal stopped trying to play through Pep-style technical pivots and started building a midfield around duel-winning, transitional ball-carrying, and the kind of vertical aggression that Guardiola’s deeper midfielders — Rodri excepted — have rarely been asked to provide. Rice in 2023-24 was the most expensive English signing in history. He was also, on the structural reading, the player whose acquisition signalled that Arteta was no longer trying to win the league by playing better Pep-football than Pep. He was trying to win it by playing a different football altogether.
Years Four and Five: The Arteta System
What that different football looks like in 2025-26 is, on careful viewing, the most coherent answer Arteta has yet produced to the question of what his Arsenal is. The system rests on four structural commitments that have, by now, been embedded across enough match minutes to count as identity rather than experiment.
The first is the Saliba-Gabriel centre-back partnership as the platform on which everything else is built. The pairing is — and I have written this elsewhere, but it bears repeating — the best centre-back partnership in Europe. Saliba’s recovery pace and aerial dominance and Gabriel’s ball-playing range and physical presence combine into a defensive unit that is comfortable defending in a high line, comfortable defending deep, comfortable in 1v1 isolation against elite forwards, and structurally capable of progressing the ball when Arsenal need to. The team’s Expected Goals against — the lowest in the league, by some distance — is the statistical expression of what the partnership enables. Without Saliba and Gabriel, Arteta’s structural choices on the ball would not be possible. With them, he can do almost anything he wants.
The second commitment is the Saka-Ødegaard right-side combination as the team’s chief offensive geometry. The pairing has been the most productive winger-eight pairing in Premier League football for three consecutive seasons, on the published progression and chance-creation numbers, and it is the channel through which the largest share of Arsenal’s open-play attacking output continues to flow. The injuries Saka has carried this season — the Achilles problem from January, the absence through the spring run-in — have been the structural problem of Arsenal’s 2025-26, and the principal reason the title race has tightened. The team has options without him. The team’s offensive ceiling, without him, is meaningfully lower.
The third commitment, and the one I want to dwell on, is the Rice-Zubimendi double pivot and the inverted full-back structure that surrounds it. The £55m summer-2025 acquisition of Martín Zubimendi from Real Sociedad was, on first reading, the kind of squad-building decision that suggested Arteta was retreating to a more orthodox positional-play setup — a No.6 specialist alongside Rice would, the natural inference ran, free Rice to play higher and produce the kind of box-to-box numbers that his physical profile suggested were possible.
What has actually happened on the pitch is more interesting than that. Rice and Zubimendi have not settled into a clear No.6/No.8 division of labour. They have been deployed as a genuinely interchangeable double pivot in which the player who steps higher in any given phase is determined by the immediate match-state — who is closest to the ball, which half-space is open, which inverted full-back has stepped into midfield to cover. On the coaches’ analysis, the pair operates more like two roaming sixes who each know how to play the eight, rather than two specialists fixed in their positions. The implication is that Arteta has, in Zubimendi specifically, found a partner whose technical floor is high enough that Rice does not need to be the team’s defensive anchor at all times. Either of them can be the anchor. Either of them can be the carrier. The opposition doesn’t know, in any given sequence, which player is going to be where.
The inverted full-back structure that wraps around the pivot is what makes the geometry work. Jurrien Timber on the right and Riccardo Calafiori on the left — when both have been fit, which has been less often than Arteta would have liked this season — operate as half-time midfielders rather than as conventional full-backs. Calafiori, in particular, has been used in the kind of left-eight role that Pep’s John Stones-as-inverted-full-back template did not quite reach. He is not a converted centre-back deputising in midfield. He is a left-back who, on substantial percentages of Arsenal’s possession sequences, plays as the team’s primary left-sided eight, with Rice or Zubimendi sliding wider to cover the touchline. The interchangeability with Rice is the specific structural innovation. Pep’s inverted full-backs occupied a fixed midfield zone. Arteta’s inverted full-backs trade roles in real time with the central pivot, producing a midfield-three geometry that rotates rather than holds.
The fourth commitment is the directness. The summer 2025 signing of Viktor Gyökeres from Sporting was the personnel statement on which the change rests. Gyökeres is not a Guardiola-style false-nine. He is not even, on the public scouting consensus, a particularly good combination forward. He is a runner-in-behind, a peeler-off-the-shoulder, a striker whose offensive output is concentrated in the moments when the opposition’s defensive line is set fractionally too high or breaks fractionally too late. Arteta’s decision to build the 2025-26 attack around a player of that profile — rather than the more Pep-orthodox profile of Kai Havertz, who has rotated with Gyökeres rather than been replaced — has produced a specific tactical shift. Arsenal under Arteta in 2022-23 averaged some of the longest possession sequences in Europe. Arsenal in 2025-26 are, on the public-record numbers, more direct than at any point in the Arteta era. They have not become a long-ball team. They have become a team that, when the geometry permits, will play the third pass forward rather than the fifth.
What This System Is, and What It Isn’t
The temptation, with a manager whose tactical project has become this clearly his own, is to invent a label. Arteta-ball. Hybrid positionalism. Modern English-school total football. The football-media instinct on this is bad, and I want to resist it. The system Arteta has built is not a school. It is a synthesis. It takes the structural rigour of Guardiola’s positional play — the build-up patterns, the half-space occupation, the rest-defence numbers — and combines it with a Klopp-adjacent commitment to vertical transition and physical duel-winning that Pep has, on the public evidence, treated as inferior football. It takes the set-piece economy that no Guardiola team has ever prioritised and weaponises it as an offensive sub-system in its own right. It takes the inverted-full-back idea that Pep introduced to the modern game and extends it into a genuinely interchangeable midfield-three structure that Pep’s own teams have not, on the visible evidence, attempted.
What it isn’t is a Pep clone. The argument that Arteta is still building a smaller version of his mentor’s project is, on the 2025-26 viewing evidence, no longer defensible. The argument that he has built something new — and that the something new is, on the duel-winning, set-piece-driven, transition-tolerant evidence, structurally better suited to the physical demands of Premier League football than the Pep template he started from — is, in my reading, the argument the football media will be making in three years’ time and ought to be making now.
So What?
The Premier League title race in 2025-26 is, after the Etihad result, no longer in Arsenal’s hands. They may finish second again. If they do, the institutional verdict will be — predictably, and in my view wrongly — that Arteta has hit a structural ceiling and that the project requires renewal. The verdict will be wrong because the underlying numbers, as I write this on April 26 with five fixtures and a Champions League semi-final remaining, indicate an Arsenal team that has been the most consistent and structurally coherent side in the country across two full seasons and is now, depleted by an injury crisis no other elite team has had to absorb at this scale, still within striking distance of a domestic title and into the last four of Europe.
The deeper point — and the one I want this piece to land — is that the Arteta system, irrespective of whether it produces the 2025-26 trophy, is no longer a derivative project. The Arsenal of April 2026 plays football that does not look like Pep’s, does not look like Klopp’s, does not look like Wenger’s, and does not look like Mourinho’s or Tuchel’s or anybody else’s. It is its own football. Whether the Premier League rewards it with a title in 2025-26 is a separate question from whether Arteta has, after six and a half years, produced the kind of distinct managerial identity that the football-media class spent four years insisting he was incapable of producing.
He has produced it. The argument is over. The remaining question — which is the question I will be watching the closing five weekends of the league season and the Champions League semi-final to answer — is whether the system he has built is good enough, often enough, to win the trophies that the institutional class has been waiting for him to win before granting him the credit he is already, on the structural evidence, owed.
I think it is. I have been wrong about plenty before. I am willing to be wrong about this loudly. But on the viewing evidence of 2025-26 specifically, the Arteta who walked into the Emirates as Pep’s apprentice in December 2019 has, six and a half years later, walked out of his mentor’s shadow into a tactical identity of his own. The trophies, if they come, will be the institutional acknowledgement of what has been visible on the pitch for the better part of two seasons. The football itself, irrespective of the trophies, has already made the case.