Before we face Manchester United on Saturday night in Los Angeles, Mikel Arteta held his pre-match press conference for journalists in the City of Angels.
The boss came straight from a community event that saw him link up with his LA Rams counterpart Sean McVay to oversee a coaching session for local kids that saw them learn skills in both our version and American football.
He tackled questions on Saturday’s game (get your tickets now), the significance of a win, the aims for next season and much more.
Here is everything he had to say:
on what inspires him to push for the title this season:
First of all, analyse what we did, and have a clear perspective of how we achieved what we achieved last year and why we didn’t achieve what we wanted, which was ultimately to win major trophies, and especially how close we came to becoming Premier League champions. It’s realising the things that we need to do better, and improve.
We know the margins we need to do that because at the level we are at the moment, there is a very tiny margin to improve and we are trying to have clarity on which margins those are and how we’re going to improve them. My motivation and belief is looking at those boys and how much they want it, looking around the club and the excitement that is around it, and the fact that we really want it.
on whether a win against Man Utd would be significant going into the season:
Winning always helps - it brings belief, it brings good vibes. We are playing one of the best teams in the world in one of the nicest stadiums in the world, built by our owners, so it’s a big day for us tomorrow.
on whether it’s harder to transmit his message for a third title tilt:
I think the message is very clear - we need more from everybody. That means personally I have to raise my standards and I need to bring something that I haven’t brought yet, and individually and collectively we have to do the same. And for our people, it is the same - the more they help us, the better the chance will be to win the Premier League. That’s what we want, so we need to work every day with that excitement and understanding the difficulty of it. When difficult times come, we need to be together and go through them efficiently.
on the importance of evolving his squad:
The full focus is on trying to improve these guys and get the best out of them consistently so they can perform every three days at the level that we want. We know that we have certain parts in the squad that we would like to improve, but that is dictated by the market. At the moment we already have a great squad, and and we are giving the opportunity for our young players from the academy to be with us and it's a joy to have them on tour with us.
on being able to play in front of American fans:
It’s an opportunity for us to connect with our supporters. If they’re Arsenal supporters then great, and if they are football supporters let’s get them to become Arsenal supporters. That would mean that we produced certain joy and excitement in them in the way that we play the game. That’s one of the objectives, but the main one is to win the game, that’s for sure.
on his relationship with LA Rams coach Sean McVay:
I know Sean well, we’ve met a few times and obviously we have the same ownership so that connects everybody - not only coaches but players and the organisation. There’s a lot of know-how and skills that we take and build from each other and it was great to see everybody together. It’s not common and we had the opportunity to do it and I think it’s something we can really use to benefit everyone within the organisation.
on whether pre-season allows him to go into extra details:
One of the things is adapting to new stimuli - we have a different climate, different pitches with different sizes and grass, different kinds of opponents and different stadiums. Players are going to be playing at different times, sometimes they’re going to come in in the second half, first half, 30 minutes, some of them will play 95, so all these things are really useful for us. During the season we’ll face so many different contexts and we need to be able to adapt to them and win in every context - that’s the idea.
on the commonalities he sees with himself and McVay:
That we are really young! That’s one for sure yeah? I think it’s down to the ownership, they’ve shown a lot of faith in both of us. We’ve both had some really good moments and some difficult moments in our careers and you’re going to go through that in elite sport, but they are really stable. They understand what we do and are extremely supportive in that and passionate as well. We both feel the ambition that we are here to win and we are building our teams in order to achieve that.
on what it will take to get ahead of Manchester City this season:
114 points - if we do that we will win the league for sure! This is the objective and from there let’s see what we can get, but today that has to be the target, win every single game and earn the right to win it and have the biggest probability on the opponent to win the game. When we have difficulties, we still need to be better than the opponent, so that’s the objective for the team.
on interacting with the local kids at the community event:
It’s great, I love the culture here, it’s so open, so transparent and a lot of energy in the way everyone communicates with you. You talk to the kids and some of the questions they ask are very different to what kids would ask in the UK, so it’s a great experience to nurture in that culture and get things from it. It’s something very valuable for us.
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