Is the 18 year long wait finally over? Will the Gunners finally win the title this season in the Premier League? Probably not, but for Arsenal coach Mikel Arteta, that’s not so important (kind of). Make no mistake, the Spaniard is hungry for trophies and is surely not satisfied with only one FA Cup in his three years of management, but he is more concerned about the club as a whole. That is – club first, trophies later. The club was in decline after Arsen Wenger closed the door at the Emirates and the Unai Emery project failed.Valverde is Real’s star now, but in 2014 he trained with ArsenalThe Gunners made a huge risk of bringing the unexperienced then 37-year old Manchester City’s assistant coach to a club which was in disarray, but that rookie coach was former Arsenal player and he understood the task and finally, after three turbulent years, the Gunners are in a good place. And that’s priceless for the former Arsenal player, who thinks that bringing the club back to it’s glory days is better than winning trophies. “I mean, if it’s winning titles or is bringing our club together, for me, bringing the club together is much more powerful. We have a club that was in a difficult state, with a lot of cracks with a lot of division. When people who have been here for 30 years who are emotionally attached to the club come to me and say: ‘Listen, I’ve never seen this before. I never felt that unity across the club. I never felt that unity. With our supporters. Everything is sold out. We are selling more shows than ever. We don’t have tickets. They really feel connected to what we are doing. The other thing is when I go to the dressing room when I walk around the building, and I see there’s really a sense of family and people who work for Arsenal describe it as a sense of family, what it means for them to work for the club, to participate in this journey together” said Arteta.’With modern day managers you have no say, unlike with Wenger’The Spaniard was an assistant coach to Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, before deciding to ‘bite the bullet’ and take over struggling Arsenal. But those years of working alongside the Spanish tactician were extremely valuable, as his fellow countryman explained. “The greatest thing with Pep was that I was able to see and feel what the role as a football manager meant. Working in another office and looking through the window or trying to read what he was feeling. He gave me the opportunity to get an inside view and really verbalise how he was feeling, fears that he had, the reason why he was doing it (his role), the periods that he had difficulties, or he had good moments. He really deeply shared his emotions with me and that was an incredible lesson. Obviously, we worked together before, but he did it in a way that transformed my way of understanding the profession”. ##NAJAVA_MECA_6698128##
