Mikel Arteta: the Arsenal manager who won England and lost Budapest

Mikel Arteta

Photo: Prime Video AU & NZ / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 26, 1982 San Sebastián
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Premier League 2025 · FA Cup ×2 · Scottish Premiership 2002 · UEFA Intertoto Cup · Scottish Championship · League Cup ×2
Individual awards	Premier League Manager of the Season · FA Community Shield

The worst night of Mikel Arteta’s best season ended with Gabriel Magalhães walking back from the penalty spot in Budapest. Arsenal’s fifth kick had missed, Paris Saint-Germain kept the Champions League, and the manager who had just ended the club’s long wait for an English title left the Puskás Aréna as the losing finalist in the one competition Arsenal have never won. Less than two weeks earlier he had been watching a screen at the London Colney training ground as Bournemouth held Manchester City to a draw and handed his team the Premier League. Both results belong to the same man, and together they explain where he stands now: the method he spent years asking Arsenal to believe in has been proved in England, and it has not yet been proved in Europe.

For a long time the story around Arteta was the opposite one. He was the coach who built beautiful, controlled teams that finished second. The title settled that part of the argument. It did not settle the rest, and he knows it.

The path starts on one street in San Sebastián. Arteta was born in the Basque city in March 1982 and grew up in the Antiguo district, on the same street as Xabi Alonso, the friend with whom he spent childhood afternoons trading tricks on the beach and weekends playing for Antiguoko, the amateur youth club that also shaped Andoni Iraola. At 15 he left for Barcelona and La Masia, the academy that was then producing the passing midfielders who would later win everything with Spain. Arteta shared their style but not their route into the national team: he played for Spain at youth level and never won a senior cap, a gap that says more about the depth of that generation than about his range.

Barcelona loaned him to Paris Saint-Germain, where he won the Intertoto Cup, and then sold him to Rangers, where he won the Scottish league and League Cup in his first season in Glasgow. A homecoming at Real Sociedad did not work. In January 2005 he joined Everton, first on loan and then permanently, and that is where English football got to know him: a small, precise midfielder who set the tempo and was twice voted the club’s player of the season.

Arsenal signed him on deadline day in August 2011. He was never the most gifted player in the squad, but he became its captain, won the FA Cup twice as a player and retired in 2016 with a clear idea of what he wanted to do next. He went straight to Manchester City as an assistant to Pep Guardiola. In three seasons there he helped win two Premier League titles, an FA Cup and two League Cups, and absorbed the positional ideas that would define his own teams.

Arsenal brought him back as head coach in December 2019. Three months later, in March 2020, he became the first Premier League manager to test positive for Covid-19, the case that helped push the league into suspension. When football returned, his side beat Chelsea in the FA Cup final, and Arteta became the first person to win that trophy as both Arsenal captain and Arsenal manager. The seasons that followed were harder. An eighth-place finish left the club out of Europe, and the public faith he asked for sounded, to many supporters, like a slogan. Amazon‘s documentary series All or Nothing: Arsenal put his dressing-room speeches on screen and gave both his admirers and his mockers plenty of material.

Then came the near misses, and they are the part of his record his critics still reach for. In 2022-23 Arsenal led the table for most of the season and finished second on 84 points, five behind City. A year later they reached 89 points and still lost the title by two. The following season they were second again, behind Liverpool, and went out of the Champions League in the semi-finals to PSG. Across those seasons the charges hardened: his teams leaned too heavily on set pieces, and control turned into caution in the biggest games. His outburst at the officiating after a defeat at Newcastle in November 2023 added a touchline temper to the file. Part of that criticism was fair, though it rarely measured how far the club had come from an eighth-place team.

The 2025-26 season answered the loudest version of it. After a summer that brought Martín Zubimendi from Real Sociedad, Viktor Gyökeres from Sporting CP and Eberechi Eze from Crystal Palace, Arsenal finished with 85 points, seven clear of City. The title was confirmed on 19 May 2026, when City drew 1-1 at Bournemouth, and the trophy was lifted after a 2-1 win at Crystal Palace on the final day. It was Arsenal’s first league title since the unbeaten side of 2003-04, and Arteta was named Premier League Manager of the Season.

The same season also contained two finals he lost. City beat Arsenal 2-0 in the League Cup final in March, and on 30 May PSG came back from Kai Havertz’s fifth-minute goal to draw 1-1 and win the shootout 4-3. The title changed how Arteta is judged; Budapest set the terms of the next judgment.

The new season began as if nothing had been lost. Arsenal beat City 3-0 in the Community Shield in Cardiff in August and won seven straight matches in all competitions before a 3-0 defeat at Brighton on 19 September. Guardiola’s departure from City has left Arteta as the longest-serving manager in the Premier League, and his childhood friend Alonso is now across London at Chelsea. In the week after the Brighton defeat, Arteta agreed terms on a new long-term contract, reported to run until 2030, replacing a deal that was due to expire in 2027.

Away from the club he keeps a low profile. He is married to the actress Lorena Bernal, and the couple have three sons.

Arsenal return from the international break against Leeds United on 10 October. The league title is on the wall now. The Champions League, the trophy that slipped away on a single penalty in Budapest, is the one that will decide how the Arteta years are remembered.

Tags: sports, athletes, Premier League, soccer, Arsenal, Xabi Alonso, UEFA Champions League, football managers, pep guardiola, Mikel Arteta