Congratulations will be passing between two old friends, young for their current jobs but with a bond that goes back more than 30 years, as they ease into a fortnight’s break from the demands of elite club management. Welcome to the summit, Xabi Alonso can say to his compatriot, his fellow Basque and former schoolboy teammate, Mikel Arteta.
Both Xabi and Arteta reached rite-of-passage moments in their managerial careers at the weekend and, knowing each other as well as they do, since their childhood adventures together in San Sebastian, northern Spain, they will appreciate each other’s success.
Arteta’s Arsenal on Sunday rose to joint-top of the Premier League, a position they have held before but not by climbing such a significant rung of the ladder. By beating the reigning champions, Manchester City, Arteta has, at the very least, shifted a monkey off his back. Seven times he has taken on City as a Premier League manager. The first six of those contests were all Arsenal losses.
The same weekend, in Germany, Xabi marked 12 months in his first job as a head coach in a top division. When he started at Bayer Leverkusen, they held the penultimate spot in the Bundesliga. A year on, Leverkusen are top, with two points clearance over serial champions Bayern Munich, from whom they pickpocketed a point last month, thanks to a stoppage time goal from a substitute Exequiel Palacios.
For a coach, those sort of late gains are exhilarating, an endorsement of competitive stamina, evidence that if you can keep pace with an established champion over 90 minutes, you can believe in doing so over the course of a whole campaign. When the decisive, last-gasp hero is a player who has come off the bench, the decision-making coach is instantly awarded much of the credit.
Arteta found that as he was hailed for the combination of Arsenal players who sealed victory over City at the Emirates Stadium. The name on the scoresheet for the 1-0 victory was substitute Gabriel Martinelli; the three players directly involved in the move up to the goal were the trio Arteta had brought on in the 75th minute: Takehiro Tomiyasu, Kai Havertz and Thomas Partey.
Never mind that a fifth individual was very decisive. Martinelli’s shot took a substantial deflection off of City’s Nathan Ake on its way past goalkeeper Ederson.
But Arteta can argue you make your own luck, or that, in this fixture, Arsenal were owed some blessings. He has been managing the club for approaching four years – always, until now, on the losing side in league meetings with City. Rewind another four years and he was watching the imbalance from the opposite dugout, as assistant to Pep Guardiola at City. There Arteta had a role in overseeing six City wins out of seven Premier League encounters with Arsenal in the period between 2016 and December 2019.
Like Arteta and City, Xabi and Bayern have a recent past. The former Spain, Liverpool and Real Madrid midfielder won three Bundesliga titles with Bayern as a player. Arteta and Xabi are both ‘Guardiolistas’ to a degree that they both acknowledge. Arteta was an insistent Guardiola’s choice to be his deputy when he joined City as manager. Guardiola had made Xabi a priority signing ahead of his second season as Bayern head coach, to add authority, vision and direction to central midfield.
As coaches, they have learned from the best. But they will instinctively challenge the idea that, in the leagues of City and Bayern, of Guardiola and Thomas Tuchel, other clubs are obliged to aim only at second-best. Xabi and Arteta have brought determination, tactical imagination and a clarity to their first jobs as senior coaches. “Xabi communicates everything very well,” said the Leverkusen captain Lukas Hradecky after the weekend’s 3-0 derby win over Cologne.
To watch Leverkusen and Arsenal is to appreciate that while the Premier League club have the vastly superior budget, there is a shared emphasis in Arteta and Xabi’s teams. There’s energy and width. Alex Grimaldo, on Leverkusen’s left, and Jeremie Frimpong, on the opposite flank, are key dynamos in the Xabi machine; for Arteta, a gratifying aspect of Sunday’s close victory over City was that Arsenal achieved it without the injured Bukayo Saka, whose influence from the flank has often seemed essential. In Martinelli, Arsenal had an alternative, match-winning winger.
“The team showed a real maturity,” beamed Arteta after the beating of City. Over in Germany, Xabi was echoing that about his Leverkusen side. “The youngsters really understood what was needed." he said.
And up on a hillside overlooking the bay at San Sebastian, a small but proud football club is celebrating a notable double, appreciating how far two of the youngsters they call their own have travelled. Those who knew Arteta and Xabi as boys at the Antiguoko club always recognised their leadership potential. They see it now in a pair of precocious managers disrupting hierarchies in two of the strongest leagues in Europe.
