Mikel Arteta Tactics Explained
Mikel Arteta was still in his mid-thirties when he first started to gain serious respect in coaching circles. After retiring as a player, he took a job alongside Pep Guardiola as an assistant coach at Manchester City and rapidly started absorbing information from the influential Catalan head coach.
In his second season at City, Arteta played a key role in helping the East Manchester team become the first side in Premier League history to finish with 100 points, in the famous 2017/18 'Centurions' campaign. And after continuing to impress at the Etihad, he was ultimately offered the top job at Arsenal in 2019, following the departure of Unai Emery.
Since then, Mikel Arteta has gone on to become one of the most respected coaches in world football (and one of the best-paid as well). While he has undoubtedly been heavily influenced by his mentor Guardiola over the years, the younger coach has also gone on to develop his own unique style of play in the years since he took over at the Emirates.
In this article, we'll explore the tactics Mikel Arteta employs at Arsenal and examine the strengths and weaknesses of his chosen style of play.
Mikel Arteta Tactics Explained: What System Does Arteta Play?
Arteta's style of play has evolved a lot over the last few years. After all, he's still a young coach; the Spaniard was just 37 when he joined the Gunners, and at the time of writing, only three Premier League managers are younger than him.
In his early days at Arsenal, it was clear that Arteta was a committed Guardiola disciple; he was committed to keeping hold of possession as much as possible, and preventing the opponent from causing problems by pressing high, suffocating them, and keeping them camped within their own half.
Arteta has consistently utilised a 4-3-3 shape (also Guardiola's favoured formation), with centre-backs capable of progressing the ball from the back, full-backs that look to get forward and offer width, highly technical central midfielders, and a fluid front line capable of pressing aggressively as a unit and causing key turnovers.
He's deployed inverted full-backs such as Oleksandr Zinchenko, creating overloads in central areas by giving these wide defenders license to roam into the middle of the pitch and combine with midfielders.
These are all ideas that Guardiola has also employed at Manchester City, but as time has gone on, Arteta has edged further away from his mentor in other ways.
A crucial reason for this is that while Guardiola has always had an incredible array of talent to draw on — allowing him to consistently break teams down even with a second-string line-up — Arteta realised pretty early on that he didn't have quite the same level of squad at his disposal.
At the start of the 2020/21 season, he knew he needed to solidify the club's defence, and the subsequent addition of Gabriel and William Saliba at the heart of the back line has made a huge difference to Arsenal's defensive performances in the seasons since.
But even then, Arsenal's lack of squad depth, resilience, and title race staying power meant that they proved slightly toothless towards the end of the 2022/23 season, when they'd mounted their first serious title challenge under Arteta.
The head coach decided that the answer was to double down on defensive solidity; players like Declan Rice, Jurrien Timber, and David Raya were brought in, and an increased emphasis on organised, physical set-piece play, and tougher, more disciplined performances started to become visible.
According to Tifo, the team "diverged from Guardiola's tactical blueprint [in 2022/23]. Where their ball progression numbers had jumped up the previous season, they now started to creep back down.
Arteta appeared to be questioning one of Guardiola's central ideas: was it really necessary for elite sides to possess the ball as much as possible to win games?"
The answer to that question has been clear to see: in the last two years, in key clashes at the top of the Premier League with Liverpool and Manchester City, Arsenal have been increasingly comfortable spending less time on the ball, sitting deeper and allowing their opponents to dominate possession.
While the Gunners continue to dictate play against lesser sides, in general they've become more cautious and have made up for this less swashbuckling style by boosting their use of set pieces as an attacking tool.
And despite some losses, it has generally been effective, with Arsenal unbeaten in the Premier League against Manchester City and Liverpool in both 2023/24 and 2024/25.
The Strengths of Arteta's Style of Play
The increased emphasis Arteta has placed on defensive solidity in recent years has made Arsenal much harder to beat, and in 2024/25, they had the best defensive record in the English top flight, conceding just 34 goals.
This was the second year running that they had achieved that feat: the previous season, the Gunners conceded only 29 goals all campaign, and their ability to consistently secure clean sheets helped them accumulate a total of 89 points (just two points off champions Manchester City).
This tweak hasn't come at the expense of exciting attacking play; Arsenal still press opponents high up the pitch and are extremely good at winning turnovers in advantageous positions.
Their extremely structured, coordinated press allows them to strangle the opposition, stop them from building out from the back, and subsequently create dangerous chances.
In 2024/25, only Bournemouth recorded more high turnovers (337) than Arsenal (335), while the Gunners were also in the top three when it came to PPDA (passes per defensive action), a metric used to show the intensity of a press.
By being this aggressive and front-footed, Arsenal have been able to consistently suffocate their opposition and keep the pressure on them for sustained periods of time, which inevitably leads to defensive errors, chances, and ultimately goals.
While Arsenal are highly structured in the way they press teams, when it comes to playing out from the back, they like to build in different ways. David Raya's excellent kicking ability means they will regularly pick out a long pass to a winger or forward, bypassing the midfield and setting themselves on an attack with speed and efficiency.
This is a useful tool, but not one that they overuse; last season, Arsenal's long pass rate of 10.4% was the second-lowest in the league, reflecting the fact that they typically want to build possession from deep with the two centre-backs splitting and the full-backs combining with the central midfielders to form a unit that offers a variety of passing lanes.
This variety of build-up options makes Arteta's team unpredictable and therefore more difficult to defend against. He adds to this by creating structured positional fluidity, for example, asking his left-back to occupy an inverted full-back role, drifting into central midfield, and creating numerical advantages that allow them to overwhelm the opposition.
In turn, these overloads allow more creative midfielders like Martin Odegaard or Eberechi Eze to receive the ball in the half-spaces and drive forward to create chances.
A mixture of coordinated positional play, excellent technical ability, and organised defensive solidity — plus a knack for scoring from set pieces, with Arsenal regularly topping charts in terms of goals from corners — has allowed Arteta to consistently challenge at the very top of the Premier League in recent seasons.
However, there are some disadvantages to the way his team plays.
The Weaknesses of Arteta's Style of Play
Arsenal may be good at winning the ball in dangerous areas of the pitch, but they haven't always been able to convert these high turnovers into high-quality chances over the last few seasons.
While the Gunners have scored plenty of goals under Mikel Arteta, they sometimes rely on extremely impressive low xG chances (like screamers from outside the box), and in 2024/25 their total xG of 59.7 across the season was the seventh-highest in the league.
This inability to capitalise on advantageous presses is partly down to Arsenal's lack of a proven goalscoring centre-forward in recent years. Players like Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havertz have at times performed to a very high standard, but they are not natural goal scorers in the way that someone like Erling Haaland is.
In 2024/25, not a single Arsenal player registered over 10 league goals (the first time this had happened in over a century), underlining a clear flaw in their approach.
The signing of prolific Swedish striker Viktor Gyokeres was designed to address that problem, and as the 2025/26 season progresses, supporters will be hoping Arsenal's lack of clinical attacking play will be addressed.
More broadly, some critics have argued that Arteta's approach to attacking is too controlled, with Alex Keble arguing that "[his] tactical shift towards control has made Arsenal a little predictable this season, and the resulting low blocks they face have shifted too much responsibility onto Bukayo Saka while crowding out strikers who are struggling to score."
There's that centre-forward issue again — and while Arteta has often managed to cover for his lack of striker firepower by making his team excellent at scoring goals from set pieces (with 36 goals scored from corners since the start of 2023/24, nine more than the next-highest team, Man City), if the set piece goals start to dry up, this could start to become more of an issue.
Predictability and cautiousness are the two criticisms most frequently levelled at Arteta, and his continued willingness to set up extremely defensively against title rivals means those critiques won't be stopping any time soon. That will only subside when the transformative Gunners boss finally gets the North London club their first title in over two decades.
For more information about Arsenal's corner and free kick prowess, check out our article on how the Gunners became the Premier League's most effective side from set pieces.
Author: Fred Garratt-Stanley
Lead Content Writer
Fred Garratt-Stanley is an experienced football writer and journalist, specialising in industry insights, tactical analysis, and the culture of the game. He has contributed to publications such as NME, GQ, The Quietus, and Resident Advisor. As Lead Content Writer at Jobs In Football, he focuses on providing reliable, research-driven articles to help people navigate careers in the football industry.
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