When Mikel Arteta departed Arsenal in 2016, his playing days finished and a transformative apprenticeship in coaching with Pep Guardiola around the corner, he left a note for his chief executive. One extraordinary football mind was about to up sticks, for a few years at least, but another remained within reach. Arteta knew Arsenal could not afford to let Per Mertesacker slip away. “You can’t lose this guy,” he told Ivan Gazidis. “Just put him somewhere.”
Gazidis obliged. Two years later Mertesacker, once his centre-back career had wound down, became Arsenal’s academy manager; he had been offered the role at the beginning of his final season, smoothing the transition. He was known to be methodical, organised, cut out for the kind of upstairs position that might not necessarily be gratified with immediate rewards.
Some of those fruits will be in evidence on Tuesday night at the Emirates Stadium, where Arsenal face West Ham in the FA Youth Cup final. It will be their first appearance on that stage since just before Mertesacker started in the job and, while academies do not live or die by the number of trophies in their possession, there are worse indicators of a healthy setup. In 2018, Arsenal lost against Chelsea in what was then a two-leg affair but Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe were both in their side.
“When I started I thought I’d see stuff after two years but I got rid of that notion because you have to look at a 10-year cycle in the academy,” Mertesacker says. “I’m looking at the next three years thinking: ‘This is when the real work starts.’”
If Mertesacker harboured any doubts about his long-term path everything was crystallised when, after Unai Emery was dismissed in November 2019, he was asked to assist Freddie Ljungberg in a caretaker team that had little hope of stopping a deep-set rot. “It was kind of the shock experience of my life, basically,” he says. “When I had to support [Ljungberg], that’s when I felt it was a bit overwhelming, almost coming back to my 15-year playing career. Every week something is on the line, every result you have to take. I felt that was not something I want to pursue.
“I was pretty happy to go back into, let’s say, [senior] management, where you have to find the right people to put in the right positions basically, but not lead one individual team on a weekly basis.”
The man charged with getting results out on the grass for Arsenal Under-18s is Jack Wilshere, who has made no secret of his desire to plot a long-term path in coaching. Wilshere’s job is to develop talent but Arsenal and Mertesacker are responsible for nurturing him, too. The pair played together, albeit sporadically given Wilshere’s injury frustrations, and Mertesacker admits he had shared the more widely held view that his younger colleague was not obvious management material at the time.
“I was probably thinking the same, he will not make that transition, but he proved me wrong in that sense,” he says of Wilshere, who worked with the academy in a less formal capacity last season. “I had a perception about him, playing and being super-talented but probably not fulfilling his potential because of all the injuries.
“But then with him switching it to ‘I’m committed, I’m working hard. I’m learning, I’m ready to train with the first team and coach the academy teams in the evening’, that’s where I’ve thought ‘if he can do that for half a year ...’ and he’s done that pretty consistently. I think he has shown me enough commitment and consistency to transition well.”
Mertesacker had seen how intently Wilshere, still only 31, applied himself to learning a new craft over those six months. A fellow early retiree at 33, he knew what fears would have run through his mind about retaining a future in the game. When Wilshere applied for the vacant role of youth‑team head coach last summer, stating his case to a panel that included Arteta and Edu, the German was desperate to see his protege perform.
“I was praying that Jack would turn up for the interview and be himself,” he says. “That was a moment when the truth comes. It was brilliant to see him presenting himself, what he stands for, what he wants to be like, what coach he wants to be, how he wants to play.”
There are no regrets about how things turned out although it has not all been roses: the under-18s are 10th in their 12-team league and Mertesacker admits there have been some tough conversations. But the direction of travel is positive and Mertesacker feels that, through several years of tough institutional change, Arsenal are now joined up again. He has been given a seat at the table when the club’s decision makers meet and feels trusted to shape a strategy in his own image.
It helps that Arteta, who has used five academy products during a stellar first-team season and given several more experience of the bench, takes a personal interest in that pathway. It also does little harm that the two men know each other so well: they both arrived as players on the same day, 31 August 2011, as a side that had just lost 8-2 at Old Trafford sought reinforcements with quality and backbone.
“There was an immediate feeling that he could be a captain straight away,” he says of Arteta. “When we came in, we had the feeling that we were two senior players who could step up and take responsibility. But I was always thinking short term, I was never thinking: ‘I am going to be academy manager and you are going to be the manager.’”
Mertesacker proposed Arteta as Arsène Wenger’s successor; Emery was ultimately appointed but the reunion was only delayed 18 months. Messages on desks are no longer needed to convince the hierarchy of either man’s importance to Arsenal. “It felt like the right time,” he says of Arteta’s return. “From there it has been a feeling of trust, that we both do the best for the club, and it is pretty much aligned. It is a brilliant feeling that we have around this place. It is based on the past we had together, and it is really powerful.”
