Arteta reveals he sabotaged Arsenal's pre-season plans to prepare for travel chaos

Mikel Arteta deliberately sabotaged Arsenal’s pre-season preparations — delaying meals, rerouting team buses, and engineering overcrowded hotels — to ensure his squad would not panic when genuine disruption arrived. It did exactly that on Tuesday, when a UK-wide air traffic control failure delayed Arsenal’s flight to Naples by several hours ahead of their Champions League fixture against Napoli, forcing Arteta’s pre-match press conference to be cancelled.

Rather than treating the chaos as a setback, Arteta framed it as a familiar test. “I love those challenges,” he said. “I tried to create them in pre-season. So when they happen, we know how to experience them and we already know. So we get to the stadium very late, we change the routine so the players have to do something else.”

The Arsenal manager explained that the philosophy behind the approach is to eliminate surprise and stress on matchdays. Among the scenarios he has engineered are dressing rooms kept deliberately too hot, late-arriving team buses, sudden changes to the route to a stadium, and hotels where there were not enough beds for the travelling party.

“When it happens — and it can, the flight can be cancelled or the train is delayed, there is so much traffic — I don’t want the players and staff panicking,” Arteta said. “When that happens, they have to adapt to it. Ok, we have two or three hours on the plane — can we use them? Play together, spend some time together, sleep. But certainly don’t complain or use it as an excuse because it’s not helpful at all.”

The wider air traffic control failure caused widespread disruption across the UK on Tuesday, affecting thousands of flights. Arsenal were among the high-profile parties caught up in the technical breakdown, though Arteta’s pre-planned resilience framework meant the squad arrived in Naples having already rehearsed exactly this kind of scenario.

“We’ve done many things,” Arteta added. “We’re going to have to adapt to different contexts. And we try to anticipate this and adapt to difficult conditions. When there’s no element of surprise or stress on a matchday, I think it’s important.”