Mikel Arteta: ‘I don’t ask for people to like me or love me. It is who I am’

Mikel Arteta is extremely intense. That much becomes pretty clear, pretty quickly during the early episodes of All or Nothing: Arsenal – Amazon’s fly‑on‑the-wall documentary of the club’s 2021‑22 season. His team talks are life and death: opponents are there to be killed, expletives screeched. “Whatever happens I don’t want one fucking player complaining, one fucking player walking,” he demands from the Emirates Stadium changing room at half‑time, before sending the team back out to face Chelsea.

His intensity doesn’t let up as I sit opposite him, on a picnic bench outside Arsenal’s London Colney training centre, before the documentary’s release. “It’s who I am,” Arteta says, as he dispatches my questions with a ruthless efficiency and the unfaltering stare of a hawk studying its prey.

“The passion that I feel for this game, for this club, is what drives that emotion and that level of participation and that desire and hunger to be the best and improve at all times.”

The 40-year-old Arteta is the linchpin of Amazon’s latest reality‑documentary series. Others drift in and out with single‑episode arcs but his narrative presents the clearest through-line: can the league’s youngest manager lead its youngest team from rock bottom to improbable heights?

The answer: sort of.

After losing the first three games, Arsenal finished fifth, in the Europa League places, higher than the eighth of the previous two seasons, but they did so after giving up a commanding position for the much-coveted fourth Champions League place to Tottenham. Most Arsenal fans (of which I am one) would agree the season represented steady progress on and off the pitch, if not a resounding triumph. As for the manager, he silenced many of his critics.

“I don’t