Mikel Arteta to road test Arsenal new recruits in clash with MLS All-Stars

A rather surreal contest takes place in the capital of the US on Wednesday evening.

On the one side are a composite team selected partly by referendum, partly by sports administrators and only partly by the manager, who was once the most expensive teenager in the sport.

On the other side, perhaps the most upwardly mobile club in the top tier of European football, conspicuous for their youth, and enjoying that rarity in the early weeks of the transfer window: the approval of a broad majority of their supporters for the choice of new signings and the major financial outlay made by the management.

The occasion is MLS All-Stars versus Arsenal, the first of three pre-season friendlies in the US for last season’s Premier League runners-up.

The next two – Arsenal play Manchester United on Saturday, Barcelona five days later – read more like the sorts of fixtures they are looking forward to fulfilling as they embark on a Premier League campaign as, in most minds, second favourites for the title. They also return in September to the European Champions League after a seven-year absence, but the opening US fixture has a different sort of resonance.

The MLS, US football’s top level of competition and still less than 30 years old as a professional set-up, has seldom seemed quite so boastful about its status as this week, which began with the unveiling of Lionel Messi for Inter Miami, the most stellar individual to have committed a segment of his playing career to America since Pele, in a previous incarnation of the sport in the US, in the 1970s.

Alas, Messi will not feature for the All-Stars, his debut as a US-based player being a prized event for his new club. But there will be a star involved. Wayne Rooney, formerly England’s most