Mikel Arteta Challenges Arsenal to Defend Premier League Title
Mikel Arteta has thrown down an early-season challenge to his Arsenal players, demanding they show the hunger to defend their Premier League crown – and making it clear that Myles Lewis-Skelly will not be sacrificed to fund it.
Arsenal open their title defence at home to Coventry on Friday night, chasing a piece of history. They have not successfully retained the league since the 1930s. This group now carries that weight.
The numbers point one way. Arteta’s side have won 17 of their last 18 league games against promoted teams. No newly promoted side has left the Emirates with three points since November 2010 – a run stretching 45 matches.
Yet Arteta is treating this as something very different.
“We need to breathe and we need to take this organically because it’s going to be a long marathon,” he said on the eve of the season.
The message is clear: enjoy the Community Shield win over Manchester City, then move on. Fast.
“What we need to show is that desire and ambition to be better than what we were last season, a month ago, or a week ago when we played Man City,” he continued. “We have the ability to improve, to evolve, and that’s what I sense and I feel around the club and especially around the players.”
The tone is not of a champion basking in what has gone before. It is of a coach pushing a group that has already gone deep into the red to go again.
Asked whether Arsenal now carry a target on their backs as defending champions, Arteta pushed away any sense of entitlement.
“Today, no, because we start from scratch and we’re going to have to prove we have the level to go back to that position again,” he said. The league table, for now, is blank. Reputation counts for nothing.
But Arteta did not hide what he wants. “I think that happened in the last three seasons – at some point we were first, at some point we were chasing it, and you never know what’s better. You give me the choice, I want to be first, I want to be hunted, and I want to be in control of our future, rather than depending on somebody else.”
He wants Arsenal at the front of the pack, not in the slipstream.
Off the pitch, the club’s summer has been shaped by the £75m signing of Bruno Guimarães from Newcastle, a statement deal that has inevitably tightened the financial margins elsewhere. It is understood that academy midfielder Myles Lewis-Skelly was offered to Manchester United and Chelsea earlier in the window as Arsenal explored ways to balance the books.
The 19-year-old has not exactly shrunk under the spotlight. He was outstanding in midfield against City in Cardiff on Sunday and started the Champions League final last season against Paris Saint-Germain. Performances like that tend to attract suitors – and questions.
Arteta shut that conversation down.
He is “100%” confident Lewis-Skelly will remain an Arsenal player this window, and spoke with unusual warmth about what the teenager represents.
“The players that have been raised in our system, and they feel generally that love and that connection with the club, bring something else, there’s no question about that,” he said. “We need to look after them in a really special way because they bring value that is very difficult to find. That’s why, when we can, we want to protect those assets as much as possible, develop them and make them extremely important for the club.”
For all the big-money signings and the pressure of a title defence, that last line lingers. Arsenal want to be hunted at the top of the table – but not at the expense of the homegrown core they believe can keep them there.
