{"id":10971,"date":"2026-05-19T22:30:34","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T22:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/?p=10971"},"modified":"2026-05-19T22:30:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T22:30:34","slug":"trust-the-process-has-paid-off-love-him-or-hate-him-mikel-arteta-deserves-respect-for-ending-arsenals-premier-league-title-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/?p=10971","title":{"rendered":"‘Trust the process’ has paid off! Love him or hate him, Mikel Arteta deserves respect for ending Arsenal’s Premier League title drought"},"content":{"rendered":"


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As Arteta has often brought up, Arsenal were in a bad place before he took over. The frustration that had set in during the second decade of Arsene Wenger’s 22-year reign had given way to apathy by the end of Unai Emery’s ill-fated spell in charge.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, it could easily be argued that had Emery been given the same level of support as Arteta, it’s highly likely that he’d have enjoyed similar success to his successor. As Emery has since shown at Villarreal and Aston Villa, he is very much one of the elite coaches of the modern era. <\/span><\/p>\n

However, he lost the fans long before he was sacked on November 29, 2019, and not even the appointment of the extremely popular former winger Freddie Ljungberg as interim boss managed to lift the sense of doom and gloom around the club – which Arteta still vividly remembers from his final visit to the Emirates in his capacity as Manchester City coach just five days before his appointment as Arsenal’s new permanent manager.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat image, that feeling of the stadium, the crowd (with) 50 per cent of the stadium empty really got into me,\u201d <\/span>he recalled.<\/span> “I said, ‘With this, there is no project. This is not going to work.’ <\/span><\/p>\n

“Unfortunately, it got worse very quickly because then Covid hit and then instead of 50% we had zero. So, you make the job even harder. After that we had to rebuild everything.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Arteta has often brought up, Arsenal were in a bad place before he took…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}