Arteta on Villarreal, new signings and targets | Quotes | News

As he prepares to return to his spot in the home dugout this evening against Villarreal, Mikel Arteta has reflected on the summer so far and what’s to come in his programme notes.

The manager reveals the detailed planning and analysis that goes into selecting our pre-season opponents, and why the Yellow Submarine were selected, as well as Saturday’s opponents Athletic Club.

He also gave an insight into how our new recruits have settled in, which you can discover in this snippet:

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We know what we want from pre-season, which is why we have planned the schedule like this. First we played Watford at Sobha, then we went to Singapore to play against AC Milan and Newcastle, before facing Tottenham in Hong Kong. So we’ve been changing conditions, changing contexts, and now we are playing at home against two teams preparing to be in the Champions League this season.

Villarreal are playing at the highest level, and they have a manager in Marcelino who likes to play a very specific type of system and formation that we will find in the Premier League this season. But also we are playing against Spanish opposition, so that will require other things from us as well, and I expect these to be really good games.

When we arrange these pre-season matches, I always look at how the manager sets up his teams, how they coach their team, the kind of players they have, how they train different phases of play against different blocks. We have a very good mixture this pre-season. The knowledge and experience that we gain from these games all goes into our “database” to help us throughout the season and it helps for the way we have to evolve our game models.

Each game is going to demand something from you physically, and the spaces you have to attack or protect, and different ways they can play in their build-up as well. So we have to nail that and improve that, and playing against Villarreal will help that, so it’s a good game for us.

I know it’s going to be the first opportunity for many of you to see our new players in action as well, and we are all very excited about how the squad is shaping up. They have all brought another enthusiasm again, and injected it into the squad. It’s shaken things up.

They have all been welcomed into the squad by the staff and other players in exactly the way I expected. There have been no surprises there, and many of them were able to get good minutes in their legs while we were out on pre-season tour in Singapore and Hong Kong, so they are developing well ahead of the new season.

These new arrivals all add quality and depth to the squad, which is what we’re going to need throughout the season ahead.

We know what our targets are and what we want to achieve this season. There is a big belief in our ability to achieve that. We’ve been very, very close the last few seasons and the whole team is going to determine whether we achieve that or not. But at the same time, we have to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we have to do on a daily basis to get to the levels that we want.

We have to set the demands that we want within this goal. Because that’s the most important thing – the internal demands have to always exceed any external demand. That’s what we are trying to achieve every single day.

We have to do that all together, with you, our supporters as well. That’s another reason why these two games at home are so important. Let’s show that energy from the first moment. We want our people to start connecting with our players straight away, to start to build momentum, and to start to feel that at home, we are invincible. That we play here with such passion, energy and connection with our people, that we’re going to win the game. Let’s bring that conviction to the stadium again for these two matches.

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