LONDON - Mikel Arteta reportedly hired a group of pickpockets to teach his Arsenal stars a valuable lesson and is now planning to steal the Premier League title from Manchester City.
Arteta's side suffered an agonising end to last season as City pipped them to the trophy by just two points on the final day.
Arsenal lost only one of their last 18 league games but still couldn't hold off City's relentless charge to an unprecedented fourth successive Premier League crown.
That painful near-miss came 12 months after the Gunners allowed City to snatch the 2022/23 title from their grasp after squandering an eight-point lead.
Rather than dull his appetite for success, those blows inspired Arteta to take his already obsessive attention to detail to new heights as he chases Arsenal's first league title in 21 years.
"I don't want to get over it," he said. "We need that pain and that hunger to achieve what we want to achieve because the competition is unbelievable."
With that in mind, Arteta secretly tasked a team of professional pickpockets with taking phones and wallets during a dinner with his players.
At the end of the meal, he asked the squad to empty their pockets and they immediately realised they were missing valuable items.
The exercise was done to teach them of the importance of being alert at all times, on and off the pitch.
Arteta, whose side start their Premier League campaign at home to Wolves on Saturday, is no stranger to using creative ideas in a bid to motivate his players.
The Spaniard brought an olive tree into a team meeting last season, describing the players as the branches and the staff as the roots.
He also once blasted out "You'll never walk alone" over loudspeakers during a training session to replicate the raucous atmosphere at Liverpool.
Arteta even adopted a dog called Win to bring a more family feel to the training ground and boost players' morale.
But the 42-year-old's admirable ability to think outside the box has yet to deliver a prize that is beyond the reach of even his pickpockets.
'We should have won it'
Driven by his burning desire to hold a Premier League winners' medal, Arteta spent the summer consumed by the daunting task of finding a way to end City's reign as the English game's pre-eminent force.
Arsenal last won the title when Arsene Wenger's "Invincibles" went unbeaten through the 2003-04 league season.
Wenger and his iconic stars cast a long shadow over the Emirates Stadium in the fallow period that followed.
But winning a title fight with a team of City's dynastic quality would assure Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice, William Saliba and company of a place in the club's hall of fame alongside the likes of Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Dennis Bergkamp and Sol Campbell.
Arteta is convinced Arsenal are ready to make that leap towards north London immortality, citing the way his players pushed City to the brink last season as proof of their character and quality.
"When you are analytical and you gather all the stats and everything the team has done over the past 11 months in the Premier League, we should have won it," he told ESPN recently.
"The reality is that we didn't, so there is something that is there that we haven't managed as well as Man City or other clubs in the past. I think we understand where those margins are."
Arteta has been cautious in the transfer market ahead of the new campaign, signing only Italy defender Riccardo Calafiori from Bologna, while turning goalkeeper David Raya's loan from Brentford into a permanent deal.
A new striker could be the missing piece in Arteta's title jigsaw, but for now he insists City can be dethroned by focusing on the smallest details.
"One thing is to get the 90 percent that we want and actually the 10 percent, five percent, one percent is what defines success and winning major trophies," he added. - AFP