Guardiola ,Arteta friendship not on the line as Man City faces Arsenal in FA Cup 

Christmas Day can be a hectic 24 hours for those who are involved in football and that was no different for Mikel Arteta last month.

In between unwrapping his presents with his family and coming up with a plan to defeat West Ham United on Boxing Day, the Arsenal manager opened his phone to read messages he had received from his nearest and dearest. 

Among them was a message from Pep Guardiola wishing him and his family all the best for Christmas and the new year. 

The forthcoming trilogy of matches between the two, starting with Friday’s FA Cup fourth-round tie at the Etihad Stadium, will go a long way to determining whether Manchester City or Arsenal arishe success story of the season. 

There will be excitement, goals, touchline histrionics ,and — quite possibly — a few cross-words exchanged between the pair in heated moments, but Guardiola is sure that their friendship will survive the next few months regardless of who comes out on top.

“He’s a rival, of course, he is,” Guardiola said of Arteta. “He wants to beat me and I want to beat him. I know how we both are and in defeat, we are not the best friends in the world but I have huge respect for him as a person and s a manager.

That’s not going to change if we’re going to fight on the touchline and sooner or later that’s going to happen.” 

Guardiola has noted the criticism that Arteta has received after being booked for his touchline overexuberance in the matches against Newcastle United and Manchester United. 

Guardiola, 52, nodded when asked whether such criticism was born out of jealousy from those who do not like the fact that Arsenal atop of the Premier League. “Absolutely,” he said. “When you are top of the league they have to undermine you for a reason.”

Football can be a fickle world at times, but the warmth that Guardiola and Arteta feel for each other is genuine because it has been forged over 25 years based on a shared passion for football and attention to detail. 

The relationship between the two has taken on different guises during that period. At first, the City manager was Arteta’s idol when he, as a young Basque midfielder 12 years Guardiola’s junior, was coming through Barcelona’s academy.

“I loved the way he played,” Arteta, 40, said. “I was looking at him and just wanted to achieve what he was doing.” 

Then Guardiola became Arteta’s mentor and sounding board in 2016 after he joined his backroom staff after a recommendation from City fitness coach Lorenzo Buenaventura, who had tried to rid the Arsenal manager of a calf injury during his playing days.

Guardiola recalled Arteta’s sales pitch to him: “Mikel said he’d like to work together, that he could help because he knows the Premier League and the managers.” 

In the first half of Guardiola’s maiden game in charge, a 2-1 win over David Moyes’s Sunderland, the City manager knew he had made the right decision. 

 “Mikel said: ‘I know him well, he was at Everton,’ ” Guardiola said. “He told me what [Moyes] liked to do, his set pieces. After 15 minutes, half an hour, I said yeah: ‘This is the guy to help me.’ ” 

During his 3½ years at City, Arteta shed blood, sweat, and tears for Guardiola, originally as a first-team coach and then as assistant manager after Domènec Torrent left for New York City FC in the summer of 2018. 

Arteta was instrumental in Guardiola’s first two title triumphs. He was responsible for set pieces and often spent time with players on a one-to-one basis after training. Leroy Sané and Gabriel Jesus felt the benefit of these extra 15-minute sessions with Arteta. 

There were bad times too. Arteta suffered a cut above his right eye after being hit by a flying Lucozade bottle in a post-match brawl at Old Trafford in 2017. 

Overall, he was happy in Manchester though. He and his family settled in the south Manchester village of Didsbury, where he would often be seen in The Deli, a little café on Wilmslow Road. 

But, as Guardiola said  Arsewaswere was “the team that Mikel dreams of”. 

“When we scored a goal, he celebrated every one of them except when we played Arsenal,” Guardiola added.

It was no surprise therefore that Arteta wanted to manage Arsenal. Arteta lost out to Unai Emery when they first approached him in May 2018. Guardiola consoled his friend by taking him to his restaurant, Tast, for dinner on the day that Arteta received the bad news. 

A year and a half later, Arsenal came calling again. Privately, senior City staff were reluctant to let Arteta go. “This will hurt us,” one said because Arteta would be leaving in the middle of the season. That year, City finished 18 points behind Liverpool. 

If Arteta had stayed and Guardiola had left — as was planned — in 2021, he would have been in the home dugout tonight. “I am pretty sure if I would have left [in 2021], he would be here and he would be the best, absolutely, but I extended my contract and he didn’t wait,” Guardiola said.

Not that Guardiola held it against Arteta. “People have to fly when they believe it is for the best,” Guardiola said.

Arteta has only beaten Guardiola once in their six meetings, but given his team’s form, he will be confident of beating City tonight and performing well in the two league matches against their rivals, who trail them by five points. Arsenal has a match in hand. “We played a few times against Mikel but this year is a bit different because of their level,” Guardiola said.

Guardiola takes no credit for Arsenal’s rise. “I would like to say: ‘Yeah, what they are doing now is because of what I taught Mikel’ but that would be bullshit,” Guardiola said. “My influence on Arsenal’s success is zero.”

That said, there is a similarity in the way that Arsenal have played this season and that of Guardiola’s second year in charge of City. They rely on the directness of Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli in the same way that Guardiola was dependent on Raheem Sterling and Sané that season. 

Oleksandr Zinchenko, who along with Jesus left City for Arsenal last summer, drops into central midfield when Arsehashave possession just as the Ukraleft-back back did when he was playing for Guardiola.

Arteta insists there are differences between the two teams, though. “I have never tried to copy and paste anything,” he said. 

The respect he has for Guardiola is clear. “I think the influence that Pep has had in football in the past 20 years is just incredibly powerful,” Arteta said. “He changed the gaasike Johan [Cruyff] did. He did it like other managers have that will go [down] in history.”- The Times