Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta: Deity and Devotee, Master and Apprentice, and also good friends

Like two lane-violating cars on highway, immersed in their own worlds, Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta crashed into each other, when belting out instructions to their men during an uneasily cagey FA Cup encounter.
For a fleeting moment, they let themselves forget the brooding intensity of the game between the league champions and their prospective usurpers. Arteta waved an apology, breaking the characteric sombreness into a warm smile; Guardiola graciously acknowledged the apology and flicked a thumb’s up. Fifteen minutes, the final whle blew and both managers shook hands and hugged. Arteta’s eyes flickered with reverence; Guardiola’s shone with appreciation.
The day before the game, the first of the trilogy of fixtures between them in the next two months. Guardiola had poetically captured the essence of their friendship, that “their friendship would not affect the game and the game would not often affect their friendship.” In defeat we are not the best friends in the world, but friendship and respect are not going to change even if we’re going to fight on the touchline,” he elaborated.
Arteta’s words were so similar that you wonder if they had written and rehearsed the lines together. He would say: “I would prefer to do it with someone else, to be fair. I want the best for him, genuinely. But it is what it is, and that’s our challenge. That’s not going to change any friendship, the moments that we have, how important he is in my life, how important he is in my profession.”

“In that moment I said – that guy, he loves Arsenal” ❤️
Pep Guardiola says Mikel Arteta never celebrated against Arsenal when he was at Manchester City 😌 pic.twitter.com/rVaJYMjlZo
— Sky Sports News (@SkySportsNews) January 26, 2023
Theirs is a fascinating journey, their equations assuming different hues in nearly two decades of association, from a devotee-deity, to apprentice-master to near equals now. When Arteta enrolled at the La Masia Academy, Guardiola was all he wanted to be. “I loved the way he played. I was looking at him and just wanted to achieve what he was doing.” Both were not like-for-like players. Guardiola was an outright defensive midfielder, whereas Arteta was deployed in various positions in the midfield as well as on the wings.
But they never played in the same team. Arteta had to contend turning up for Barcelona B and C, before he was loaned to Paris Saint Germain and then sold to Rangers. It was just around the time Guardiola departed Barcelona, racking up 263 caps for the club, and joined Brescia, and in 2006 would call time on his career and step into management. Their destinies diverged for the best part of the decade.
As Guardiola scaled dizzying heights as Barcelona’s manager, conquering all that he surveyed, managing arguably the finest footballer ever to have roamed in the world, and wielding the most artful of footballing philosophies of his time, Arteta was straddling mediocre lines, first for an aspiring but unambitious Everton and then with a past his prime Arsene Wenger.
Then just as Arteta’s career was winding down and Guardiola teething into the premier, City’s fitness coach Lorenzo Buenaventura sounded him out about Arteta and both had a chat. Arteta was offered a job at the Arsenal academy but he didn’t think twice about tying up with his idol.

🗣 “I have never tried to copy and paste anything, this club deserves much better than that.”
Mikel Arteta responds to people comparing him to Pep Guardiola and calling him “mini Pep” pic.twitter.com/lC0ePd9TEB
— Football Daily (@footballdaily) January 27, 2023
Guardiola remembered their first conversation: “We made a conversation and he said, ‘I would like to work together and I can help you because I know the Premier League perfectly, I know all the managers’. I remember the first game was against Sunderland and it was against David Moyes and he said, ‘I know him well from Everton, he does this, he does that.’ After 15 minutes, half an hour, I said, ‘He is the guy, he can help me to anticipate’.
For three years, he was Guardiola’s shadow in the dug-out, and often his voice on the training ground. The two men, one often in sweatshirt and the other in his trademark single-breasted black suit, could be spotted together, deliberating tactical shake-ups, exchanging notes and observations perhaps, helping City build an empire. Many in City designated as the heir apparent before Arteta assumed charges of Arsenal. “His influence on me was great and so important to become a better manager,” Guardiola once said. Arteta would reciprocate: “I would not be sitting here, with that willingness and love for coaching, if he had not trusted me and given me the opportunity.”
But Arteta’s adoration of Guardiola does not stretch to the extend of blindly reproducing the City template for success. While Arsenal and City have a similarity in style and philosophy, in their devotion to producing attractive football, with an emphasis on slick passing, both are differently wired teams.

One can pick odd similarities too, like the directness of wingers Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli, their roles akin to those of Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane in the 2017-18 season, wherein they nudged 100 points. Similarly, ex-City full-back Oleksandr Zinchenko would veer into the midfield when Arsenal enjoy possession, which was his exact profile under Guardiola. The aggressive pressing of Arsenal full-backs, especially Takehiro Tomiyasu on Jack Grealish was straight from the Guardiola manual. Both look to boss possession, manoeuvre the ball with quick passing and attack with width. Both are wedded to high defensive lines, squeezing up the pitch. City’s usual starting formation is 4-3-3, and so is Arsenal’s. Guardiola intervenes: “But all the methodology, the process, the character, mentality, set pieces, a thousand million things, that belongs to them and not to me.”
Then, every attractive side in the world has borrowed some aspect or the other from Guardiola’s tenets, be it in the refinement in passing, or the use of inverted wingers and false nine. Arteta would agree. “I think the influence that Pep has had in football in the past 20 years is just incredibly powerful. He changed the game like Johan [Cruyff] did. He did it like other managers have that will go [down] in hory.”
That Guardiola would go down in the hory as one of the greatest managers, if not he already has, is a universal truth, but his once devotee and apprentice is steadily tracing his footsteps.