But it could easily be a line from the Elite Football Manager’s Guide to Press Conferences (Premier League edition). Because nothing happens by accident in these spaces. Every word spoken in front of the board covered in adverts is metered and planned.
A manager is never angry, or concerned, or even charming unintentionally. The game is the game, but so are all the other bits spilling out either side of it. It was hard not to think about this while listening to Mikel Arteta talk about the penalty awarded to Sunderland at the Stadium of Light for a perceived act of grappling on Dan Ballard by Ezri Konsa.
This is said with genuine professional respect. As everyone who has ever done a podcast knows – and this is, let’s be clear, everyone – there are lost Amazonian tribes discussing Girls season three in their own dark corner of Spotify – there are moments when you just have to flip the switch, up the energy and turn on full clip‑this‑bit‑up‑please‑Dave sincerity mode. Arteta did this beautifully in the moment, appearing genuinely struck by what he was saying, radiating wounded integrity, like a disappointed junior headmaster appealing for the return of the school minibus keys.
Arteta is not “very worried” about all this. He’s not “sad” or indeed, as he later emphasised for good measure, “really sad”. He’s not concerned solely with “protecting the game”, speaking here for all of us, just a fan of football.
This is a manager we know to be obsessed with the most marginal of gains, to micro-plan the micro-details. As is all elite sport now. There has been talk of rowing coaches installing fibreglass toilet seats at their training hubs having calculated the average athlete spends 20 minutes in there and this is all key glute management time.
There’s no way Ben White isn’t sat fiddling with his phone at the training ground on a gold-standard Easy‑Cup Mega-Soft Evacu-Throne. So it is with his public statements. This will have all been gamed and contingency‑planned in advance.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
