sport news Arsenal players impressed by Mikel Arteta's 'ruthlessness' after he forced out ... trends now

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta looked into the eyes of his captain Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and knew the star striker had to go.

'That level of trust was gone,' the young coach tells the next instalment of the fly-on-the-wall documentary, All or Nothing Arsenal.

'It was a really difficult decision to make, in the middle of the season, and with the most important player of the club and the impact not having that player could have on the performance of the team.

'But if you put all these ingredients together and still the decision is clear, then you have to make it.'

The documentary provides an extraordinary insight into a rift that threatened to destabilise the club and could have put a hole in the Spaniard's fledgling managerial career.

The documentary chronicles the end of 'Auba's' Arsenal spell, which lasted almost five years and included 163 appearances and 92 goals.

But as the fanbase fractured and club executives wobbled, Arteta stuck to his principles.

He stood his ground and refused to compromise in his crusade to transform Arsenal back into an elite football club after years of drift. And as a result, he laid down the law to the rest of his young squad.

The next blockbuster episodes of the Amazon Prime Video series, which will be streamed from Thursday, appear to confirm Aubameyang's own version of events. The Gabon international has insisted that it was Arteta who forced him out of the Emirates.

All of Nothing reveals the boss believed Aubameyang, 33, had disrespected him and the club and for Arteta, there was no way back; the rules apply to everyone.

'He's been late, apart from all the issues, many times,' Arteta, who says he kept a dossier of incidents with dates and times, tells a colleague in the film.

'The club has got a tradition. When you get paid that much money…'

At first, the player was stood down from first team duties and then stripped of the club captaincy. Ultimately, Aubameyang's contract was terminated by mutual consent and he moved to Barcelona.

However, the situation was complicated both legally and commercially, since there was no obvious taker for the £350,000-a-week striker in the forthcoming transfer window.

As a result, Arsenal's hierarchy considered 'reintegrating' Aubameyang, something the manager simply could not accept.

For Arteta discipline within the squad is always paramount. The Amazon Prime Video microphones picked up the manager speaking to club doctor, Gary O'Driscoll, on the training pitch during a winter break in Dubai in January at the peak of the crisis.

'What do you have to do?' he asks O'Driscoll, in a terse discussion about rule-breaking. 'Just let it go?'

'What do you have to do? What do you do?' he keeps demanding of the doctor.

'If you let it go… it's OK? What happened… in the last 10 years? Let it go… the next one the same… the next one the same. In Spain, it is called 'casa pepe'… everyone does whatever he f*****g wants.'

The Aubameyang saga finally concluded in dramatic fashion at 10.59pm, one minute before the transfer window closed, on deadline day in January, when the player was forced out and joined Barcelona.

Aubameyang took a pay cut and Arsenal were forced to give him £7million in compensation, while he also picked up £230,000-a-week in wages until the end of the season.

The drama was a defining period of the campaign, putting players and manager under huge pressure and leaving Arsenal short of a striker before, during and after the transfer window - a problem they hope they have now solved with the purchase of Gabriel Jesus from Manchester City.

Trouble was brewing as far back as the autumn. Aubameyang, a leader for the Gunners' young side, was out of form and on the bench.

The club agreed the player could visit his mother in France, but according to team-mates he was late back. From that moment, Aubameyang was out in the cold, training alone.

In the docuseries, the manager is heard speaking to Mark Gonnella, the club's director of communications, in the corridor.

'I want you to be prepared for what is going to happen,' Arteta tells Gonnella prior to Aubameyang being excluded from a matchday squad to play Southampton.

The players were already discussing the crisis, and while disappointed to be deprived of their talismanic team-mate, they couldn't help but admire Arteta's resolve.

'What has happened with Auba, yesterday?' midfielder Mohamed Elneny asked in the club canteen.

'He went to Paris… he came home… the boss wanted him back like, I think, one day before he came back,' explained defender Rob Holding. 'The next day he was late for training. He had permission to go there… he had to go and see his mum. And then didn't get back in time and didn't listen to him [Arteta] and do the correct thing.'

'The boss has balls, yeah?' observes Elneny.

'Yeah, the boss has balls,' agrees Holding.

The reason for Arteta's determination to confront Aubameyang's behaviour was based on three things.

Firstly, the values he is trying to instill in the club – respect, commitment and passion – are, in his words, 'non-negotiable'; secondly, Arteta claims he and the player agreed terms of engagement when the striker's contract was extended in 2020 and those rules were broken, and thirdly, the coach is determined to change the culture at the Emirates, so he couldn't let this go.

'If someone breaks some of the non-negotiables that is a really difficult point to get something back from,' Arteta tells the Prime Video cameras.

As the weeks rolled on, and the questions piled up at Arteta's press conferences, it was decided to strip Aubameyang of the captaincy.

In a tense meeting in mid-December, the manager broke the news to his players. And significantly, he used the moment to underline the importance of the rules.

'The club and myself, we are not going to accept any behaviour like this,' he told the group of wide-eyed young players. 'What we are

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