sport news Mikel Arteta: How Arsenal's rise can be traced back to their manager's ... trends now
Mikel Arteta doesn't quite remember it the way Pepe Reina does. The story that the former Liverpool goalkeeper relays is that Arteta was bored one day at La Masia, the 18th century farmhouse next to Camp Nou in Barcelona that was used as dormitories for out-of-town youth team players.
And so he and a group of teenagers gathered above the entrance and decided to lob ice cubes at any unfortunate soul who happened to be entering. Unfortunately, one of the first to be struck in the random procession of callers was Serra Ferrer, who was the first-team manager at the time.
'No, no,' protests Arteta, when reminded of the story on Friday. 'It wasn't him! And it wasn't ice cubes, it was water.'
The four years that Mikel Arteta spent at Barcelona's La Masia have been integral to his current success with Arsenal
As well as learning the way of Barcelona football, Arteta also worked under Pep Guardiola at Man City
So, despite the sketchy account of his former room-mate Reina, who was also at La Masia, the basic story appears to be broadly true. Arteta the juvenile delinquent is busted.
'We had such fantastic moments, we had so much fun,' he said. 'It's one of the best periods in my life for sure with the people that we shared those moments.'
You wonder what the 40-year-old Arteta, manager of Premier League leaders Arsenal, would think if one of his youth team players doused him with water as he walked into the training ground.
'Now probably I wouldn't like it,' he said, with his serious face then breaking into a smile. 'But it was very funny to be fair.'
He doesn't often show it, but somewhere in his heart Arteta is forever 16.
The significance of the anecdote is not to portray Arteta's pranks as the stuff of some dark rebellious soul. It is more to emphasise that those four years he spent at Barcelona will prove to be decisive should Arsenal do what no one believed they could at the start of the season and win the Premier League.
At Tottenham, Arsenal have the opportunity to go eight points clear at the top of the table as we approach the halfway stage of the campaign. You don't get any trophies for winning the first half of the season, but this is way beyond any pre-season expectations.
And the roots of that transformation lie in La Masia, a Petri dish of football ideas and tactics for impressionable teenagers.
Arsenal have the opportunity to go eight points clear at the top with a win against Tottenham
Imparted to those graduates are the philosophies of Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff, the former being the Ajax and Barca coach who brought the idea of Total Football to the world and won Barca's first Liga title for 14 years in 1974.
The latter of course was his star player, collaborator at Barca and with the iconic Dutch national team, and later coach of the greatest Barca side of the 20th Century, the so-called Dream Team, which won the club's first European Cup in 1992.
In that team was a midfielder written off by youth team coaches as a skinny runt but elevated by Cruyff to be its heart, Pep Guardiola.
The irony of this current title race is that Guardiola's Manchester City are the team most likely to deny Arteta his dream, yesterday's defeat by Manchester United notwithstanding. And yet it is Guardiola's title blueprint that Arteta has stolen. Or, perhaps to be more accurate, Cruyff's.
Arteta has revealed that he was in love with the Dream Team when Johan Cruyff was in charge of Barcelona
'I was in love with the Dream Team when Johan Cruyff was the manager,' said Arteta. 'And my only purpose at that moment when I was young was one day to be a professional footballer and to play for Barca.
'After that, when I had the chance to go there, they opened the world to me and they made me feel and understand the game in a completely different way than the perception I had before.'
Paco Seirullo is pretty much the authority on this story. He was fitness coach for Barca from 1994 to 2014, so worked with Guardiola all through the second edition of the Dream Team, the one with Lionel Messi, Xavi and Andres Iniesta at its heart, which won two Champions League trophies between 2008 and 2012.
So integral was Seirullo to Barca ideals that from 2014 to last summer, when he retired, he was 'head of methodology'.
As well as Guardiola, with whom he worked with as player and coach,
