Mikel Arteta has been brutally mocked by football fans for his attempt to prepare his Arsenal side for the upcoming Premier League season.
The Gunners have fallen agonisingly short of their goal to win the English top-flight in each of the last two seasons, while their return to the Champions League also ended in disappointment.
Arsenal go into the upcoming campaign as one of the favourites once more and it appears Arteta is leaving no stone unturned in his aim to get his team over the line.
As revealed in The Athletic, Arteta secretly hired a team of professional pickpockets tasked with taking phones and wallets during a dinner with his first-team squad.
At the end of the meal, the Spaniard asked players to empty their pockets. Several then realised they were missing valuable items. This exercise was supposedly done to teach them of the importance of being alert at all times.
It's unclear how well the stunt went down with the Gunners players that night but fans have reacted rather negatively to the lesson.
'Thats how to build trust with your players, by robbing them all,' wrote one fan on X, who accompanied their post with a laughing emoji.
Another said: 'And they'll never trust him again.' A third user on platform said: 'Bro thinks pickpocket will get prepare them to win the league.'
'How does this correlate with football or winning the league huh,' wondered another shocked user on X.
Arteta is not the first Premier League boss to be ridiculed for a teaching or motivational tactic. Then-Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers infamously took three envelopes into his first pre-match meeting as boss, held them up to his squad and told them the names in the envelopes would let him down during the season.
Former Reds goalkeeper Brad Jones revealed that the stunt instantly backfired.
'When he did it, as we were sitting and he was talking, he put the envelopes up and you could actually see straight through them, just the way that the light caught them.' He told the Liverpool Echo in 2022.
'I just remember sitting there thinking, "I don't think there's anything in those envelopes!'
Ex-Manchester United player Owen Hargreaves said legendary former Red Devils manager Sir Alex Ferguson had pulled the same trick in pre-season in 2007 - but unlike when Rodgers did it later, insisted it had a positive impact on the players.
Arteta will hope that his trick will lead to the kind of results Ferguson saw and on the evidence of their most recent pre-season clash, Gunners fans could be in store for a thrillin season.
Arsenal made light work of Bundesliga champions Bayer Leverkusen at the Emirates on Wednesday evening. Following that 4-1 win, they player Lyon on Sunday before the start of the Premier League campaign against Wolves on August 17.
