Mikel Arteta’s careful nurturing of Jakub Kiwior is the sign of a manager who is

Because he arrived at Arsenal as a seemingly fully-formed manager, sometimes we forget that Mikel Arteta is still learning.

From his first press conference back at a club he’d previously played for and captained, in December 2019, then head coach and now manager Arteta spoke with a conviction that belied his lack of experience. There was an inexplicable yet intoxicating conviction about him.

Perhaps there had to be.

In those early days, that assured persona acted partially as a defence mechanism. Arteta knew his inexperience was his greatest vulnerability, so he rarely referenced it or sought to use it as an excuse. He recognised that to quickly win the respect of players, staff, supporters and pundits, it was important to look and sound the part. The rest could be figured out in quiet moments, away from the limelight.

Yet this is still his first managerial job at any level; and we’re in just the fifth season of that nascent career. A comparison with his two counterparts in the 2023-24 Premier League title race makes for stark reading: Jurgen Klopp has managed three clubs over his 23 years on the touchline. For Pep Guardiola, it’s four (three if you don’t count Barcelona B), in just shy of 14.

Arteta — who turns 42 today (Tuesday March 26) — is still a comparative novice. Inevitably, he is still learning on the job. To that end, the way he has adapted the Arsenal left-back role to suit Jakub Kiwior in recent weeks is indicative of a manager improving before our eyes.

At the start of February, a year after joining the club, Kiwior was still a fringe player. The now 24-year-old started just four Premier League games over the first half of this season, and was even being discussed as a potential candidate for a summer departure.

The most recent of those four starts came on December 31 in the 2-1 away defeat against Fulham. Asked to replicate the injured Oleksandr Zinchenko’s inverted left-back role, Kiwior looked uncomfortable and was withdrawn at half-time.

Kiwior struggled against Fulham in December (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

It marked the end of a difficult first year in England for the Polish international. Bought last January as cover and competition for left-sided centre-half Gabriel Magalhaes, much of his football for Arsenal had been played as a left-back or a right-sided centre-back.

“We made a decision to bring him in earlier, because we believed whichever player we were going to sign to have the role that he had to have was going to need time, and that was the case,” Arteta explained in March. “And we have made it difficult for him for two reasons: because he hasn’t played many minutes, and because we asked him to play in a position that he’s never played in before. So it’s like putting (central defender) William Saliba as a full-back and saying, ‘There we go. Tomorrow, go and perform and do what we have to do!’”

When Zinchenko went off injured at half-time in the home match against