I still really, really don’t like Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, and now I know why

In January, I failed to put into words my dislike of Mikel Arteta. I no longer have that problem after Arsenal’s defeat to Newcastle.

As was the case back then, I still enjoy watching Arsenal and still think he’s an excellent football manager. And actually, if anything, my aversion to Arteta had subsided over the months, with my respect becoming less begrudging for a man with plenty of palatable character traits.

Then came his reaction to Arsenal’s 1-0 defeat to Newcastle, and as people the world over – Arsenal fans aside – watched Arteta’s stream of hyperbolic nonsense with thoughts on a scale from ‘this is a bit much’ to ‘he’s a right pr*ck’, it came to me: he cares too much.

It doesn’t sound that bad; it’s the sort of thing someone might point out as a negative when evaluating themselves in a job interview. ‘I work too hard’, ‘I’m too organised’, ‘I care too much’. Gooners will love it no doubt, and you can imagine Arteta himself saying it with a smile on his face while assessing his own managerial foibles.

But it’s not good when you care at the cost of sincerity. We can no longer take anything Arteta says on merit.

We probably should have been questioning Arteta’s integrity before his diatribe last weekend. Remember all that rubbish about rotating his goalkeepers? After David Raya replaced Aaron Ramsdale for the game against Everton we took Arteta at his word – we had no reason not to. When Ramsdale didn’t come back in for the visit of PSV Eindhoven, we wondered whether he was being saved for the north London derby. But no, he’s played two EFL Cup games; that’s it.

Arteta may claim that is rotation, but he knows full well he was spinning us all a yarn; he even talked about changing goalkeepers during games. Ramsdale is no more a first-choice goalkeeper than Caoimhin Kelleher is at Liverpool.

Mikel Arteta was an angry man in the rain.

He was never going to rotate his goalkeepers, because it’s a stupid idea, and Arteta isn’t stupid. But as that particular press conference showed, he’s got no problem spouting bullsh*t.

“It is embarrassing, it is a disgrace, that’s what it is, a disgrace,” Arteta said after three marginal VAR calls went against Arsenal at Newcastle, before banging on about “small margins” and the Premier League being “the best league in the world” for a while.

While the rant in itself could be described as”embarrassing”, in the heat of the moment, I get it. Many, many other managers would have done the same. Gary O’Neil has vented his frustration at officials on a few occasions this season (for actual injustices, but that’s beside the point).

Whether Arteta was right or wrong to feel so aggrieved, him being so angry – while making him look like a petulant child compared to Saint Ange – isn’t a good enough reason to dislike him. Nor is his decision to double-down on his chastisement of referees having taken a day or two to consider it. I don’t like that he did, but I don’t dislike him because of it.

My problem was those comments stacked against the ones he made five weeks previously in response to the irrefutable mistake made by VAR in Liverpool’s defeat to Tottenham. “[The officials] are trying to make the best decisions,” Arteta said. “We need to understand that mistakes happen.”

He’s a hypocrite of the highest order. Empathy turned to rage solely because these decisions affected his team. “There’s too much at stake,” he said. More for Arsenal than for Liverpool, who were on the end of a mistake the PGMOL has since admitted to? That was an undeniable injustice, while the apparent travesty Arteta went potty over was a marginal error at most, and in the minds of the majority, not a ‘clear and obvious’ one.

We can no longer trust anything he says, and we’ll be particularly wary when he says anything that could be considered to be with ‘the good of the game’ in mind. He doesn’t care about anything but Arsenal, and you can count his integrity among the levies in his ‘win at all costs’ mentality.