How Arteta's psychology rebuild took Arsenal to a Champions League final

Make it happen.

Walk through Arsenal's Sobha Realty Training Centre and the psychology of Mikel Arteta's rebuild is written into the building itself. On the walls. In the gym. In the corridors. Some messages are clear, others more cryptic.

"Everything matters."

"Have you made your car faster?"

"Me x me = we."

To an outsider, it can look like motivational wallpaper. To Arteta, it is the language of belief.

On one wall the outline of the Premier League trophy is featured, with an empty black silhouette left deliberately blank.

It is a space waiting to be filled, a reminder of what the players are chasing. It sits in the background as they arrive for training, catching the eye behind interviews. Arteta has spoken about it. The belief was always that one day they would fill it, and light it up.

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Arsenal are champions of England for the first time in 22 years. Arteta has been named Manager of the Season. The set-piece work will take headlines and the recruitment will take credit, but ask the manager what mattered most and he points somewhere less obvious.

"The best part of the rebuild at Arsenal was changing the culture inside the organisation," Arteta told Sky Sports once the title was confirmed.

"I wanted to understand deeply how people felt about working inside Arsenal, and I was not happy or impressed with how they described it. Changing the culture was much deeper than changing tactics or the way the team played. It became the foundation for everything we built after that."

Nothing was too small. Arsenal even reshaped the away dressing room at the Emirates, making it tighter and less welcoming for visiting teams.

It was classic Arteta: no detail too small, no edge too marginal.

The professor in the building

The Sporting News can reveal that highly regarded Professor Tim O'Brien spent several years at Arsenal under Arteta, brought in to analyse and change the culture around the club.

He conducted a research analysis of the culture and supported Arteta in making radical changes to it. O'Brien has a track record of supporting global businesses in culture transformation.

A chartered psychologist, he also worked closely with the men's team. O'Brien was not new to the training ground, having first worked at Arsenal in the days of Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry and Robert Pires, spending close to a decade behind the scenes under Arsene Wenger.

He is the Honorary Professor of Psychology and Human Development at the world-leading UCL Institute of Education in London and a Professor, part-time, at the University of Limerick in Ireland. He is also an award-winning practitioner with international standing. O'Brien's work sits in the space where thinking, emotion, behaviour and performance meet.

His view of what a football team actually is goes to the heart of what Arteta has built.

O'Brien never speaks about any of the players he has worked with. In a rare interview, with me in 2016, he said:

"Football squads are a small community of people who need each other, and this applies to the staff as well."

"You must have people whose psychological orientation is about the team and they have to be willing to serve the team. To do that you must put other people's needs before your own when the team requires you to do so."

Getty Images/Arsenal FC

That idea of the self in service of the group runs straight through Arteta's squad, as does O'Brien's belief that leadership can be held by more than one player.

Martin Odegaard is Arsenal's captain, but this season leadership is shared across a wider group that includes Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Magalhaes, Declan Rice, Mikel Merino, Jurrien Timber and David Raya.

"You need distributed leadership throughout a team. It cannot be left to a captain to lead on his or her own. Some supporters will see the captain as needing to be loud on the pitch, but the captain has to be someone who gains the respect of their colleagues by living the values of the team both on and off the pitch."

A community of mind

O'Brien has a phrase for the thing every manager chases, but few truly get.

"A team is a community of mind. Individuals have their personality but the team also has a personality. They may be from different backgrounds and cultures, with different life experiences, but fundamentally a team is a community of mind. A strong sense of togetherness is critical in creating it."

"It is always possible for a team with high levels of togetherness to beat a team that has high levels of technical quality. The history of the FA Cup provides evidence of that."

Resilience, he argues, is not something players either have or do not have. It is built. O'Brien told me that he believes resilience is emergent in individuals and in teams.

"I do not see resilience as a personality trait, something a person has or does not have. That is a pessimistic view of people. There are people who can surprise us with how resilient they are, especially in adversity. I see resilience as an unfolding process in the mind that can be nurtured. In a team, it depends on feeling a sense of belonging. A team that works on its togetherness is providing the climate for resilience too."

Pressure is a privilege

There is a difference, O'Brien says, between pressure and stress. At the sharp end of a season, that distinction matters.

"Some people perform well under pressure in the big games. They love it because they believe they have, or can develop, the psychological resources to perform when demands are highest. When pressure flips into stress, you start to feel you don't have the resources to cope. If you're stressed you cannot perform well."

Arteta reached for the same idea during the run-in when he showed his players a speech by actor Tom Hiddleston, a lifelong Arsenal supporter, who borrowed Billie Jean King's famous line that 'pressure is a privilege'.

"The chemical you produce when you're nervous is the same one you produce when you are excited," Hiddleston said. "I choose to say that I am excited. Pressure is a privilege. If you feel any weight of expectation, you are breathing rare air that few of us get to live inside."

The message to the squad was simple. What a privilege to lead the league. What a privilege to be chased by Pep Guardiola's Manchester City.

But psychology at Arsenal is not just about slogans on walls or speeches before big games. It is also about understanding the stories players carry into the dressing room.

O'Brien has written about how everyone has their own 'Inner Story'. Our experiences, and how we process them, will inform what it means to be who we are. His book of the same name explains how, in teams, this has to be understood and acknowledged because players are people and not simply performers.

William Saliba lost his father at 17 and his mother two years later before having to build a new life and career away from home. Bukayo Saka missed a penalty for England at 19, suffered racist abuse, responded with the words "love always wins" and is now a Premier League champion. Eberechi Eze was released by Arsenal at 13 and has spoken about crying for a week; years later, Arsenal paid £67million to bring him home. Gabriel Magalhaes was attacked outside his own home and fought off the assailants. Declan Rice was told by Chelsea at 14 that he was not good enough.

Some have dealt with grief, rejection, abuse, pressure, danger or doubt long before lifting a trophy. That is why the psychological side of Arteta's Arsenal matters so much.

It was not always this calm.

Rewind to 2020 and Arsenal looked very different.

Leaks were coming out of the club, agents were briefing the media, some players were unhappy with Arteta's decisions and a few tried to undermine him.

Things even spilled onto the grass, with a training-ground confrontation between David Luiz and Dani Ceballos later making its way into the public domain.

Arteta's response set the tone for everything that followed as he told the squad he would "destroy" whoever was behind the leaks. Then came the harder part: moving on those who did not fit.

Arsenal co-chair Josh Kroenke later said the motto around the club was: "Tune out the noise, keep your heads down, have each other's backs."

"At times, everyone needs an arm around the shoulder," he told Arteta.

But the Gunners' dressing room learned a harder truth too: the only people you can truly trust are the ones in the room with you.

Indeed, Arteta's team talks have become theatre since the All or Nothing documentary aired in 2022. He uses props to emphasise his message and has introduced music to Arsenal's training sessions.

"It's something we've been doing for many years now," he said.

"And as part of training we use music as another element of our sessions to build the energy, to change some purposes that we want in the training session and I think the players enjoy it.

"It depends on the drill, depends on the day. Some players pick the first song, the first two songs, the last song. It's definitely interesting."

Soon, supporters will see more of it for themselves. Arsenal have filmed heavily behind the scenes this season and footage of Arteta's motivational talks is expected to be released. It is understood the material will form part of the club's tie-up with Paramount+.

There is one prize left.

On Saturday, May 30 in Budapest, Arsenal face holders Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final, as they seek to secure a European crown the club has never won.

An AI song that names every member of the squad, and which Arteta will only say "came from somewhere", played loudly in the manager's garden the night Arsenal were confirmed as champions. His sons love it. So do the players.

It carries one of his favourite phrases: make it happen.

And now it is the guys in the room, the ones Arteta trusts, who could be about to do exactly that.