There’s only one place to start this morning, which is with the confirmation from the club yesterday that Mikel ARteta had signed a new contract, taking his deal with The Arsenal to 2027.

This is fantastic news.

He had been talking about how it was going to get done, there had been plenty of journalists saying there isn’t any issues and of course this was probably just a formality, but until you physically get that confirmation and see the announcement, you never really know. So to get that confirmation yesterday brought a smile to this here Gooner’s face. In December Arteta will have been at the club for five years and this time five year’s ago if you’d have told me that we’d have won an FA Cup and competed with 115 Charges FC for two seasons, amassing the highest number of goals scored and wins for an Arsenal team in the Premier League era, I’d have thought you were mad.

It kind of is mad to think how far we have come. The Emery era ended on a quite sour note, the signings we made were either bang average or terrible and when Mikel arrived he talked about getting that connection back with the fans. When he first did his first interview as Head Coach of Arsenal I remember thinking “lovely, but let’s see how he turns this in to reality”.

He has done just that.

When we were linked with Arteta before Emery got the job, my ol’ mate Dave told me that he’d spoken to Paul Davis about Arteta (or he’d spoken to somebody who had spoken to Paul, I can’t 100% remember) and Davis had been doing his coaching badges at the same time as the Spaniard. He’d talked of how impressive Arteta was; his knowledge of the game, tactical insights, his approach and also his intensity and drive to become a top coach. This is a driven man who during his playing days had been called quite an intense character. So there was no doubt he would be a top coach and that’s why Guardiola wanted him on his coaching staff. But that doesn’t always translate to success as the main man. I remember people talking up Steve McClaren as a great coach, or Brian Kidd, but whilst they absolutely nailed it as Fergie’s number two, they couldn’t hit the high notes as a manager.

I think that so far the signs for Arteta have been very positive. He even got the old ‘hasn’t won anything’ stick that is used to beat coaches with out the way early, winning the FA Cup in 2020 and whilst we haven’#t won anything of note yet, there’s no doubt in any real Arsenal fan’s mind that we are heading in the right direction. He has overseen an overhaul of playing style, of culture, of what it feels like to go to The Emirates, of the connection between fans and players and he has done it during some of the most challenging periods in football history. The global pandemic was unprecedented as we all know, but Arteta has turned Arsenal in to a competitive side that we all thoroughly enjoy watching. He has his naysayers in the press, rival fans and even some weird Arsenal fans, but you cannot argue that Arsenal aren’t in a better position now than when he took over.

His words:

“Together with the players and everyone at the club, we are looking forward to the coming years, with our supporters, who have emotionally transformed the club and the team. Our supporters have transformed individuals and we are different now. You can tell that we are different and for me, that is down to them. We look forward to continuing the journey together.”

The journey is still going and what’s next has to be to realise the amazing work he, Edu and the team at The Arsenal have done. We have to see the next evolution and that has to be winning trophies. Nothing is guaranteed and it is hard to win one of those important shiny silver trinkets, but we are in a great place to do it.

He’ll have his press conference today and I suspect that he’ll be given congratulations, there might be a reflection question or two, but it is his driven nature that will see that talk quickly ‘filed’, because he’ll be focused on the job that needs to be done on Sunday. And it’s another big task – and ask – for him to go this early in the season to a tough ground, with a bunch of injuries and suspensions, and pick up three points. It is going to be a massive game this weekend and many of us – me included – are fearful of what might happen in the next nine days given how tough each of these matches are, but in Mikel we have a guy who will absolutely not be making excuses, who will see this as an exciting challenge and who I think will be bullish in his press conference today.

I’ll pen some post-presser thoughts tomorrow, particularly as we’ll get an update of sorts (although I doubt he’ll give any timeline) on Martin Odegaard, Gabriel Jesus and Riccardo Calafiori, but for today I will leave it with the positivity that Mikel is here to stay for another three years and hopefully, he can realise the dreams we all have for The Arsenal, which is big prizes and big trophies.

Have a good one peeps.