Mikel Arteta has now taken charge of 100 Premier League matches as manager of Arsenal but how does his record compare to the start made by one of the best managers in the league, Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp?
Arteta was interviewed for the Gunners job in 2018 but was overlooked in favour of Unai Emery. He was eventually appointed in December 2019 following Emery’s sacking.
It’s taken time for the 40-year-old to impose his ideas and get the side playing the football he wants, with some bumps along the way, but things have steadily improved over the course of his 100 Premier League games in charge.
Arteta’s Gunners narrowly missed out on a top-four finish last season, but they’ve made a stunning start to the 2022-23 campaign and have engineered much excitement in the red half of north London – although the man himself has dampened talk of a title challenge just yet.
“You’re not going to hear it from me,” Arteta said about his side’s title credentials following the 2-1 victory over Fulham. “It’s the next game, the next training session. We go day-by-day.
“But it’s a very different problem from this time last year [when Arsenal lost their first three games without scoring] – I prefer this problem, that’s for sure.
“We need to maintain the cohesion of the team, the belief in the team that everybody is able to contribute. I keep the standards high and keep the demands even higher and make sure everybody is at it every single day.”
The manager’s reputation has even survived the Amazon Prime microscope, even if some scenes from Arsenal: All or Nothing left Arteta looking more like David Brent than a Premier League manager.
And, in an interesting parallel, Jurgen Klopp enjoyed a similar trajectory during his first century of Premier League matches as Liverpool boss.
Klopp made some slow and steady progress in his first few seasons before eventually turning Liverpool into Champions League and Premier League winners.
While everybody associates Klopp’s Reds with the likes of Virgil van Dijk, Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool squad during the early part of the German’s reign was much more prosaic.
And Liverpool only finished eighth in 2015-16, after Klopp took over in October 2015, matching Arsenal’s position under Arteta in both 2020 and 2021. Spooky stuff.
We’ve crunched the numbers to see how Arteta’s first 100 matches as a Premier League manager compare to Klopp’s first 100:
Mikel Arteta
Won: 53
Drawn: 16
Lost: 31
Goals for: 162
Goals against: 111
Clean sheets: 34
Points per game: 1.75
Win rate: 53%
Loss rate: 31%
Goals per game: 1.62
Goals against per game: 1.11
READ: Comparing Mikel Arteta’s first 100 PL games at Arsenal with Wenger’s
Jurgen Klopp
Won: 54
Drawn: 28
Lost: 18
Goals for: 208
Goals against: 117
Clean sheets: 33
Points per game: 1.9
Win rate: 54%
Loss rate: 18%
Goals per game: 2.08
Goals against per game: 1.17
READ MORE: The 12 Arsenal players let go by Arteta and how they’ve fared since
https://www.planetfootball.com/quick-reads/mikel-arteta-arsenal-100-premier-league-games-comparison-klopp-liverpool/
