Danny Murphy believes Mikel Arteta can draw from years of working with Pep Guardiola and win the Premier League this season.
Arsenal and City’s race is seen as a mentor and mentee battle, as Pep played a key role in Arteta’s development as a manager.
The former midfielder was the assistant manager at Manchester City between 2016 and 2019 when he took up the Arsenal job.
Pep had trusted him with a lot of responsibilities and they won several league titles together.
Arteta is now building a career at the Emirates and Murphy believes that experience will help. He writes in his column on the Daily Mail:
“Working alongside Pep Guardiola for many years can’t guarantee Mikel Arteta the title — but it is a big help.
“Though he’s still relatively inexperienced, the Arsenal manager was in the room when Pep fought off Liverpool in the greatest title race of them all in 2019.
“He’ll have picked up valuable lessons as we get to the business end of this season and you can already see the benefit to the Gunners.”
Just Arsenal Opinion
There is no doubt that Pep influenced Arteta’s career and we can see a lot of similarities between both clubs.
However, the Arsenal gaffer has built on what he learnt at City and continues to improve on it every season.
Working with Pep and AW won’t have done Arteta any harm and he is very much his own man. All sorts of players who go on to be managers have worked with the best, but it counts for nothing if they don’t have an innate instinct for the role and good man management skills as well.
The 2019 title race was not the greatest of them all. Arsenal winning at Anfield was much better, and there are others I’d put ahead
Murphy is of course self admittedly biased toward Liverpool. He is entitled to be so but equally he cannot in truth claim THAT season to be the greatest title race.
If he were aware of top division history, as he plainly is not, he would know that it is not in the top ten or more of close races.
It IS the most points by the top two combined teams, but he did not mention that, which IS the case, but instead and rather dully, gave an obviously factually inaccurate opinion.