A club of nine, about to become ten
Monday night at Villa Park will be Mikel Arteta’s 250th Premier League match in charge of Arsenal. He walked into the building in December 2019. Almost seven years later he is about to join a list that holds nine other names.
Reaching 250 Premier League games as a manager is unremarkable enough. Doing all 250 at the same club is a different matter. Only Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, David Moyes, Joe Kinnear, Harry Redknapp, Alan Curbishley, Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Sean Dyche have got there. The most recent was Guardiola, in February 2023 at Manchester City. Klopp at Liverpool and Dyche at Burnley crossed the line the year before that.
Three and a half years have passed without a new name. That gap says something about how quickly boards now reach for the exit.
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The record behind the number
Arteta arrives at the milestone with 150 wins, 48 draws and 51 defeats. A 60.2 percent win rate. Of the managers who reached 250 at one club, only three finished with a better return: Guardiola on 70.8 percent, Ferguson on 65.2, Klopp on 62.6. Wenger, who spent 22 years at Arsenal, sits below him.
The route there was not smooth. Arsenal had gone six straight seasons outside the top four when Arteta took over. He dragged them back, then parked them at second place three years running, the kind of sequence that curdles into mockery if it runs any longer. Last season it broke. Arsenal won the league for the first time in 22 years.
Why the timing suits Arsenal
Continuity is worth actual points right now. Manager turnover across the Premier League has been heavy over the past year, and squads learning a new voice tend to leak results while they do it. Arsenal have none of that to work through. Their staff, their patterns and their pecking order are all settled.
Villa Park is a rough place to mark an anniversary. Unai Emery has taken Arsenal apart there before, and his sides have a habit of ambushing the division’s better teams in that stadium.
Arteta turned 44 in March. On the evidence of the past two seasons, 250 may end up looking like an early checkpoint rather than a career total.
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