A look inside Mikel Arteta’s mentality as a manager, with the former Arsenal methodologist

Follow today’s live coverage of Atalanta vs Arsenal in the Champions League

When The Athletics When it was revealed last month that Mikel Arteta had hired professional pickpockets to steal valuables from his Arsenal players at a team dinner last season, there were plenty of people who wished they had been there to see the reaction.

Kevin Balvers, who was head of methodology at the club for three years before moving to current champions PSV Eindhoven this summer, could do even better.

“I was in the control room of the camera system,” Balvers laughs.

“It was before the Liverpool game (Arsenal’s 3-1 home win in February) and the message to the players was that you always have to be prepared for them to subconsciously tempt you into something because they have the mentality to win.

“Then we had a meeting with the players and Mikel said, ‘Is anyone missing a phone?’, and he got it out of a big bag. Then it was, ‘Is anyone missing a hotel key?’.

“The coaches all knew we had hired them, but even one of the staff had stolen something. We showed them the cameras, saying that this is exactly what Liverpool are going to do. It helped to align the players with the way the manager was thinking.”

• Want the latest Arsenal news, analysis and additional insights from James McNicholas, Amy Lawrence, David Ornstein, Art de Roche, Jordan Campbell and more? Join our new Arsenal WhatsApp channel

This is what Balvers describes as an ‘activation’, a pre-match brain game with a deeper psychological message behind it. It’s the kind of outside-of-the-box thinking Arteta quickly got used to after joining his staff in 2021.

They were only played when it was decided the team needed something extra to focus them, but they were more common just before kick-off, with Arteta’s own version of Pictionary being a favourite.

“When we played a team that was countering and there were open spaces, he would say to the players, ‘The highway is open,’ which was a picture of an F1 car with no other cars around them,” Balvers says. “When we played a team with a tighter organization, it was an F1 car, but very busy. The players remembered more quickly what we were talking about.

“This is Mikel. When he talks to people from another world, he tries to think of how he can translate that into football — even with a pilot.

“We had a presentation where he said that they didn’t have control of the plane every minute because some things were automated and they just had to adapt. We had a presentation where one plane went up when you had a high press and another one went down when you had to control the game. He was saying that maybe you have to change your tactics in the game.”

His path to Arsenal was paved by Arteta’s assistant Albert Stuivenberg. They first met when Balvers was trying to expand his knowledge base at Dutch club Vitesse Arnhem and had contacted dozens of coaches from the Netherlands to understand their style of play.

They spoke for two hours, with Balvers helping Stuivenberg articulate his playing model and philosophy, which led to him being recommended to Arteta in 2020.

“I was at home without a contract (after leaving Vitesse), so I offered to help Albert with everything for free,” Balvers says. “He asked me to help with the analysis of the opposition, but I worked on it with Carlos Cuesta and Miguel Molina, who were also not there yet.

“They saw my work there, but Arsenal were struggling with Covid, so those two were able to join then, but Arteta was only able to get more staff later.”

Balvers was at Swedish club Malmo in 2021 when he received a call from Arsenal sporting director Edu Gaspar asking him to apply for the role of head of methodology. After a video call with Arteta and Stuivenberg, an anxious wait ensued, as there were two other candidates. Arteta stressed that the one with the best “connection” would be chosen.

Balvers during his time at Vitesse (Photo: Paul Meima/Pro Shots/Isosport)

But after an eclectic decade with the Cyprus Football Association, the Netherlands youth teams, the Caribbean nation of Curacao, Vitesse, Barcelona’s La Masia academy and the Malmö first team, Balvers was handed the role in North London.

He was tasked with creating a unified football idea that would run through the men’s team, the women’s team and all the way down to the youngest age group at the academy, but he didn’t anticipate how broad his role would become.

“It wasn’t just his (Arteta) ideas on the pitch, it was the re-culture of the training ground and the club in every way,” Balvers said.

“If he said that the painting in the toilet in the stadium had to be changed, it was because he had a vision. It’s a stupid example, but I helped him a lot with these kinds of things.

“On the training ground all the walls were white, but Mikel wanted them to create a culture. I designed some words and pictures with him to put on the walls.

There’s a lot of thought put into the message at Arsenal, whether that’s at the Emirates Stadium or on the training pitch (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

“One of them was ‘BASICS’ — B for Boxes, A for Attack, S for Shape, I for Intensity, C for Compete, and S for Set Pieces. It made it clear what we expected of them, and because he speaks that language every day, the players speak it too.

“He used a lot of specific words, but one of them was ‘collaboration’ – daily cooperation and competition.”

Balvers quickly grew into a football analyst, graphic designer, motivational filmmaker and interior designer all in one. Arteta wanted to bring his colourful analogies to life.

“It was all the graphics and the motivational videos,” Balvers says. “There was a promo video that the club made for Liverpool’s home game last season, but he wanted a bit more energy to connect with the team and the fans. He had a different idea, so he came to me with it and the video you saw was the new one.

“When we went to the away pitch, I made the banners with the Arsenal emblems and others with texts from our game model. Those banners were placed around the dressing room.

“When he presented his financial plan for the club to the board, we did some really good things. We lost the first four games after I joined and I thought: ‘I can be out of here now’, but Mikel’s strength was that he could translate his vision and ideas across the entire organisation, not just the team. I think that’s why the board and the owners believed in him.”

No stone was left unturned to ensure Arteta’s ideas were ingrained in the players’ minds, with advice sought from education experts to understand the science behind how people learn best.

“We had people from different clubs and different sports come and talk to the coaches, and that’s how we picked things up,” Balvers says. “For presentations, an American came by to share techniques that lecturers at the university use to get the message across, how to get information to them and how to get information out of them.

“In tactical meetings, I learned from studies that if you use a dark blue background, the players learn the information better than white, black or red, because the contrast is better. When defending, we made sure the text and highlighted areas were red and when attacking, blue. This helps their brains to know immediately which phase of the game we are talking about.”

Even more attention was paid to the presentations with which the club was introduced to potential new players.

“We talked about how we saw them fitting on and off the pitch and we had already photoshopped some pictures of them into the kit,” Balvers explained.

“For (Jurrien) Timber we had some pictures of his family with the message that we are one big family and take care of everything. Because I am also Dutch, I put some music in there from artists he listened to, instead of English music. Win the dog was in the series for Kai (Havertz), because we knew he loved dogs and we explained that we wanted a family feel.

“That summer we used an animation of a train. Mikel said, ‘We have our direction and we know where we want to go. If you want to continue, jump in.’ A lot of them said it was great because they felt like the club really wanted them in the team.

“Everything that was in Mikel’s head, I visualized and tried to make it interesting but easy for the players to understand. It was really fun for me because I could be creative when he came to me with an idea and I had to figure out how to present it in the best way. It was the perfect job for me.”

After three seasons at Arsenal, it was agony for Balvers to leave. But with a wife and two children, aged three and five, the temptation to return home to his family in the Netherlands proved too great.

The distance made for some difficult moments, but the atmosphere at Arsenal helped him through it.

“Mikel is good at talking tactics, but he is also interested in your family. If you have a problem at home, you can call him in the middle of the night,” he says.

“We had a few breaks before Christmas, but in 2022 we only had one before the World Cup, so it was really hard. I spoke to Mikel and Edu and told them I was struggling, that I couldn’t do this for another year. It was special that they just asked me what my idea was and let me work from the Netherlands for one week a month.

“That’s the biggest example of why I love the people in the club so much. Because it’s not a club that’s just based on results, it’s a very warm place.”

Balvers received a signed and framed shirt as a memento of his time at the club, but his children now have two red and white shirts that they wear when playing in the garden since their father joined PSV. These shirts have the same colours.

He left a parting gift for the Arsenal squad after their final-day win over Everton, urging them to keep going and become Premier League champions for the first time in more than 20 years.

“At the end of every season I always made a video showing the highlights of the whole season, but not just on the pitch. The team building, the barbecues, everything. They were really emotional videos,” he says. “This summer I tried to get the message across that yes, we tried to win and we were disappointed, but we have to look back at the journey and the story we have built together. We have been great, but we have to accept that Manchester City are great too.

“I have no doubt that if Arsenal can make steps like they did last year, they can become the most important team in the Premier League. Every club has its era.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)