Arsenal have spent the last week talking themselves up as the coming force in world football, a club who believe they can be the best in the game for years to come and are prepared to say so repeatedly. Their manager, the only man in the Premier League with a winners' medal in his back pocket, has just put pen to paper on a contract that will extend his spell for a decade.
And that was at best this week's B plot. Such is the gravitational pull of the Manchester City story. It is one that Mikel Arteta was always going to find himself drawn into. No manager can say they have experienced a Premier League warped by City quite like Arteta. As a player, he arrived at the Emirates Stadium a week after Samir Nasri had upped sticks for the Etihad. His coaching career began under Pep Guardiola, two of his three and a half years as an assistant falling within the period of the 114 breaches of Premier League rules. Then, of course, came the defining period of his career so far, the long and ultimately glorious battle against City for Premier League supremacy.
There was plenty Arteta might have shared. Little he chose to. Ultimately, the nearest he got to a definitive statement on City was when asked, given his time at the club, whether his conscience was clear. "Yes," he said emphatically. That aside, the Spaniard was even more cagey on his former employers than he would be when asked about a high-profile injury. It was easy to see why Arteta might be reticent to speak for a club that has reserved the right to explore legal avenues against City once the Premier League's case has been concluded. He was no more candid, however, when it came to reflecting his own personal experience of that momentous day in Premier League history when the charges dropped.
"This has been going for various years," he said. "That process is still not finished. So it is very difficult to express how I feel, because it is not resolved. When it is resolved, I can talk with clarity and tell you exactly how I feel."
He will be held to that. Few came to London Colney expecting Arteta to expound on the City situation. Even if it weren't for his ties to the Etihad, it is just not his style to concern himself with many matters beyond his team, the crusade for more substitutes on the bench notwithstanding. The media room gravitas of reigning Premier League champion does not sit as easily on Arteta as it did, for instance, on Jurgen Klopp, let alone Arsene Wenger.
Arteta was not the only one to play the many questions over City with a dead bat (this is a cricket reference for all you Americans out there). Andoni Iraola was similarly circumspect, ahead of his side's confrontation with City this weekend, though it was notable that Manchester United boss Michael Carrick, who might have had more Premier League winners' medals had it not been for City's rule-breaking, called for speed in concluding this process. That is a view shared by many other clubs in the Premier League, though on Friday's evidence Arteta was in no rush to resume questions over his past.
His future seemed far more invigorating now that he is signed up to 2030. An extension to terms due to expire at the end of this season had long been expected; what was more notable was the way in which club and manager reached an agreement to prolong their partnership beyond the decade mark. Even when they end with one being the best-paid manager in the Premier League, few managers find themselves saying that they "loved" the negotiations after fresh terms have been agreed. Arteta is different.
He loved "the way we have analysed what we've done together and especially how we're going to take this club to be the best in the world for many years... You just have a sense how you feel about each other, how we do things, and I feel really lucky and having [co-chairs] Stan and Josh [Kroenke] in front of you and talking to them and expressing still what they want to do, how they want to do it, especially is just inspiring."
That is not the first time since signing his new deal that Arteta has set expectations at a stratospheric level. Last season's Premier League title was, he said, just the beginning. Meanwhile, club chief executive Richard Garlick spoke about Arsenal "[dominating] football for the next number of years". That is a big ask for a team with one top-flight title to their name in 22 years, one that is still without that Champions League win that is a prerequisite of elite status. These are also the sort of lines that can come back to haunt a team, and yet Arteta is not afraid of setting the bar at the highest level.
"I don't think you have to hide it; the thing is that you have to earn it every single day. Your aspirations and your dreams are where they are. I think it's easier to get them [now]. If I said to you the one that I had when I arrived [as manager in 2019], probably you would say what are you talking about?
"That was the ambition, that's the drive, and it's because we believe that we can do it, and then there will be many factors that would allow us or not to achieve it. Time will tell, but certainly that drive is there."
And of course that opportunity to establish Arsenal as the leading lights in England and Europe is all the greater with their rivals facing what seems likely to be a cataclysmic set of sanctions. Not, of course, that Arteta would want to discuss it in those terms.
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