David Moyes ponders what Mikel Arteta has taken from him

The Scot snapped up Arteta in January 2005 during his first spell in charge at Goodison Park and the former midfielder turned out for the Blues for over the next six-and-a-half years before his transfer to the Gunners.

Having worked as a coach under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, the Spaniard returned to Arsenal as manager on December 2019 and having guided them to the FA Cup at the end of his first season, added the club’s first Premier League title for 22 years in May.

And Moyes said: “I always look and I think: ‘Mikel has had Pep, what would he take from me?’ I don’t really know. But I think he might take from me a little bit of the other side.

“I know how Pep works, how good his teams are and what he’s seen. He’s worked under Pep and he’s seen an awful lot of stuff there.

“But there’s a lot of other stuff like having a winning culture and a winning team, how you’re dealing with the players, what you’re demanding of them, the standards you set. I hope that in some way he might have taken bits of that.”

Arteta is one of four Basque-born managers currently plying their trade in the Premier League along with Andoni Iraola at Everton’s neighbours Liverpool, Unai Emery at Aston Villa, plus former Kop Idol Xabi Alonso at Chelsea, but Moyes reckons his old protege, now 44, has done an incredible job.

He said: “I think he was always going to be his own person anyway. I could be babbling on here, but look at the boys who’ve come out of the Basque Country, from Andoni, Unai, Mikel, Xabi Alonso.

“There used to be periods where we had great Scottish managers, from Sir Alex to Jock Stein. But I was fortunate to go and work there for a year at Real Sociedad and it looks like at the moment they’ve got the magic dust.

“Mikel has done a brilliant, brilliant job. I remember at the time, I remember listening and hearing people talk about what he hadn’t done.

“I’m saying: ‘what a load of rubbish.’ I think won the FA Cup at the end of the first year and folks were saying: ‘he’s not won anything.’

“I’m thinking: ‘he’s only just going into the job.’ It looked as if there was a period where he was very close… I was calling it the media pressure.

“But he hasn’t half stood up. He’s now right up there, winning the Premier League.

“He’s playing against the best teams in the Champions League. He’s right up there with the best managers in the world at the moment and obviously, he’s got a team which has probably got that status as well.”