Keep training fresh, find a hobby… and know when to let top players leave: what Mikel Arteta can learn from greats such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Bob Paisley and Graham Taylor as he bids to join the 10-year brigade and build an Arsenal dynasty

A conversation between Sir Alex Ferguson and Rio Ferdinand nearly 20 years ago encapsulates why the former Manchester United’s manager’s longevity and success surpass those of anyone who has lasted a decade or more at the helm of a British football club.

Ferguson had just spent an evening away in Europe, scouting a player, and returned the following day having left morning training to his assistant Carlos Queiroz. Ferdinand sought him out at Carrington to ask where he’d been. ‘It’s not the same when you’re not here,’ he told him.

The manager took these words to heart, ensuring that from then on United always chartered him a plane for such trips, so he would be at the training ground, even if it meant getting to bed at 2am. 

The significance resides both in Ferguson’s acceptance that a manager’s physical presence was important – ‘leaders are usually unaware, or underestimate, the motivating power of their presence. No one sees themselves as other sees them,’ he observed years later – and his willingness to weigh a player’s complaint.

Mikel Arteta may not feel he needs to take lessons on keeping things fresh and intense from an arch foe like United, though the small band of managers who’ve lasted a decade in post provide pointers as to how Arsenal’s manager might see his new contract to its end point and join that ten-year brigade.

Bill Shankly, at Liverpool’s bridgehead for 15 years, and Brian Clough, 18 years at Forest, were also the all-seeing eye – present at, though not controlling, training. For Shankly, there was a beauty in training sessions being unchanging, says Gordon Milne, who played in the mid-1960s Liverpool team and later enjoyed a very successful seven years as Coventry City manager. 

‘Today, coaches are often lauded for the variety of their sessions,’ Milne writes in his excellent memoir Shankly, My Dad and Me. 

Mikel Arteta’s new deal at Arsenal will take him to a decade in charge

‘That wasn’t us. Success and stability thrived on repetition and although this may have appeared basic, we took these principles on board. 

‘And because Shanks was a great believer in principles (rather than rules, which he knew would be broken), it was nigh-on impossible not to be swept along.’

It was away from the training ground that managers who’ve lasted changed things up. Graham Taylor, who passed away in 2017, was constantly looking to freshen the environment during his ten years at Watford’s helm, occasionally cancelling training and inviting those players who had a dog to turn up with it at the appointed time. They would be embarking on a walk.

’On a similar occasion, the players were asked to turn up with an overnight bag and to bring their passports,’ journalist and author Lionel Birnie, who worked on Taylor’s own excellent posthumous memoir, In His Own Words, tells Daily Mail Sport. 

‘It turned out they were heading by ferry to the Isle of Wight. That was Graham. He kept the momentum going all those years by the depth of his engagement and his imagination.’

Common to some of those managers who have lasted and flourished is a resolve to refresh the backroom staff, so that the voices the players heard were changing. 

David Pleat, who was at the Luton Town helm for eight years, always felt this was a secret of Ferguson’s success. Over time, the United manager employed Brian Kidd, Jim Ryan, Steve McClaren, Carlos Queiroz and Mike Phelan as his No 2s.

‘This constant change meant new ideas, a fresh voice in the dressing room and changing philosophies,’ Pleat wrote in his biography, Just One More Goal, published in 2024.

Pleat contrasts managers like Mark Hughes who always took the same backroom team everywhere with him. 

Graham Taylor kept changing things up at Watford to keep his players engaged

‘Did they change their views and ideas as time progressed?’ he writes. ‘Did they adapt to the players? Did they keep their freshness as the training grounds changed? I wonder.’ 

Mauricio Pochettino was another who displayed such reluctance to employ new assistants, as a critical voice.

For David Moyes, whose first period at Everton spanned 11 years from 2002, longevity was built on learning and evolving as he went along and not presupposing that some of his earlier responses to situations were right. 

As a 38-year-old in his early months at Everton, he let Wayne Rooney and Thomas Gravesen get away with letting off rockets in the gym. A mistake, he felt in retrospect. 

But when one senior member of the squad he inherited repeatedly feigned injury before miraculously declaring himself fit for an attractive final game of the season against a former rival, Moyes flatly told him he would not be playing.

Moyes, who has received several calls from Arteta, including one last season, seems to view management as a constant form of self-improvement. 

‘I’m really looking closely at the moment at what I could do to try to manage the players a bit better,’ he says in a TNT Sports interview this weekend. ‘I feel myself that I’ve had to be adaptable and try and change. I think about it a lot. I stress about it a lot.’

Bill Shankly – with his team of Liverpool coaches Bob Paisley, Ronnie Moran, Joe Fagan and Reuben Bennett – had a set of principles underpinning his 15-year spell at Anfield

John Coleman, whose two spells managing Accrington Stanley spanned 13 years and ten years respectively, puts longevity down to embedding a clearly defined culture. 

‘It’s like a mother yeast,’ he tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘Once it’s going, you don’t have to alter or interfere with it, but you do have to evolve. You have to adapt to the times, or you get left behind. I’ve tried to meet people and exchange ideas and listen.’ 

Coleman, now assistant manager at Reading, thinks it helped that he was never a professional footballer himself. ‘I had to take it my own way and prove myself that way,’ he says. Coleman, like Ferguson, Shankly and Taylor, found delegation to be an article of faith.

Shankly’s innovative obsession with his players ‘living right, sleeping right, eating right, training right’, as Milne puts it, feels immensely modern, now, and his pursuit of new ways was never-ending. One of his 1960s projects was the purchase of a German electrical muscle stimulation device, first tested on midfielder Jimmy Melia.

Melia, lying prostrate on a treatment table with his left leg wired up to the machine’s electrodes, declared he could not feel anything, even when the dials were turned to ‘maximum.’ 

David Moyes admitted to mistakes in his early years at Everton, before replacing Ferguson at United in 2013

Someone in the room pointed out to Shankly that the plug had not been flicked – so someone immediately rectified this, without anyone thinking of turning down the dials.

The story of Melia’s leg shooting up from the table is one Shankly’s old players discuss to this day. He engendered a sense of adventure and fun through infectious enthusiasm and so his players loved him. ‘Players have to see how much it means to you,’ Coleman says. ‘You’ve got to be obsessed with the game.’

The brutally difficult, sometimes impossible, task is releasing players who had delivered so much. Shankly struggled with this in a way that Ferguson didn’t and endured six trophyless years from 1966 because of it. 

‘The hardest thing is to let go of a player who has been a great guy – but all the evidence is on the field,’ Ferguson reflected from retirement. ‘I believe that the cycle of a successful team lasts maybe four years.’

Arsene Wenger laboured under a different kind of sentimentality, which wrecked the legacy he built in the glorious first eight of his 22 years at Arsenal. The money Arsenal spent building a new stadium gave opponents bigger spending power, but his obstinate insistence on attempting to replicate Barcelona’s aesthetic without the quality of player and in a far harder league was flawed. 

That obstinacy was still evident on the occasion of his 1,000th game at Arsenal’s helm, in 2014. ‘Maybe I have an idea of making the players perfect, having the ideal game, the perfect game,’ he said that day. ‘I run after that happiness week after week.’

Perhaps the greatest challenge for Arteta, if he is to make it through a decade at Arsenal, is simply surviving the contemporary maelstrom. 

Arteta has already shown he is willing to vary his methods to keep his players fresh 

Shankly was desolate when stepping down in 1974 and Jurgen Klopp worn out by eight Anfield years in 2024. Clough was the most sadly diminished when he walked away in 1993. He never got over his split with Peter Taylor. He stopped laughing. ‘Peter made me laugh,’ Clough said in an interview, heartbreaking in retrospect.

There are already ample signs that Arteta is looking for his own idiosyncratic ways of ensuring that his Arsenal environment is kept fresh, five years into his tenure. The introduction of ‘Win’, the club’s chocolate labrador, to foster a family-orientated atmosphere. Having ‘pickpockets’ at club dinners to heighten players’ sensory awareness. Bringing a 150-year-old olive tree, symbolic of history and growth, into training.

But it is to the example of Ferguson he would be wise to turn, in search of how to maintain some sanity. And Ferguson would tell the Spaniard to find himself a hinterland, however small and insignificant.

‘I find horse racing is a release but I’m also learning to play the piano,’ he related, during his last stretch as manager. ‘I’m quite determined, you know. It’s a necessary release from the pressure.’