Mikel Arteta and Xabi Alonso are the king of the Premier League and the pretender to the throne. This is the story of how their remarkable shared history led them to the same touchline – as very different managers

The photograph has been famous for some time. Two 10-year-old boys stand on a grassy slope at a youth football tournament in France, staring into the camera. It is their first tournament abroad with, Antiguoko, a club from their home city of San Sebastian, in the Basque Country. They will go on to win the tournament.

On the left, Mikel Arteta beams into the camera. He looks smart, in a dark anorak. He is holding what looks like a notebook or a map in a plastic holder. He looks neat and together and stylish even then. He looks as if he cannot wait for all the adventures that life is going to bring him.

On the right, Xabi Alonso looks more uncertain. He wears a wistful, thoughtful expression. He is looking at the camera as if it is a curiosity. He is carrying a rolled-up poster in one hand and what looks like a pennant in the other. His anorak is undone and billows around him. They are different characters but a certain intensity is already apparent in both.

And now the boys are men. And the first thing to say about them is that they have grown up good men, a product of their families and their city and their region. 

‘I know I am hardly neutral expressing my opinion on him as a friend and former team-mate,’ Jamie Carragher says of Alonso, ‘but anyone who spends time with Xabi will appreciate that the manner in which he carries himself and presents his vision of the game oozes class.’

Arteta can divide opinion more than his old friend but his instincts are sound and he tries to be fair and just, not only with his players but with everyone he meets. 

He is liked by staff and players at Arsenal and if it sometimes feels that he lacks levity, that is because levity is not something he aspires to.

The coincidence of Alonso and Arteta growing up together, playing football on Playa de La Concha in San Sebastian, playing for the same youth team, growing into players who faced each other for Liverpool and Everton and now will face each other as managers of Chelsea and Arsenal at the Emirates on Sunday, is endlessly striking.

Both men have led their clubs to successive wins in the early stages of the new season and early predictions are that they and their respective teams are the most likely sides, along with Manchester City, to contest the title this year.

Sunday’s Emirates clash will be their first meeting as managers but it seems likely to be the start of a fierce rivalry.

To add to the fascination of their shared background, Andoni Iraola, the new Liverpool manager, played for Antiguoko at the same time but Alonso and Arteta have risen faster and more prominently. And if their backgrounds unite them, the different paths their careers took exposed them to contrasting influences that have shaped the football their teams play.

Both men have been outstandingly successful already. Arteta took over as Arsenal boss at the end of 2019 when the club was at a low ebb. He brought the club together, dragged it out of the despond that followed the Arsene Wenger years and had the hunger and the drive to survive three consecutive runner-up finishes to beat Manchester City to a first title in 22 years last season.

Those three successive second-place finishes would have destroyed other managers but not Arteta. He did not lose belief in himself or his players. He stuck to his playing principles, he resisted revolution, he kept evolving the side. He played under David Moyes at Everton and cites Moyes’ influence as a lesson in to how to build a club.

Alonso made a spectacular start to his own coaching career, taking over at Bayer Leverkusen in October 2022 and doing the unthinkable by leading them to the first Bundesliga title in their history in 2023-24 without losing a game. Leverkusen’s win halted a run of 11 straight Bayern Munich title triumphs.

Mikel Arteta has turned Arsenal into the dominant force in English football, never losing belief in himself or his players despite three straight second-place finishes

Alonso, meanwhile, will try and replicate his enormous success at Bayer Leverkusen with Chelsea

When the two boys left Antiguoko within a few months of each other in their teenage years, Arteta went to Barcelona and gradually came under the orbit of Pep Guardiola. 

Most significantly of all, he became a disciple of Johan Cruyff, the great Dutch player who became one of the most imitated and followed coaches of all time and introduced a kind of ‘total football’ to Barcelona.

‘They changed the world for me,’ Arteta says of his time at Barcelona. ‘It’s like the sky had opened and this was a different sport. 

‘Johan was the influence of everything when I was at the La Masia academy, all the coaches who were at the academy it was the same. He was the one that injected that vision and that passion and understanding for the game.

‘From there, the game has evolved. Pep took the game and his vision to a different level. Johan is the greatest football person. I fell in love with that Barcelona team of his, I was six or seven, and I fell in love with that team, that way of playing. I had posters, kits, and if Barcelona were losing 1-0, I was going mad and my dad would send me to bed.

‘I learned a lot about the culture of a club when I was there and now, at Arsenal, it’s about the culture I create. 

‘It’s like drizzle. It’s always raining. You have to have a jacket because if you decide you are going to go without a jacket, you are soaking wet. If you don’t do it every day, the structure cracks.

‘I have high demands but I am realistic, too. What do I expect from one of my kids? That he goes to his room and everything is tidy and he always flushes the toilet and his toothpaste is always in the right place and they eat and they are always dressed? It’s not like this. We want everything perfect but this game is very imperfect.

‘I like to be challenged but if you work with me at Arsenal in the environment we have created at the club, I need you to love what you do because that is why we are here and we have to be contagious.’

Arteta’s vision of football was shaped by Barcelona. He idolised Johan Cruyff, and worked for years with Pep Guardiola

Alonso, however, was shaped by a more diverse group of managers, including Rafa Benitez at Liverpool

Alonso’s influences are more diverse. Arteta idolised Cruyff, admired Moyes and worked with Guardiola at Manchester City but Alonso has played for both Guardiola and Jose Mourinho, both Rafa Benitez and Carlo Ancelotti. He has already managed in Germany and Spain, where his reign at Real Madrid was short-lived. Some credit him with being more flexible and pragmatic than Arteta.

‘The data and the information is not everything,’ Alonso says. ‘You have to have knowledge and intuition. You have to have man management. I have had great managers and from each one, I have learned. I have lived with them through good and bad moments and understood why they have made their decisions.

‘It’s not copy, paste. It’s about being authentic, being your own self. Building my own ambition as a coach, taking the best from each one. That is the way you are going to be able to trust me. I want to be open-minded to everything, not just one idea, have different ideas, sticking with your principles.

‘In different countries, you live different things. The more you know, the better you can get. The German way – for the last 20 years, something has been happening in German football. I think it started in 2006 with the World Cup in Germany and the influence of Jurgen Klinsmann.

‘What the German Federation started doing with grassroots and new managers and young managers. The profile of the manager is very brave and intense, physical but with a tactical approach. Julian Nagelsmann, Thomas Tuchel and Jurgen Klopp but there are others, too. I thought it was great what they were doing.’

So if Arteta largely sticks with a 4-3-3 system that has consistently served him well, Alonso mixes styles according to the challenge in front of him. 

The basic formation he favours is 3-4-2-1 but against Brighton last weekend, Chelsea won the game 4-3 while recording only 26 per cent of possession. When new goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez was on the ball, 97 per cent of his passes were hit long. As he settles in at Stamford Bridge, that process will be refined.

Sunderland’s Granit Xhaka has played for both managers. He is more complimentary about Alonso than Arteta, which is hardly a surprise given he was the star man for Bayer Leverkusen in their title-winning season and endured some difficult times at Arsenal before and after Arteta’s arrival.

‘Mikel has his philosophy and that’s it,’ Xhaka says. ‘You know this: always change the sides, find the free man, let him jump, for example. Play always with a back four and never change to a back five for example, or never change like a 4-4-2 with two proper strikers. So you had this 4-3-3, with one six and two eights.

‘Xabi is a little bit different. I think that Xabi can play a back four, but he can play as well a back five. What he wants is always two No6s, not running everywhere, or more of the time be in the position. But if you are a coach you need your own philosophy, your own tactics, your own ideas.’

‘Mikel has his philosophy and that’s it,’ Granit Xhaka says of Arteta, under whom he endured some difficult times at Arsenal

‘Xabi is a little bit different,’ adds Xhaka of Alonso, who is perceived as a more flexible coach than his boyhood friend

It is the most eagerly anticipated game of the season so far. Chelsea under Alonso look like the great entertainers, despite that possession statistic against Brighton. They will score plenty and concede a few, too. 

Alonso appears to have allowed Cole Palmer to rediscover his best form and line him up in a formidable front three with Morgan Rogers and Joao Pedro. They will present a test for Arsenal’s redoubtable defence.

Arsenal already look like the team to beat again this season. Their squad is even deeper and even more impressive than it was last season. They have improved from a position of strength. They look, at last, like a team that believes in itself after getting over the line and winning the title.

This is Arteta’s league now. He is the manager of the champions, he is the longest-serving manager in the top flight by a distance, he is the man. 

But if there is a pretender, if there is a manager who has the qualities to threaten his dominance, it is the man who was once the boy standing next to him in the photograph all those years ago.