There will be no lack of respect between Pep Guardiola and his old friend and assistant Mikel Arteta when Manchester City host Arsenal in the FA Cup Fourth Round.
The pair’s relationship stretches back over two decades, when Guardiola was winding down his playing career at boyhood club Barcelona and Arteta was following in his footsteps and emerging through the youth set-up, before the duo reunited as manager and assistant manager at Manchester City.
Now the pair are on a collision course; Arteta’s Arsenal side have emerged as an outstanding candidate to take City’s Premier League crown and the top two sides in England face each other in a huge FA Cup clash at the Etihad.
So we’ve collected together everything Guardiol and Arteta have said about each other since they worked together as manager and assistant.
September 2019
“He’s helped me a lot,” Guardiola told The Times in September 2019, speaking about his assistant at the time.
“From day one, so not just the last two seasons, from day one. He has an incredible work ethic, and he has a special talent to analyse what happens, and to find the solutions.
“We talk a lot about what he believes and feels and so on. He helped me a lot, especially in the first year. He knew the Premier League – like for example in games against Stoke or whatever.
“He can tell me about the players we will face better than myself, because he played against them and was in the Premier League for 10 or 11 years. That’s a long time.
“He’s so happy when we win but suffers when we don’t and that is why he tries to find a solution. He’s an incredible human being, with incredible values about what it means in the locker room to be together, and he is already an incredible manager and he’ll have incredible success in his future.
“We see the football in really quite a close way.”
June 2020
Guardiola has kept up the same respectful and flattering tone since Arteta left to succeed Unai Emery at Arsenal and was looking forward to their first meeting as opposition managers in June 2020.
“I’m so excited to see him, one of the nicest people I ever met. It was a joy for me and for all of us to work with him,” he said pre-match.
“The feeling I have is he’s happy there and doing an incredible job. I’m looking forward to seeing him.”
Arteta said: “Well, he [Guardiola] was an influence for me since I was 15 years old and we met at Barcelona, both as players and in my coaching career and my…
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