‘This is the place I want to be,’ says Mikel Arteta after signing new Arsenal contract

In exciting news for Arsenal fans, their manager Mikel Arteta has signed a contract extension that will keep him at the club until 2025. To make things even special, women’s team boss Jonas Eidevall has penned down a new contract, which will keep him at the club until the end of the 2023-24 campaign. After being appointed in 2019, Arteta has eventually managed to make his side play at the level they were expected to for a long time. He helped the Gunners overcome an extremely difficult start to the season and guided them into the top four places.

Arsenal have 63 points from 34 games in the Premier League currently. “I’m excited, grateful and really, really happy today,” Arteta was quoted as saying by the club’s website. “When I spoke to Josh he could see the club at the same point and he wanted to take the club the way I wanted to do it. So everything that he’s said, and that Stan has said when I’ve been together with both of them, they’ve always delivered,” he added.

“We want to take the club to the next level and to compete really with the top teams. In order to do that, we have to be playing in the Champions League. We have to be able to evolve the team, improve our players, improve all departments, generate even more connection with our fans, improve the atmosphere at the Emirates, be able to recruit top, top talent and the best people for this club to drive this project to that level.”

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Mikel Arteta: It was a really simple decision for me

Speaking to Arsenal Media, Arteta spoke about the reason behind announcing the contract at this point in the season. Asked about the timing of the announcement, Arteta said, “The club was really eager to do it as quickly as we could. Obviously they showed a lot of faith and belief in what we are doing, with the coaching staff, what the direction of the team, and they thought the best moment was to do it right now, to give a final push to the team, to give some clarity about what we have to do in the summer, in the future. It’s a way of saying ‘listen, from both ways we believe in what we are doing and we want to commit to this project together.’ And this is the place I want to be, so it was a really simple decision for me.”

He then spoke about the ambitions for the short and longer-term plan with the club. Arteta explained, “To take the club to the next level and to compete really with the top teams. In order to do that, we have to be playing in the Champions League. We have to be able to evolve the team, improve our players, improve all departments, generate even more connection with our fans, improve the atmosphere at the Emirates, be able to recruit top, top talent and the best people for this club to drive this project to that level.”