If Mikel Arteta’s dossier is part of a deliberate strategy, it is a dangerous one for Arsenal | Jonathan Wilson

The manager is not yet in Alex Ferguson and José Mourinho’s league, but his conspiracy theories have reached new levels

English football loves the word “dossier”. It doesn’t love dossiers themselves, of course; they’re for nerds – unless, that is, they’re a “secret dossier”, which have a thrilling redolence of spy dramas, invisible ink and dead drops. Non-secret dossiers, though, are inherently risible: call something a “dossier” in English football and you’re immediately signalling: this is absurd poindextering. Dossiers were preposterous when Don Revie was – imagine the pretension! – drawing up scouting reports on opposing players, and they are preposterous today as Mikel Arteta collates images of rival managers stepping outside their technical area.

Arteta, it should be said, did not use the word “dossier”; rather it was swiftly applied to what he had called “a massive storage of images”. During Arsenal’s 2-0 win against Everton last Saturday, he received his second booking of the season for leaving his technical area. This, it turns out, is another part of the vast conspiracy against Arsenal. Yes, Arteta accepted, he left his technical area (44 times before being booked, according to the former referee Graham Scott), but other managers do it too. “There are managers who have the record in the league, 36 times in 10 minutes [they] leave the touchline – no yellows,” he said. “I am clipping all of that … so if somebody comes to me I can say: ‘I am not in the record yet.’ Somebody else has the record so let’s see. Then it’s 36 yellow cards in 10 minutes for the managers.”

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