Having spent a week in a city where it failed to drop below 25 degrees even at night, it was something of a shock for the Arsenal players when they stepped off the plane in London to sub-zero temperatures on Wednesday evening. As he braved the winter chill, though, the success of his side's trip to Dubai would undoubtedly have given Mikel Arteta a warm sense of satisfaction.
With the first winter World Cup in footballing history, each team has taken a step into the unknown over the past week. Arsenal though have been planning for months to ensure it went as smoothly as possible.
As far back as September, Dubai was being sounded out as a potential destination for a warm weather training camp to gear the Gunners up for the return of the Premier League. Having travelled to the Middle Eastern city in January of this year, it made sense in theory to go there again. Of course in practice though things are rarely ever quite as easy as planned.
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The time in Dubai did throw up unexpected issues that Arsenal had to deal with such as Ben White's early departure from the England squad due to personal reasons. With stories circulating that other factors had been at play in his early exit from Qatar, it was crucial for the club to act swiftly in order to allow White time to go on holiday before joining the group in Dubai where it is understood that he settled quickly.
Beyond that though, the programmes of players in Qatar were individually tailored to cater to their needs. Granit Xhaka and Matt Turner for example both exited the World Cup at the second round stage before spending time on holiday with their families in Dubai and joining the team for training. Takehiro Tomiyasu meanwhile went out at the same stage with Japan, but was given permission to fly back to London.
For those in Dubai from the start training was intense. Arteta wasted little time reacclimatising players to his very specific set of demands. Among the drills worked upon at the Al Nasr Leisure Land Stadium were exercises focused on what Arteta has termed 'the basketball rule' where players are encouraged to recover loose balls as quickly as possible to recover them as if they were rebounds off the back board in basketball.
The Spaniard also had his players working on inverting the full-backs as we have seen with the likes of Ben White and Oleksandr Zinchenko this season, something that has been crucial to their increased dominance of possession in the Premier League.
Of course, the World Cup itself has offered a natural bonding experience for the Gunners players out in Dubai, and several watched the quarter-finals together at the team hotel. A midnight curfew meant that those watching England's quarter final with France had to spend the second half watching in their rooms due to the time difference, though.
For some players such as Reiss Nelson, who is well versed in short mid-season pauses having spent time on loan in Holland and Germany where the football calendar is punctured by a winter break, this return to training was perfectly manageable.
"It was fine," the Hale Ender says of his break. "We had the first week off where I just chilled out with my friends and my girlfriend and then the second week we came here to train. It wasn’t too tough. It wasn’t a big break. I think I managed it well."
For others it would doubtless have been harder. With so many senior players away at the World Cup, maintaining the standards set in the first half of the season was always going to be difficult.
It was here that Arteta was forced to lean on his academy and after consultation with Per Mertesacker and Under-21s coach Mehmet Ali, a large selection were chosen to travel out to the Middle East. It was a gamble forced upon him somewhat, but Arteta could not have been happier with the results.
"We’ve been lucky because we brought a lot of kids here, but what they’ve done is they’ve not only maintained the standards, but they’ve increased the standards," the Spaniard said after his side had clinched the Dubai Super Cup with a win over AC Milan. "Thank you so much to them because they’ve been key in this camp to have a successful period of training and competition."
Several of the academy youngsters including the impressive Lino Sousa have now had individual feedback sessions with individual development coach Carlos Cuesta, who has informed them on where they have been doing well and where they need to improve. With youngsters like Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly still too young to sign professional deals such a exposure will surely have been invaluable in the fight to convince them to continue their footballing journeys at Arsenal.
With the success of the youngsters' contribution Arteta has been able to re-instil the automatisms that made his side such a threat in the early part of the season. After years of hard work on the training ground, games like the friendlies against Lyon and AC Milan are evidence of how deep these principles run in the squad.
"I think it is all praise to the coaching staff," Nelson says. "I feel like we've had the same group for two or three years now and he's implemented the playing style all the time no matter what. In training sessions there are games we play were it's five vs five games, the boss wants to always get that tactical awareness from attack and defence that the players understand.
"That is something that he has drilled into our heads that we follow the model. He is like a magician. He makes us play in a certain style that we love."
There is still more to do for this Arsenal side as they gear up for the return of the Premier League on Boxing Day. World Cup stars like Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli need to be reintegrated into the group, while William Saliba is still out in Qatar ahead of France's World Cup final on Sunday with Argentina. But with a well-spent 10 days in Dubai under their belts the Gunners are ideally placed to kick on and hopefully build on the momentum that has put them in a fantastic position to challenge for a first title since 2004.
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