Mikel Arteta joked that he would have been facing a fan revolt had he not given William Saliba his chance at Arsenal.
Signed for £27million in 2019, the French central defender was made to wait three years before finally making his Premier League debut at the start of this season. At that point, it was unclear whether Saliba would ever make the grade in north London, with Arteta the toughest of taskmasters.
The Gunners boss arrived in the dugout months after Saliba signed from Saint Etienne and after Covid-19 affected his season back with the Ligue 1 club, Arteta left him out of his squad for the 2020/21 season.
Another spell away at Nice would follow, before a coming-of-age campaign with Marseille last year. His performances at the Stade Velodrome meant there was a clamour for his inclusion at the start of pre-season, a clamour Arteta finally acknowledged.
“I was 100 per cent sure that I was going to have a lot of pressure externally to give him the opportunity,” Arteta said in his press conference before facing Bournemouth. “Then it was the perfect storm and a beautiful relationship started to build.”
Saliba’s long and winding road to the Arsenal first team now looks like a masterstroke, with the 21-year-old emerging as one of the Premier League’s best defenders. But Arteta has now admitted that he had a series of tests the youngster had to pass, proving he was truly ready to be put into the fold.
“I just wanted to see... how he was because then you can understand the real him,” he added. “How the player is going to reintegrate into our dynamic after being out for so long. Is there some frustration there, something personal between, for example, between me and the player because he could not understand that?”
But those doubts quickly subsided with his determination to prove a point in the best possible way standing out. Arteta explained: “He had an immediate impact... the first two training sessions that we looked at him and thought: ‘There's huge potential here.’”
“His attitude, the way he came in and said: ‘I'm going to prove that I'm very good and I deserve to be here’. Without looking back, or being shy - he was doing it the right way.”
“He took out every question mark that we could have with him and gave us all the reasons to play him.”
Saliba’s partnership with Gabriel Magalhaes has been one of the foundations of an Arsenal title bid many deemed nigh-on impossible before a ball was kicked last August. And they evoked memories of Arsenal defensive pairings of the past, when despite beating Leicester City last week, they went at each other after the full-time whistle.
“They have a happy marriage,” Arteta said of his starting defensive duo. “They love playing with each other! But they are really demanding of each other, which is good. Everything is fine.
“I don’t want robots, I want players with feeling, with passion. That they demand more from each other and that they have a chemistry, and those two certainly have that chemistry on and off the field. I love that even when winning, they want each other to do better.”
