'All or Nothing: Arsenal': Did Mikel Arteta have a heart disease? Gunners manager opens up on rare condition
In what came as a shocker for the uninitiated, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta revealed a startling piece of news in Amazon Prime's 'All or Nothing: Arsenal' which premiered on August 4. The eight-episode series on the streamer dropped three episodes and the first saw the Spaniard opened up to his team about his heart disease when he was young.
The first episode, 'New Beginnings' shed light on the new-look Arsenal outfit that was still coming to terms with the brand of football they wanted to play. Things go sideways for the decorated club as they lose their first three games to Brentford, Chelsea, and Manchester City in a row. While they eventually broke the shackles with a 1-0 win against Norwich in their fourth Premier League game, safe to say, it was Arteta's stirring pep talk to his team that did the job.
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The manager spoke about his condition to his team minutes leading up to the Norwich skirmish. "When I was born, I was born with a big heart disease," he said. "And for two years they had to try to save my life until I had the opportunity to have the first open surgery in Spain." To set the context, Arteta was talking about high-performance teams in various industries and one of them was the emergency services. "In many industries, there are high-performance teams," he explained. "And these high-performance teams are called like this because they all have something in common - because they get results."
"So a high-performance team, not a football team or basketball team, for example, it can be an emergency team, the ones that work for example in hospitals. "These teams have to be surrounded by people, they are very special. They are willing to work 24/7. They do it only for one reason - because they love what they do. That's their drive, that's their purpose."
Per a BBC interview, Arteta said he was unsure how the process of his surgery would unfold. "I was born with a big heart issue that they could not resolve until I was two years old because I was too little," Arteta recalled. "They had to open my heart and go through it. It was one of the first surgeries that were done in that way in Spain, so we didn't know how it was going to end up. I was a really lively kid, the doctor was telling my father and mother that he needs to calm down, that he's not going to be able to do much exercise with that problem."
'All or Nothing: Arsenal' Episodes 1-3 are streaming on Amazon Prime Video.