Mikel Arteta to road test Arsenal new recruits in clash with MLS All-Stars

A rather surreal contest takes place in the capital of the US on Wednesday evening.

On the one side are a composite team selected partly by referendum, partly by sports administrators and only partly by the manager, who was once the most expensive teenager in the sport.

On the other side, perhaps the most upwardly mobile club in the top tier of European football, conspicuous for their youth, and enjoying that rarity in the early weeks of the transfer window: the approval of a broad majority of their supporters for the choice of new signings and the major financial outlay made by the management.

The occasion is MLS All-Stars versus Arsenal, the first of three pre-season friendlies in the US for last season’s Premier League runners-up.

The next two – Arsenal play Manchester United on Saturday, Barcelona five days later – read more like the sorts of fixtures they are looking forward to fulfilling as they embark on a Premier League campaign as, in most minds, second favourites for the title. They also return in September to the European Champions League after a seven-year absence, but the opening US fixture has a different sort of resonance.

The MLS, US football’s top level of competition and still less than 30 years old as a professional set-up, has seldom seemed quite so boastful about its status as this week, which began with the unveiling of Lionel Messi for Inter Miami, the most stellar individual to have committed a segment of his playing career to America since Pele, in a previous incarnation of the sport in the US, in the 1970s.

Alas, Messi will not feature for the All-Stars, his debut as a US-based player being a prized event for his new club. But there will be a star involved. Wayne Rooney, formerly England’s most prolific goalscorer, once of Manchester United, Everton and, last but not least, DC United, as a veteran player and now as their manager.

Rooney, who shares the role of All-Star selector with US fans, who vote on who should be in the squad, and with the boss of the league, has been telling reporters in the lead-up to tonight of his respect for Mikel Arteta, Arsenal’s manager. And he has also taken the opportunity to remind the wider game that, one day, he too would like to be managing a Premier League club.

Arsenal's top earners 2023/24 - in pictures

Not so long ago, there was a genuine possibility that might be Everton, where Rooney began his playing career. He had impressed during his first job as a senior first-team coach, at Derby County, a club hampered by debt and administrative issues, in the English Championship.

Rooney earned praise for his work with young players. Arteta has made that a trademark, and Arsenal’s youth-first recruitment strategy is shaping a summer that might have felt deflating – Arsenal led the Premier League title-race going into match day 33 of the 38-game season, only to be reeled in by a relentless Manchester City.

Arteta rejected the notion that inexperience caused the late-campaign dip in form in 2022/23. The strengthened spine of the Arsenal of 2023/24 backs up his determination that young, rising talent must give Arsenal’s renaissance continued momentum.

Declan Rice’s arrival from West Ham United, for a fee in excess of £100 million, gives huge midfield responsibility to a 24-year-old. Kai Havertz’s £65 million capture from Chelsea invites the German, 24 and still to define his best position on the pitch, to seize the creative initiative.

Jurrien Timber, the Netherlands international signed from Ajax for more than £35 million, is, at 22, tasked with providing the same sort of defensive authority Arteta drew from William Saliba at the same age for much of last season.

Given Granit Xhaka’s departure – the 30-year-old has joined Bayer Leverkusen – and the now-established figurehead roles in the Arteta scheme of Martin Odegaard, 24, and Bukayo Saka, 21, Arsenal will enter Europe’s principal club competition with one of the youngest starting XIs among all the clubs from the continent’s major leagues. But Arteta would argue that in Rice and Havertz he has bought both long-term potential and proven big-match calibre.

Rice was the last English captain to lift a European trophy after West Ham beat Fiorentina in May’s Europa Conference League final. He’s “like a lighthouse,” said Arteta of Rice, “he’s willing to put light in others, improve others”.

Havertz, two seasons earlier, was the match-winner when Chelsea won the 2021 Champions League final.

Some of these medalled new recruits may be mere spectators for most, or all, of Wednesday's friendly in Washington. But by the close of the tour, Arteta should be wiser about how his young, driven, costly Arsenal will look, and whether they can push on from being leading challengers to Manchester City in the Premier League to real contenders, capable of lasting the pace.