Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta uses ‘desirable difficulties’ to prepare his players – is this a good coaching strategy?

The former England rugby union coach, Sir Clive Woodward, once shared an anecdote about an unexpectedly delayed diving contest, after an interloper in fancy dress had jumped in the pool.

Woodward described how some competitors became overly anxious, ill-focused and disturbed, while others stayed calm, continued their preparation, and treated these altered circumstances as part of the challenge. Not surprisingly, the latter divers performed much better when the competition resumed.

In a similar vein, Arsenal men’s football manager Mikel Arteta spoke recently about deliberately creating unexpected disruptions for his players as part of their preparation. The Spaniard, whose contract has just been extended by the Premier League champions, explained that he does this to promote greater adaptability among his players, when they have to perform at the highest level under fluctuating real-world circumstances.

Arteta’s tactics include unexpectedly delaying the players’ meals, changing their travel plans, making dressing rooms hotter and reducing the number of massage beds. Another reported example was secretly hiring professional pickpockets at a team dinner, to emphasise the importance of maintaining awareness against opponents known for stealing advantages.

Arteta is not the first elite coach to use such management tactics. But is there any evidence that they work? And should we be adopting similar tactics in our own lives and organisations?

Legendary coaches unsettled their players

Many top sports coaches have found unusual ways of provoking players to try to heighten their match readiness. The legendary American football coach Bill Belichick – whose favourite Sun Tzu quote is “every battle is won before it is fought” – would make conditions as hard as possible in training for his players, such as the state of the balls. “Wet, sticky, cold, slippery – however bad we can make them, I make them,” he boasted.

Across the Atlantic, Nottingham Forest’s all-conquering football manager Brian Clough would regularly unsettle players and opponents alike with his strategically unpredictable behaviour. One one occasion, he threw one of his player’s boots into the crowd, declaring that if he was not going to use them properly, someone else might want to. Complacency was rarely an issue with Clough’s teams.

But what appears to distinguish Arteta’s methods is a heightened focus on the potential value of everyday operational disruptions for player development. This mimics research undertaken by US psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork on the effect of “desirable difficulties” as a means of enhancing learning capabilities.

Their work found that introducing short-term, effortful challenges into education plans could enhance learning and retention. Discomfort could be beneficial when viewed not as an obstacle, but a means to promote adaptability and development.

Canadian sport psychologist Nicola Hodges has also worked on desirable difficulties in high-performance sport, emphasising the importance of incorporating challenge and difficulty in training to help athletes adapt. Her training regime framework suggests optimal learning often arises from struggle with appropriately challenging situations – but only if the level of struggle is calibrated with the learner’s capabilities.

The context of the challenge is also important. Hodges concludes that difficulties should be meaningful – such as training when fatigued or with crowd noise – to promote useful transfer to situations that are likely to happen in the real world.

Locating the ‘challenge point’

The fact that Arteta has talked about this unusual training tactic now is interesting. It came after disruption to Arsenal’s Champions League travel plans, caused by a major UK air traffic control issue, were taken in the team’s stride.

They still won away at Italian giants Napoli, after which Arteta revealed he had deliberately made his team late for matches in pre-season, to prepare them for just such an eventuality. “I don’t want the players and staff panicking,” he explained. “When that [disruption] happens, adapt to it – don’t use it as an excuse.”

Having won the Premier League title for the first time as Arsenal manager last season, it might be that Arteta now feels more emboldened to further challenge the players and reduce the likelihood of complacency.

After a similarly successful season with Portuguese club Porto, the emerging managerial great José Mourinho deliberately adopted a more demanding tactical model. He later explained that this was to force his players to be more rigorous, focused, and to “get them on a short leash”, rather than allowing them to rest on their laurels.

Hodges writes about locating the “challenge point” for each player, where adaptation is maximised without risk of demotivating or overwhelming them. Of course, this point is different for each player, depending on their physical and mental characteristics.

This is a consideration for Arteta moving forward. As champions, how far should the bar be raised collectively to promote further improvement? And how much uncertainty and difficulty can each of his players tolerate? An unexpected bump in the road to another league title came recently with defeat to Brighton, where they faced unsettlingly unusual “pressing traps”.

Arteta’s approach parallels Stoic resilience training, and the notion that preparing for difficulty in a controlled environment can bolster performance later when encountering uncertainty.

Stoic philosophy emphasises that external circumstances are not under our control, but our reactions and choices are. Stoics intentionally exposed themselves to minor hardships such as cold baths, to train their ability to maintain composure and adaptability.

The psychological principle underpinning this, well supported by empirical evidence, is that exposure to manageable, planned stressors can promote adaptability, focus and resilience. For any of us in any walk of life, difficulties may indeed sometimes prove desirable.