Guardiola ready to benefit as fellow Cruyff disciple Arteta strays from the path

Pep Guardiola (left) and Mikel Arteta direct their teams during a Carabao Cup final where City played with a swagger Arsenal couldn’t match. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

Guardiola’s ability to accommodate Cherki’s creative idiosyncrasies into this late title charge stands in stark contrast to Arsenal’s more functional forward line. It was instructive that the City manager compared Cherki with another very un-Pep like player whom he also accommodated, Sergio Agüero, after the key role he played in victory over Chelsea at the weekend. “Sergio was not the incredible high-press player but he tried his best and all I ask is that,” Guardiola said. “Do your best and you can do it, because he has another quality. Every player has his own ability.” Indeed, the blossoming of Cherki – with notable admonishments for rabona crosses and Carabao Cup showboating – has been key to freeing up City in the home straight.

And while neither Cherki nor Martín Zubimendi are likely to be aware of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Nobel prize-winning paper on Prospect Theory, both demonstrate intuitive understanding of the basic concepts in their respective form.

Published in 1979, the seminal paper, which deeply influenced data-led decision-making in sport, showed that human beings suffer from loss aversion when in a favourable position. Thinking becomes dominated by what they could lose whereas, in pursuit, you have a clear target, full focus and less to lose and are thus much more open to risk taking.

Sir Alex Ferguson might call it Devon Loch syndrome, famously citing the horse that collapsed within sight of the Grand National finish line to bait Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle into their own meltdown in the 1995-96 title race.

Arteta’s Arsenal look like a team set up not to lose. And it’s not a recent phenomenon confined to this mini slump. Even back in February, in the “goals from open play” table, City were ranked first with 83% with Arsenal 16th, at 58%.

“Outcome pressure” is how Martin Fairn of Gazing, the company the All Blacks hired to transform their losing mindset to win the Rugby World Cup in 2011, describes it. Once you start obsessing about the outcome, as Arsenal appear to be, decision making goes awry. “In the mission simulation training we do with the British army, they give themselves 24 hours to reach a target,” says Fairn. “One hour in, it all feels pretty relaxed. As they go through the night and get closer to the enemy, there’s more jeopardy and decisions are harder. And if you make a stupid decision 50 yards from the enemy, that is life and death jeopardy.

“The question is, how heavy does the context and the associated pressure weigh on your shoulders? And are you diverted and not able to think clearly, or are you able to maintain agile thinking?

“Outcome pressure limits our ability to think clearly. Either you over-engage – ‘we have to fight to win, to save our lives’ – which can flip over into frantic stupidity, or there’s passivity, where you just freeze and people disappear. They’re playing but they’re off the pitch. You start to just feel the weight of being in the lead. And that’s exactly what’s happening with Arsenal now. It gets called choking and various things like that. It just means you feel the weight of being favourites because you’re closer and closer.

“The question is, how do you free up the mentality to acknowledge the significance of the outcome while resetting your attention. The zoom-out moment says we are not where we are by mistake. We’re at the top of the league because we’ve competed and delivered results consistently through the season.”

Arsenal struggled in the Carabao Cup final and have done since. Are they suffering from ‘outcome pressure’? Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

The twist is, of course, that Guardiola and Arteta go way back, not just to their days together at Manchester City, where Arteta was Guardiola’s assistant, but to Barcelona’s youth academy, which forged them both in the values of Cruyff’s risk-taking, possession-dominant football. Indeed Arteta partly couldn’t progress at Barcelona because Guardiola played in his position and Xavi was the better contemporary.

One of the few first-team appearances Arteta had was in a pre-season friendly against Hertha Berlin where, as a callow 17-year-old, he came on for Guardiola, the 28-year-old established pro. “With Xavi, Iniesta and Arteta, everything suggests Barça won’t have problems in this position for the next 20 years,” Guardiola said encouragingly after that game and he wasn’t wrong, even if Arteta wouldn’t feature.

And where once they both seemed to be inheritors of Cruyff’s legacy of playing football that demanded risk and creativity, it looks as though successive title meltdowns in the face of Guardiola’s City have forced Arteta into a more reductive way of playing. The irony is that this very caution risks being their undoing.