Arsenal have spent the last week talking themselves up as the coming force in world football, a club who believe they can be the best in the game for years to come and are prepared to say so repeatedly. Their manager, the only man in the Premier League with a winners' medal in his back pocket, has just put pen to paper on a contract that will extend his spell for a decade. And that was at best this week's B plot.
Such is the gravitational pull of the Manchester City story. It is one that Mikel Arteta was always going to find himself drawn into. No manager can say they have experienced a Premier League warped by City quite like Arteta.
As a player, he arrived at the Emirates Stadium a week after Samir Nasri had upped sticks for the Etihad. His coaching career began under Pep Guardiola, two of his three and a half years as an assistant falling within the period of the 114 breaches of Premier League rules. Then, of course, came the defining period of his career so far, the long and ultimately glorious battle against City for Premier League supremacy.
There was plenty Arteta might have shared. Ultimately, the nearest he got to a definitive statement on City was when asked, given his time at the club, whether his conscience was clear. "Yes," he said emphatically.
That aside, the Spaniard was even more cagey on his former employers than he would be when asked about a high-profile injury. It was easy to see why Arteta might be reticent to speak for a club that has reserved the right to explore legal avenues against City once the Premier League's case has been concluded. He was no more candid, however, when it came to reflecting his own personal experience of that momentous day in Premier League history when the charges dropped.
"This has been going for various years," he said. "That process is still not finished. So it is very difficult to express how I feel, because it is not resolved.
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