Annexed off Arsenal’s home dressing room, through a small hallway past the gargantuan television screen fully equipped with all the modern technology a manager could dream of to add any number of arrows and circles to a video presentation, is Unai Emery’s match-day office.



Inside there are three sofas and a couple of armchairs in various shades of orange or browny red (not Arsenal red), a dining area, a smaller TV for watching matches or studying any vital analysis, and a compact library of bound matchday programmes from the past few years. It is a utilitarian space. A few pictures on the wall all pre-date Emery’s time and depict successful teams of the Arsene Wenger era together with some stadium shots. In the corner of the room is a beer fridge with a plastic model of an Emirates plane perched precariously on top.



The big flip-chart catches the eye as the sole window into Emery’s work. Hand scrawled, with Arsenal in red pen and the...