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When The Athletic revealed last month that Mikel Arteta hired professional pickpockets to pinch valuables from his Arsenal players at a team dinner last season, there were plenty of people wishing they had been in the room to witness the reaction.
Kevin Balvers, the club’s head of methodology for three years before moving to current Dutch champions PSV Eindhoven this summer, could do one better than that.
“I was in the control room of the camera system,” Balvers laughs.
“It was before the Liverpool game (Arsenal’s 3-1 home win in February) and the message to the players was that you always have to be prepared for them to trick you into something without knowing, as their mentality is to win.
“Afterwards, we had a meeting with the players and Mikel said, ‘Is someone missing a phone?’, then pulled it out of a big bag. Then it was, ‘Is someone missing a hotel key?’.
“The coaches all knew as we had hired them but even one of the staff had something stolen. We showed them the cameras, with the message that this is exactly what Liverpool are going to do. It helped align the players with the way the coach was thinking.”
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This is what Balvers describes as an ‘activation’, a pre-match brain game with a deeper psychological message behind it. It is the kind of outside-of-the-box thinking from Arteta that he quickly became used to after joining his staff in 2021.
They would only happen on occasions when it was decided the squad needed something extra to focus their minds, but they were more common before early kick-offs, with Arteta’s own version of Pictionary being a favourite.
“When we played against a team who counter-attacked and there were open spaces, he would say to the players, ‘The highway is open’, which was a picture of an F1 car without any other cars around them,” says Balvers. “If we were playing against a team with closer organisation, it was an F1 car but really crowded. The players would then remember more quickly the things we were talking about.
“This is Mikel. When he speaks with people from a different world, he is trying to think of how he can translate it into football — even with a pilot.
“We had a presentation where he was speaking about them not having control of the plane every single minute because some things were automated and they just had to adjust. We had a presentation with a plane going up when you face a high press and another going down when you have to control the game. It was to say that you may need to change tactics in-game.”
His path to Arsenal was paved by Arteta’s assistant Albert Stuivenberg. They first met when Balvers had been trying to expand his knowledge base at Dutch club Vitesse Arnhem and had reached out to dozens of coaches from the Netherlands to understand their way of playing.
They spoke for two hours as Balvers helped Stuivenberg articulate his game model and philosophy, which led to him being recommended to Arteta in 2020.
“I was out of contract sitting at home (after leaving Vitesse) so I offered to help Albert with anything for free,” says Balvers. “He asked me to help with the analysis of the opposition but I was working with Carlos Cuesta and Miguel Molina on it, who had not joined yet either.
“They saw my work there but Arsenal were struggling with Covid, so those two could join then, but Arteta could only get more staff members later.”
Balvers was at Swedish club Malmo in 2021 when he received a call from Arsenal sporting director Edu Gaspar asking him if he would like to interview for the job as head of methodology. A video call with Arteta and Stuivenberg was followed by an anxious wait as there were two other candidates. Arteta stressed the one with the best “connection” would be chosen.
Balvers during his time at Vitesse (Photo: Paul Meima/Pro Shots/Isosport)
But after an eclectic decade with the Cyprus FA, the Netherlands’ youth teams, Caribbean nation Curacao, Vitesse, Barcelona’s La Masia academy and Malmo’s first team, Balvers secured the role in north London.
He was tasked with creating a uniform footballing idea that ran through the men’s team, the women’s side, and all the way to the youngest academy age group. He did not, however, envisage just how wide-ranging his role would become.
“It wasn’t only his (Arteta) ideas on the pitch, it was the re-culturing of the training ground and the club in every way,” says Balvers.
“If he said the painting in the toilet in the stadium has to be changed, it was because he had a vision. It is a stupid example, but I helped him a lot with these sorts of things.
“At the training ground, all the walls were white but Mikel wanted them to create a culture. I designed with him some words and pictures to go up on the walls.
Plenty of thought goes into the messaging at Arsenal, whether at the Emirates Stadium or the training ground (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
“One of them was ‘BASICS’ — B for Boxes, A for Attack, S for Shape, I for Intensity, C for Compete and S for Set pieces. It made it clear what we expected from them, and because he speaks that language every day, the players then speak it.
“He had many specific words he used but one was ‘collaboretition’ — collaboration and competition every day.”
Balvers quickly became a football analyst, a graphics designer, a motivational filmmaker and an interior designer all in one, such was Arteta’s desire to bring his colourful analogies to life.
“It was all the graphics and the motivational videos,” says Balvers. “There was a promo video the club made for the Liverpool home game last season, but he wanted a bit more energy to create a connection with the team and the fans. He had a different idea, so he came to me with it and the video you saw was the new one.
“When we went to away grounds, I made the banners with the crests of Arsenal and others with words from our game model that were placed around the changing room.
“When he was presenting to the board about his plan for the club financially, we did some really good stuff. We lost the first four games after I joined and I was thinking, ‘I could be out already’, but the strength of Mikel was that he could translate his vision and ideas about the whole organisation, not just the team. I think that’s why the board and owners believed in him.”
No stone was left unturned when it came to ensuring Arteta’s ideas became ingrained in the players’ minds. They sought the advice of educational experts to help understand the science behind how people best learn.
“We had people from different clubs and different sports coming over to speak to the coaches, which is how we picked up things,” Balvers says. “For presentations, we had an American come and share techniques which teachers use at university to bring across the message, how to get information into them and how to get information out of them.
“In tactical meetings, I learned from studies that if you put a dark blue background the players will learn the information more than white, black or red as the contrast is better. When speaking about defending, we made sure the text and areas highlighted were red and when attacking it was blue. This helps their brains know instantly what phase of play we’re talking about.”
Even more thought went into the presentations used to pitch the club to prospective new players.
“We spoke about how we saw them fitting in on the pitch, outside the pitch and had some pictures of them photoshopped in the kit already,” Balvers explains.
“For (Jurrien) Timber, we had some pictures of his family with the message that we are a big family and take care of everything. As I’m Dutch too, I put in some music from artists he was listening to, rather than English music. Win the dog was in the one for Kai (Havertz), as we knew he loved dogs and we explained we wanted a family feeling.
“That summer, we used an animation of a train. Mikel was saying, ‘We have our direction and we know where we want to go. If you want to keep going then jump in’. A lot of them said it was amazing as they felt like the club really wanted them in the team.
“Everything that was in Mikel’s mind, I was visualising and trying to make interesting but easy for the players to understand. It was really fun for me as I could be creative when he came to me with an idea and I had to think about how we could present it in the best way. It was the perfect job for me.”
Having spent three seasons at Arsenal, it was a wrench for Balvers to leave. But with a wife and two children, aged three and five, the lure of going home to his family in the Netherlands proved too strong.
There were difficult times due to the distance but the environment at Arsenal helped him get through those moments.
“Mikel is great at speaking about tactics but he’s interested in your family and if you have a problem at home, you could call him in the middle of the night,” he says.
“We had a few breaks before Christmas but in 2022 we only had one before the World Cup, so it was really difficult. I spoke with Mikel and Edu and told them I was struggling, that I could not do this another year. It was special that they just asked me what my idea was and let me work one week a month from the Netherlands.
“That’s the biggest example of why I love the people in the club so much, as it’s not a club just based on results, it’s a really warm place.”
Balvers was given a signed and framed shirt to remember his time at the club by, but his kids now have two red-and-white jerseys they wear playing in the garden after Daddy joined PSV, who have the same colours.
He left his own form of a leaving gift to the Arsenal squad after the final-day victory against Everton, his way of urging them to go on and complete the job of becoming Premier League champions for the first time in over 20 years.
“At the end of every season I always made a video showing the highlights of the whole season, but not just on the pitch. The team building, the barbecues, everything. They were really emotional videos,” he says. “This summer I tried to make the message that, yes, we tried to win and were disappointed, but we have to look back to the road and the story we have built together. We have been amazing, but we have to accept that Manchester City are amazing too.
“I’m not in doubt that, if Arsenal can make steps like they did last year, they can be the main team in the Premier League. Every club has its era.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
