Pep Guardiola shows Mikel Arteta his major Arsenal mistake with huge achievement

Bernardo Silva has been perfectly managed by Pep Guardiola, enabling him to reach a crazy achievement with Manchester City and leave Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta a stark lesson he must learn from

Bernardo Silva will leave Manchester City at the end of the season and Pep Guardiola has counted on the Portuguese international throughout his tenure. The player has been a mainstay making 452 appearances for the club so far, his last coming in the 2-1 win over Arsenal, and having missed only nine through injury.

It is quite an unbelievable career and begs the question of how he has been able to do it. He has averaged over 33 league games per season, and over 50 appearances across all competitions.

He may yet win a seventh Premier League title this year, and his contributions during the win on Sunday have gone a long way to aiding that. On the other hand, Bukayo Saka missed the game as the winger continues to recover from what football.london understands to be Achilles tendonitis.

Saka is known to have played a huge number of games. He held the record for the most Premier League consecutive appearances from May 2021 to April 2023 after being included 87 consecutive games. During that run, Saka started 83 of them, coming off the bench in only four.

Furthermore, of the 83 starts during that run, he was brought off 39 times. On average he was completing 76 of the ninety-plus minutes across the games he was taken off.

When we make the comparison to how Guardiola has used his talismanic midfielder, if we take the last four seasons, from 2022/23 to the current campaign, Silva has made 142 league appearances.

In those 142 games, he made 120 starts, coming off the bench 22 times. He was an unused substitute 11 times.

If you compare that to Saka during the same time period, Saka has been included in 125 Premier League matchday squads and has featured 125 times. In fact, the last time Saka was an unused substitute for Arsenal in a Premier League game was May 2 2021.

Guardiola has managed Silva’s exposure to game time perfectly, allowing him to continue to play so regularly and be available so often for City. Those eleven games Silva sat on the bench as an unused substitute stand out.

Martin Zubimendi has been a player often highlighted as having suffered in the second half of the season with fatigue. Despite signing Christian Norgaard, the Spaniard has featured in all 33 games so far this season, starting every single one.

Before the win over Everton, which required two late goals to win and saw Zubimendi taken off in a tactical change to add additional offensive options, he had been taken off just seven times.

Jurrien Timber is currently out injured and a huge miss for the Gunners. He began the season with a fitness problem, as Ben White started at Manchester United until he was forced off with an injury of his own in the second half. Until Timber’s injury suffered in that Everton match, he had started all but one of Arsenal’s league matches.

He missed the home match against Brighton with an ankle problem, forcing Declan Rice to operate in the unorthodox role in the absence of White, but started and played 83 minutes three days later against Aston Villa. Of the 28 starts this season, Timber has been taken off in just five games, three of them due to fitness or injury-related concerns.

Arsenal may yet win the league, but if they do not, many will point to Mikel Arteta’s overplaying of some of his group as a key factor. While Guardiola will celebrate another title victory, his seventh, having yet again utilised his group extremely effectively and efficiently. Bernardo Silva the prime example.