The Mayor and the Manager: New York City Elects Its Mikel Arteta

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Perspectives: is an essay series and interviews dedicated to bring sociological, political, economical and cultural thoughts on the game by experts, local actors, thinkers, and researchers. These essays are designed to start conversations, understand the new issues and give policy-oriented takeaways.

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The Mayor and the Manager: New York City Elects Its Mikel Arteta
Words and Photography by Marvin Heilbronn — November 5 2025

When I had the opportunity to ask Zohran Mamdani what quality from Arsenal’s community he’d most like to see in New Yorkers, he smiled and said: “Thinking that every year is the year.”

A simple answer, one that made both of us laugh, but also a quietly powerful statement. Hope, persistence, and the belief that progress is the point.

And it made sense. Arsenal and New York City have more in common than one might think. Both have lived through their wilderness years, long stretches after the glory, when progress is promised more often than it’s proven.

For Arsenal, that era came after Arsène Wenger’s 22 year long reign. In 2018 Unai Emery took charge, guiding the club to a Europa League final and recording one of the highest win percentages in Arsenal’s history. However, poor communication, inconsistent selections, and dressing room friction cut his tenure short, leaving Arsenal adrift once again. Flashes of brilliance from players like Aubameyang, Lacazette and Özil, brought brief flirtations with stability but excitement that never lasted.

For New York, it was the years between Bill de Blasio’s earnest optimism and Eric Adams’s performative confidence. Both mayors promising renewal, each delivering fragments of it. What was left was a city still proud, still pulsing, but directionless. Rising rent, disjointed budgets, over-policing, and under-delivering left New Yorkers wondering what happened to the place that once made everything feel possible.

By the early 2020s, Arsenal had already begun to find its way back. The years after Wenger had left the club unsteady, but when Mikel Arteta took charge in December 2019, he began a calm, obsessive, and slow reprogramming of Arsenal’s DNA. Not instant glory, but visible progress. Not miracles, but methods. Within months, in the strangest of circumstances during the first Covid summer, Arsenal lifted the FA Cup. It was not a full return to glory, but it was proof of direction and the first successful turn of the page in years.

New York, meanwhile, is standing where Arsenal once stood: talented, restless, and searching for renewal. The city has endured its own period of uncertainty shaped by inequality, mismanagement, and eroding public trust. Now, five years later, Zohran Mamdani may be the Mikel Arteta New York has been waiting for: a leader inheriting chaos but armed with conviction and a plan.

Neither promised instant success. But both offer something the people around them had forgotten how to feel: direction.

Parallel Projects
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s election doesn’t erase the city’s struggles, but it does signal a turning point: a chance to build something new from the chaos. Mamdani, like Arteta, inherits an institution too large to overhaul overnight, yet too integral to ever be left behind. Both men have been tasked with turning belief into structure, structure into systems, and systems into change.

Arteta has not yet lifted the Premier League or Champions League, but his revolution is unmistakable. Arsenal play with purpose again, their identity clear and their fan base united.

Mamdani’s victory marks a similar restoration of faith. His campaign blended principle with personality, conviction with warmth. His energy made complex policies feel human. His confidence gave reform credibility. And, like Arteta, his progressive approach and distinct personality set him apart from his predecessors and challengers, keeping him under constant scrutiny with every move analyzed and debated.

Both are builders. Arteta rebuilt a squad. Mamdani wants to rebuild a city.

Youth and Renewal

The parallels between Arteta and Mamdani go beyond the project they are tasked with. Both leaders have turned rebuilding into a movement powered, and often defined, by a new generation. Arteta built Arsenal’s resurgence on the energy of Saka, Martinelli, and Ødegaard — players young enough to see football not as a burdened legacy, but as open possibility. In their confidence, he found courage; in their rawness, he found the freedom to shape instinct into identity. The project became less about restoring the past and more about reimagining the future.

Mamdani represents a similar shift in politics. Part of a new wave of progressive leaders, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Omar Fateh, Mamdani embodies a break from the transactional politics of the old guard. They see power not as something to possess, but as something to use — rebuilt around the needs of the people, through transparency, compassion, and urgency. Like Arteta, Mamdani is turning to the youth not for novelty but for the belief that systems, like teams, can be taught to dream again.

The Politics of Connection
Turning to the youth is one thing; inspiring them to believe and act is another. Both Arteta and Mamdani have shown the rare ability to connect deeply, mobilizing a generation to feel part of something larger than themselves — and, crucially, to act on that belief. According to early voting data, 117,042 adults ages 18 to 29 cast early ballots in the election — roughly 16% of the total vote share, a decisive force in Mamdani’s win. On the pitch, Arteta’s revolution has been powered by a similar youth surge. Arsenal’s young core of Saka, Martinelli, and Ødegaard have combined for 296 goal contributions under Arteta. These players were just 18, 18, and 22 respectively when they made their first start for Arteta — proof that belief in youth, when paired with connection, can drive real transformation.

Arteta’s communication style borders on the surreal: the lightbulb team talk, the pickpockets at preseason dinner, and even the introduction of a training-ground dog named Win to remind his squad that “we all love winning and Win needs a lot of love.” It might seem strange, but it seems to be working. His players feel something larger than tactics — belief, belonging, and a shared purpose.

Mamdani operates in a similar emotional register. From trips to Madison Square Garden to connect with die-hard Knicks fans to perfectly delivered roasts aimed at Cuomo, Mamdani’s viral videos and debate performances turn politics into performance art that still feels human. His social media presence is confident, witty, and sincere all at once, turning city policy into something shareable, even joyful. While Mamdani may be a little more tapped into pop culture and social media than Arteta, both understand that emotion is one of the most powerful tools for building belief.

Their work is about more than results; it’s about culture.

The Set-Piece Playbook and the Tax Code

The likeness between Arteta and Zohran only deepens in the details, where both find transformation in the margins.

Arteta found gold in the details others ignored. Corners and free kicks, long treated as administrative restarts, have become Arsenal’s edge. Since 2023–24, Arsenal have turned set pieces into an advantage few can match, scoring 37 goals from dead-ball situations — over 40% more than Borussia Mönchengladbach, the next-best Top-Five League side with 26. The point isn’t romance. The point is points. Arteta found success in something hiding in plain sight, a routine the entire football world had accepted as a mere hopeful opportunity until he turned it into a weapon and an ever-looming threat.

Mamdani’s set-piece revolution is fiscal, finding value where others stopped looking, just as Arteta did. New York’s inequality is staggering: the top 1% capture nearly 44% of city income, with those households averaging $3.7 million a year. Mamdani’s plan to raise taxes on the top 1% and redirect wealth toward social programs reflects the same philosophy that drives Arteta’s football: powerful change can be found in the details others overlook or refuse to confront.

Both men are redefining efficiency. Both have faced skepticism for the ways they look to rewrite the game. And both believe in finding value where decision-makers never wanted to look.

The Architects Before Them: Pep Guardiola & Bernie Sanders

Yet one must acknowledge that these frameworks, ideals, and personalities didn’t emerge in isolation. Every project has lineage.

Arteta’s preferred 4-3-3, his insistence on playing out from the back, and his belief in controlling the game through possession all echo his former mentor, Pep Guardiola. The emphasis on positional superiority, inverted full-backs, and coordinated pressing patterns are fingerprints of the Guardiola school. But not all of Arteta’s tactics have been passed down from Pep, of course. Having come through La Masia himself, Arteta has evolved those ideas into something distinct — a system defined not just by beauty, but by resilience. He has built one of the Premier League’s most impenetrable defenses while maintaining the precision and structure that define his footballing ideals.

Mamdani’s politics sit within the Democratic Socialist tradition of Bernie Sanders, whose presidential campaigns pulled the movement into the mainstream, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose influence helped redefine what progressive leadership could look like in New York. Yet, like Arteta, his ideas are grounded in personal experience. Before entering office, he worked in foreclosure prevention and housing counseling, witnessing firsthand how fragile the social contract had become. Mamdani’s vision for New York, affordable housing, free childcare, city-run grocery stores, higher wages, increased taxes on the wealthiest 1% and fare free buses comes not from ideology alone, but from lived proximity to the struggles of the city’s working class.

Both men drew from systems they admired and reshaped them through the force of their own experience. Arteta took the structure of Guardiola’s philosophy and injected it with Arsenal’s identity — precision mixed with defiance, discipline balanced by emotion. Mamdani inherited the ideals of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez but filtered them through the texture of New York life and his own charming charisma, where policy meets people in the smallest, most human moments. Each absorbed what worked from their mentors, discarded what didn’t, and built frameworks that reflected who they are and who they serve.

The World They Lead

Every philosophy eventually meets its test in the community it serves. Look around the Emirates on a matchday and you’ll see London’s world gathered in one place. Supporters from Lagos, Mumbai, Kingston, and North London chant in unison. Diversity isn’t an accessory; it’s the foundation of Arsenal’s identity.

The same can be said for New York City, the global capital of pluralism. Over eight million people call it home, and roughly 36% were born outside the United States. More than 200 languages are spoken daily, with some estimates saying over 700, making New York the most linguistically diverse city on Earth. Entire neighborhoods, from Chinatown to Jackson Heights to Brighton Beach, exist as living expressions of cultural identity. Immigrants own nearly half of the city’s small businesses, their ambition and creativity powering its economy as much as its spirit.

Both Arsenal and New York embody the same paradox: that the strength of a collective doesn’t come from sameness, but from difference. Both Arteta and Mamdani have been tasked with representing and leading a diverse community. For Arteta, that means uniting a global fanbase under one rhythm, a team that speaks many languages but plays one way. For Mamdani, it means governing a city that contains the world within its borders, proving, like Arsenal long has, that diversity isn’t a challenge to unity. It is the source of it.

The Risk of Belief

Every project that begins in belief is first met with ridicule. “Trust the process” was once a punchline and still lingers as a meme every time Arsenal drop points. Arteta, in his very first managerial job, was written off by many as a promising assistant trying to imitate his mentor. His obsession with detail — from working with the Royal Air Force to improve communication, to studying the psychology of tunnel walks — was mocked before it was admired. Yet those quirks became symbols of a manager who saw possibility in the smallest margins. Inexperience became innovation. Doubt became conviction.

Mamdani faces the same skepticism. This is his first major executive role, and critics have been quick to question whether optimism and idealism can survive the grind of governing the largest city in America. His lack of experience has been framed as a weakness, just as Arteta’s once was. But both understand that leadership isn’t about résumé, it’s about vision. Mamdani’s pledge to “tax the rich” and fund public services is treated by opponents as naive, yet, like Arteta’s methods, it comes from an obsession with the overlooked. Where others see futility, he sees opportunity. Arteta found goals where others saw stoppages. Mamdani looks for justice in policies dismissed as impossible.

Process Over Perfection

Arteta’s journey has been turbulent. Training-ground bust-ups, a historically winless start to the 2021/22 season, a comical stretch of red cards, and waves of doubt from the stands. But he stayed the course. Turning both to the checkbook for new signings and to the youth, Arteta built a new squad from the ground up and implemented his own system. The reward for patience has been coherence, stability, and success — and now, all that’s left is a major trophy.

Mamdani’s coming years will likely follow a similar arc: political opposition, legislative friction, the grind of governing. Mamdani will face the test of converting early excitement into lasting conviction, and winning over not only those who doubt his ability to deliver, but those who fundamentally disagree with his vision for New York. But as Arsenal fans learned, belief compounds and progress is rarely linear.

New York City’s challenges aren’t unlike Arsenal’s once were. MTA floods recall the holes in Arsenal’s backline during the Mustafi and Luiz years — moments of fragility that Arteta repaired through structure, repetition, and marginal gains. Mamdani now faces the same task on a civic scale: to rebuild a city whose infrastructure and morale have both eroded.

If Arteta made Arsenal believers again, Mamdani’s challenge is to do the same for New York: to prove that collective effort, not billionaire benevolence, can win again. Neither project is close to being finished. But after years adrift, New Yorkers may have found in Zohran Mamdani what Arsenal found in Mikel Arteta.

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