u/DavidOrnstein_

Top PL assisters in pre-season

Player	Assists	Club
Christos Tzolis	6	ARS
Antoine Semenyo	5	MCI
Emiliano Buendia	4	AVL
Daniel Jebbison	3	BOU
Jamie Gittens	3	CHE
Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall	3	EVE
Morgan Gibbs-White	3	NFO
Mathys Tel	3	TOT

Arsenal Players:

48. David Raya, goalkeeper, Arsenal

41. Eberechi Eze, attacking midfielder, Arsenal

27. Martín Zubimendi, midfielder, Arsenal

25. Kai Havertz, forward, Arsenal

15. Martin Ødegaard, attacking midfielder, Arsenal

13. Jurriën Timber, fullback, Arsenal

10. Bruno Guimarães, midfielder, Arsenal

6. Gabriel Magalhães, center back, Arsenal

5. William Saliba, center back, Arsenal

4. Bukayo Saka, winger, Arsenal

3. Declan Rice, midfielder, Arsenal

>He says he first started thinking about becoming a manager when he was 26 and recovering from a torn ACL while playing for Everton. “I was out for almost a year and didn’t know if I could come back. I said I can’t live without football.” He did play again, but with more of a coach’s eye. “I started to study the game. I started to talk with a lot of people and then I decided at some point I wanted to be a coach or a manager to try to help the players.”

>His management style is an amalgamation of the minds he played under — Wenger at Arsenal, David Moyes at Everton, Luis Fernández at PSG — plus Guardiola, whom he coached under. There is also the lingering ethos of Johan Cruyff from his youth days at Barcelona. But the most vital influence, he says, came from his boyhood coaches in the Basque city of San Sebastian.

>“They gave me belief,” he says. “They knew I was going to be a professional football player — and because they kept telling me, ‘Mikel, you are going to do it,’ I took it for granted that it would happen.”