Arsenal’s Mikel Merino, the story of the anti-galactico who keeps redefining himself

When Spain needed a winning goal in their 2024 European Championship quarter-final against host nation Germany, it was 6ft 2in substitute Mikel Merino who produced a split-jump header Simone Biles would have gawped at.

When they needed an equaliser in the first leg of their Nations League quarter-final against the Netherlands last week, it was Merino again who stepped up, and when it came to designating the first penalty in the shootout to decide the second leg three days later, he donned his cape once more.

Merino is growing into his role as Arsenal’s unlikely saviour, too, scoring decisive goals against Leicester City and Chelsea since being converted into an emergency striker in response to their many injuries in forward positions.

For a man with his name up in lights this often, much of Merino’s winding path to cult hero at the age of 28 — via stints at Osasuna, Borussia Dortmund, Newcastle United and, most notably, Real Sociedad — has remained in the dark.

Even now, with his definitive cameos for Spain and centre-forward stint for Arsenal, there is a sense that Merino thrives when emerging from the shadows.

The Athletic has spoken to those who have played a part in his career to gain a sense of what’s made him the player he is today.

“Here is a way to understand Mikel,” Real Sociedad sporting director Roberto Olabe tells The Athletic.

“When he arrived (in 2018), he said, ‘Tell me, Roberto, the players don’t contact the body (hard) during training. It is like they are worried they will get angry. Maybe we need to increase this activity if we want to compete’.

“He wanted to create a competitive environment. He thought we maybe didn’t have it enough to be winners. He had the personality to come to me and say this.”

It was a lesson Merino learned in his 12 months at Newcastle in 2017-18 but his single-season spells with Dortmund and then on Tyneside were so fleeting many had to be reminded that Arsenal was not his first taste of English football when he signed for them last summer.

Perhaps the reason Merino has gone under the radar at various points is that, in sticker-book language, he is not a shiny.

Arsenal team-mate Kieran Tierney, who spent last season playing alongside him on loan at Real Sociedad, describes him as a “duel monster”. Some consider his playing style “un-Spanish”, while he is so malleable he has been deployed in just about every position: as the left centre-back in a back three during his days in Germany, at centre-back in a back four for Spain Under-21s, No 6, No 8 and No 10 in Spain, right-winger as a kid and now up front in England.

A Swiss army knife of a footballer but lacking an obvious superpower, it has been difficult to capture the essence of Merino in his debut season at Arsenal.

Even at Real Sociedad, where he was an integral part of the team that won the club’s first trophy in 34 years, there was always someone else in their side who caught the imagination more, such as Alexander Isak, Martin Odegaard or Takefusa Kubo, or who was more emblematic, like Mikel Oyarzabal or Martin Zubimendi.

But in recent weeks Merino has started to show why Olabe — the man who both bought him from Newcastle in 2018 for €12million (£10m; $12.9m) and sold him to fellow San Sebastian native Mikel Arteta for €32m last summer — came to view him as the on-pitch conscience of manager Imanol Alguacil’s golden team.

Olabe first saw Merino play as an under-16, for Osasuna in a game against a Real Sociedad side containing his son Roberto.

Osasuna, the biggest club in his home region of Pamplona in northern Spain, are where Merino first emerged. He made his debut for their reserves in March 2014 and the following season started for the first team against Barcelona B under manager Jan Urban, who was extra-alert to the young Merino as he had been a team-mate of his father, Angel, at Osasuna between 1988 and 1994.

“We had a transfer ban after relegation from La Liga,” Urban tells The Athletic. “Osasuna had financial problems and we needed to give young players chances. Many of them used that opportunity well.

“He wasn’t a spectacular player. He was more hard-working. I think every player whose father was a famous player feels additional pressure and everyone needs to handle that. Today, we can say Mikel did it very well.”

Merino made 29 appearances in his debut season and helped Osasuna avoid relegation to Spain’s third tier by one point.

Urban recalls a well-mannered and smart student of the game, whose rapid progress saw him rewarded with the No 8 jersey — the same number his father wore for the club.

“We knew he had a good technique but he needed to prove it with an aggressive opponent, especially as a central midfielder,” says Urban. “Good vision, quick thinking and good heading. Those were the reasons he adapted fast. He had a great left foot and good technique, but most important was his ability to make quick and good decisions. He wasn’t fast, but he was thinking fast.”

Merino was a key figure in his second season, 2015-16, scoring three times over two legs in the first promotion play-off round against Gimnastic before helping beat Girona 3-1 on aggregate to seal Osasuna’s return to La Liga. His backheel assist for the only goal in the second leg of the latter tie showed the technical side of his game but the way he attacked a looping cross in the lead-up to his goal showed why Merino stood out.

“His style of playing is connected with the style of coaching in north Spain,” says Urban. “That’s the part of the country where football is more aggressive and physical. Mentality is important there but it doesn’t mean there are no good players with high football skills.”

His form won him a host of admirers but in 2016 he chose Dortmund and Thomas Tuchel, who had taken over from Jurgen Klopp the year before.

But 2016-17 was a season of transition for Dortmund and Merino barely played, managing just 312 minutes in all competitions as Tuchel left him out of the majority of his matchday squads. It was a similar case for fellow summer 2016 signing Isak, albeit he was only 18, who Dortmund loaned to Dutch club Willem II after playing just 13 games across two years.

But while the Swedish striker found his way straight to Real Sociedad when he left Dortmund permanently in 2019, Merino moved first to Newcastle in 2017. Manager Rafa Benitez pushed for him, to add to a growing contingent of Spaniards in the squad.

“We knew he had the skills, so we weren’t concerned about the problems he had in Germany,” Benitez’s former assistant coach Mikel Antia tells The Athletic. “In Germany, it is totally different to Spain with the language, but Mikel spoke perfect English, so it was no problem adapting to the dressing room.”

Benitez did not ease Merino into Premier League life. He started seven of the first eight Premier League games as he forged a partnership in midfield with Isaac Hayden.

“He was box-to-box and aggressive at pressing,” says Antia. “He has a lot of quality to give the last pass and was good in the air so scored many goals from set pieces. He understood quickly the way Rafa wanted to play defensively as he is smart, but we weren’t thinking about Mikel as a defensive guy. He can provide many things when you are attacking.

“There are players who only people who work in football can see. They see Mikel has a lot of skills. He’s maybe not the best at anything but he is really good at most things. If you think about this profile, it could be closer to a British profile than a Spanish one, but it’s not easy to find these kinds of players in Spain.”

His start convinced Newcastle to make his season-long loan permanent after just three months but Merino’s minutes then tailed off after he dropped out of the team with a back injury. He only made two starts in the second half of the season as Newcastle won on the last day to finish in the top half of the Premier League.

Merino playing for Newcastle against Arsenal in 2018 (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

After a largely positive season overall, Merino went home to Spain in summer 2018. Newcastle would have liked to keep him but Olabe triggered his €12million release clause and offered him a platform to be a regular starter.

Merino brought a fresh perspective to Real Sociedad, having spent those previous two years in Germany and England. The Basque club had been used to one profile of midfielder — the technical type whose skill set revolved around a possession game and being in the perfect position to receive a clean pass.

“We had good talents in terms of playing football, but without the complete profile Mikel has,” says Olabe. “He has the mental and physical profile too, the power to play in different ways.”

Merino slotted into midfield and became a difference-maker, registering 27 goals and 30 assists across 242 appearances.

In his first season, La Real finished ninth in La Liga but the team grew together and they recorded top-six finishes for the next five years in a row before he headed back to the Premier League.

“The itinerary (CV) of Mikel is what I would like to have for every player,” says Olabe, who believes Merino’s grounding in the feisty lower divisions in Spain and experiences abroad have contributed to his skill set. “We were lucky, because we signed a player who put all of those experiences on the field. He was ready to explode.

“He is ambitious and a winner. He wanted to improve his goalscoring and how he arrived in the box. He wanted to be in the national team. You could feel how important it was to him. He wasn’t one of these guys who promises you he will work. That is natural to him.

“The base of this guy is not football skills. The base of this guy is the personality, the smartness and the competitiveness. His first football culture came from home, don’t forget. His father was a hard-working, aerial, serious midfielder.

“It wasn’t just Osasuna, Dortmund, Newcastle or Sociedad, it is what he did with every single experience to improve. Competitiveness is the DNA of his home.”

Perhaps only topped by Spain’s Euro 2024 triumph last summer, Merino’s crowning moment so far came in April 2021 when Real Sociedad beat neighbours Athletic Club 1-0 in the Copa del Rey final (it was actually the competition’s 2019-20 edition, having been postponed due to restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic) to end a trophy drought that went back to the 1980s.

Merino won the Copa del Rey with Real Sociedad in 2021 (Fran Santiago/Getty Images)

He was instrumental in the final’s only goal, producing a terrific curled through ball to play in winger Portu, who was brought down for the penalty that Oyarzabal scored.

“I remember the goal well,” smiles Olabe. “It is not about the kind of pass he did, it is that he knew perfectly the team-mate he was giving the pass to. We sometimes just describe the individual skill but the most important bit is how they contextualise those skills. He understands what happens around him. Everyone around him is better with Mikel. He gives others the idea.

“He didn’t arrive at the game (that final in Seville) in the best moment. He had a problem in his back, which is always his Kryptonite. It speaks about his mentality as no one knew how he had been preparing for two months.”

It was a sign of Merino’s leadership, which continued to grow as he ended what proved his final season with Real Sociedad as the top duel-winner across the top five domestic leagues of Europe. And without him, his former club have struggled. They sit 12th in La Liga and have undergone a period of transition, as centre-back Robin Le Normand also moved on to Atletico Madrid in the summer.

“He is a ‘killer’,” says Olabe. “Sometimes, leadership is not just what you say. He never smiles during training. When we were working with new players, he ‘killed’ them too as it was his way of saying, ‘You need to understand what happens here’. He doesn’t need to talk, they just have to observe what he is doing.

“One of the problems we have with the guys in their development is that they are thinking competitiveness starts at 3:30 on Sunday (when the match kicks off). It can’t. It is a way to live like Mikel.”

Merino was back at Real Sociedad’s Zubieta training ground for a visit this week, following that Nations League battle with the Dutch and before heading back to London to resume Arsenal’s season. One staff member jokingly asked if they could keep him for the second leg of their Copa del Rey semi-final against Real Madrid (who won the first leg 1-0) next Tuesday.

He is such a chameleon of a player that there could well be two of him but Arsenal need him for their own showdown with Carlo Ancelotti’s European champions in the Champions League quarter-finals starting a week later, where they will hope that Merino, the anti-galactico, can surprise from the shadows once more.

(Top photos: Getty Images)