One of the great stories of the early days of Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal tenure was told by the club’s former midfielder Granit Xhaka, a few years down the line. Xhaka revealed how, on Arteta’s first day at the training ground, the new manager took his players to a meeting room and turned all the chairs upside down, scattering them all over the floor.

Surveying this unintelligible mess of furniture, Arteta told the squad: this is how you are playing. “It was chaos,” Xhaka said. “Big chaos.”

And so Arteta then set about picking up and restructuring the chairs, using them to demonstrate where Arsenal needed to be after one year, two years and three years. It was a characteristically inventive way of making a point to his team, about their lack of structure and the time it would take to rebuild the club.

It is easy to forget now, five years on, but Arteta really did take time to implement the style of play that has been associated with his team for the past few seasons. He did not arrive at the club and immediately produce the attacking 4-3-3 we see today, with his flying wingers and high defensive line. The Arsenal rebuild was completed brick by brick, window by window.

After all, in his first year at the club, Arteta won the FA Cup by playing a defensive back three (which was often a back five) and by having only 29 per cent and 40 per cent of the ball respectively in matches against Manchester City and Chelsea. Arsenal hired Pep Guardiola’s former assistant but, in those early days, Arteta was far more similar in style to another of his previous bosses, David Moyes, than to the great Catalan mastermind at City.

In the winter of 2020, a year after his appointment, Arteta said: “We want to move to a 4-3-3, but for that you need a lot of specificity in every position. Now, in five or six positions, we don’t have it.”

And in an interview earlier that year, Arteta had said: “I don’t want to accelerate the process and take them [the players] somewhere they cannot do, because it would not be productive.”

It feels timely to consider this now, ahead of Arsenal’s meeting with Manchester United on Sunday, because Arteta effectively took the opposite approach to Ruben Amorim at Old Trafford. There are many similarities between the two managers — both were hired in their late thirties, both were brought in midway through a campaign — but their strategies could hardly be more different.

Compare Arteta’s unwillingness to play 4-3-3 without the appropriate players, for example, to Amorim’s insistence on deploying his preferred back-three formation despite the shortcomings of his United squad. “I have to sell my idea,” Amorim has said in recent weeks. “I don’t have another one.”

Arteta, in those early days, saw adaptability and flexibility as a necessity. Amorim, much like Ange Postecoglou at Tottenham Hotspur, appears to regard it as a sign of weakness. “There are no second doubts, no second way,” Amorim said when he faced the media for the first time as United’s head coach. “It’s one way and we are going to do it.”

The table below shows how Arteta gradually evolved Arsenal’s style over seasons. For example, their “average start distance”, a measure of how high their defensive line is pushing up the pitch, rose with each campaign. Similarly, their shots and expected goals — a measure of attacking intent — improved gradually as they moved towards Arteta’s preferred 4-3-3 shape.

In early December, Amorim warned that “the storm will come” for United as they attempted to adjust to his demands. To extend his analogy, Amorim has decided to let that storm batter his players and see how they cope, while Arteta chose to protect Arsenal from it. Only when they had been fully prepared over a period of years, and when new signings had arrived, were the Arsenal players deemed ready to go out into the rain.

None of this is to say that one approach is better than the other. On that front, only time will tell. Indeed, based on United’s performance against Liverpool last weekend, there are signs that the storm might already be passing for Amorim. But it does make for a curious and striking contrast between the two managers, and it also speaks to a wider trend in coaching.

Adaptability, it seems, has gone out of fashion. Coaches are sticking to their philosophies more rigidly than ever before, with Amorim, Postecoglou and former Southampton coach Russell Martin among the best examples.

This is evidently what big clubs are looking for these days. Vincent Kompany maintained his principles so religiously that Burnley were relegated under his watch, and then he got the Bayern Munich job. On the other hand there is Thomas Frank, who has made Brentford one of the most versatile and adaptable teams in the Premier League, keeping them in the division in three consecutive seasons. Unlike Kompany, though, Frank has not been scooped up by a giant of the European game. Philosophy, it seems, sometimes matters more than points.

For Amorim, there are good reasons to be uncompromising. His predecessor, Erik ten Hag, quickly became more pragmatic after a difficult start, but was unable to follow Arteta by then evolving that style into something greater. After years of turbulence, it is entirely understandable that Amorim and United feel a defined identity is required from the off.

Arsenal against United on Sunday is, then, more than a knockout battle between two of England’s greatest clubs. It is also a clash of styles on the touchline. The slow-build pragmatist, who gradually added layer after layer to create the team he wanted, comes up against the strong-willed ideologue, who will not compromise on a single vision.