The PFA’s attempt to celebrate Mikel Arteta’s Premier League title win with Arsenal quickly turned into a fact-checking mess.
Arteta’s achievement remains huge, especially after ending Arsenal’s 22-year wait for a league title.
The problem was that one deleted PFA claim went too far and ignored a former Manchester City manager who had already made the same piece of history.
PFA’s Mikel Arteta claim gets corrected after Arsenal’s Premier League triumph
The PFA made a now-deleted post on X after Mikel Arteta led Arsenal to the Premier League title, but soccer fans quickly pointed out the historical mistake.
The deleted post read, “The first former Premier League player to win the Premier League as a manager. Congratulations Mikel Arteta.”
The intention was clear enough. Arteta played for Everton and Arsenal in the Premier League before becoming the manager who finally took the Gunners back to the top.
That makes his title win special, but not in the exact way the PFA claimed. Fans immediately reminded the account that Roberto Mancini had already beaten Arteta to that record.
Mancini played for Leicester City in 2001, making four Premier League appearances during a short loan spell before moving fully into management.
Roberto Mancini’s Manchester City title made PFA’s Mikel Arteta post age badly
The correction was not a minor technicality, because Roberto Mancini’s Premier League link is enough to make the PFA’s wording wrong.
Mancini later managed Manchester City to the 2011-12 Premier League title, the famous Sergio Aguero season that ended the club’s 44-year wait for a top-flight crown.
That means Mancini was already a former Premier League player who won the competition as a manager, 14 years before Arteta’s Arsenal triumph.
Fans roasted the PFA because the mistake came from an organization expected to know Premier League history. Some users shared screenshots after the post was deleted, while others simply pointed to Mancini’s Leicester spell as the obvious correction.
Arteta still has a cleaner, more modern Premier League playing connection than Mancini, given his 284 appearances across Everton and Arsenal. He was also Arsenal captain and became the manager who ended one of the league’s longest modern title droughts.
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