Mikel Arteta has never been shy about speaking up when he feels Arsenal have been hard done by.

After being booked for leaving his technical area in Saturday’s 2-0 win over Everton, the Arsenal boss suggested he is treated differently to other managers. “There are managers that have the record in the league, 36 times in 10 minutes leave the touchline, no yellows,” he said. “So I’m clipping all of that. I have a massive storage of images.”

But according to one former Premier League referee, that kind of approach might not be doing Arsenal any favours.

Graham Scott on Arsenal’s approach to referees

Graham Scott, who refereed in the Premier League for a decade before retiring in 2025, was asked in his mailbag for The Athletic whether Arsenal’s habit of highlighting harsh decisions affects officials.

He admitted unconscious bias is hard to rule out completely, but suggested the effect could actually work the other way. “It is just as likely that Arsenal’s approach leads to a few officials being tougher on them,” Scott wrote.

He pointed out that Arsenal and Arteta are far from the only ones to do this, suggesting that Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Arsene Wenger all followed a similar playbook. In his experience, though, he claims referees are good at ignoring the noise before and after games, and most of it is dismissed as a sideshow.

Scott believes Arteta has also brought extra scrutiny on himself by going public with his analysis of other managers. “Arteta is in complete control of his own behaviour on the touchline, from where he chooses to stand to how he decides to react,” he wrote. “I stood alongside him many times and was always convinced everything was being done for a purpose.”

Interestingly, Scott’s own figures show Arsenal do have reason to feel aggrieved this season. According to the Premier League’s panel that reviews key decisions, they’ve been on the wrong end of two incorrect calls: a penalty they should have been awarded at Aston Villa, and one they shouldn’t have conceded at Sunderland. Over the whole of last season, however, decisions went their way nine times and against them five, and since the panel was set up in 2022, the record stands at 25-22 in Arsenal’s favour.

Arteta will need to tread carefully either way. Saturday’s yellow card was his second of the season, and one more will bring an automatic one-game touchline ban, with a trip to Liverpool coming up on Sunday.