Europe's youngest manager on Arteta and leaving Arsenal for Parma

By

Football tactics correspondent

After spending five years as Mikel Arteta's assistant at Arsenal, Carlos Cuesta is now in his first managerial role at Parma and is the youngest head coach in Europe's top five leagues.

At 30, he has already coached youth sides at Atletico Madrid and Juventus and this season steered Parma to a 13th-placed finish in Serie A after taking the reins last summer.

After retiring from a playing career at 18, Cuesta began a sports science degree but always knew he wanted to coach.

"You need to increase the probabilities and that comes from doing the things that you think will help you," he said on his pathway into coaching.

One way the Spaniard did this early in his career was by messaging members of staff at Real Madrid and Atletico on social media. It was through this that Cuesta eventually found himself volunteering with the youth sides at Atletico.

"I was very lucky," Cuesta said. "During the journey I found incredible people that were super willing to help me to grow, that were super available, opening the doors of their knowledge. I learnt a lot. I had great inspirations."

One of those people was Arteta, his friend and mentor, with whom Cuesta shared the touchline at Arsenal for half a decade.

When he left the club last June, he said "I'm convinced that the best moments for this football club are still yet to come".

After Arsenal's recent success, Cuesta was glowing about both his former club and their manager, but careful to draw a line between their achievements and his own involvement.

"I'm extremely happy for them," he said. "They deserve everything. Every person from this organisation, and especially Mikel.

"A lot of people can see how incredible he is, and the only thing I can say is that he's even better than what people see.

"When you know him day to day, only then can you understand that he's even better. He's an incredible human being, leader and coach."

Having taken the bold decision to leave Arsenal in 2025, the question for Cuesta now is how he builds a team of his own.

Parma are a club firmly embedded in football's history, having housed greats including Lilian Thuram, Gianluigi Buffon, Fabio Cannavaro and Gianfranco Zola.

But this is also a club building again with hopes of returning to the form they boasted in the late 1990s.

"It depends," Cuesta replied when asked how to rebuild a club. "First, on what your team's targets are, what your capabilities are, and what the philosophy of the club is.

"Everything depends on context. Once you understand the situation you find yourself in, you can identify the priorities and where to start building. You need a clear vision about how the team will evolve over time."

For Cuesta, that starts with giving the team a shared direction.

"The first thing we need is a collective guideline. I want to be clear about where we want to go, what the identity of our team will be, and what our macro principles are.

"Then we look to understand the qualities of each individual so we can make the vision work and the team evolve.

"I don't focus as much on the system. I try to focus a little bit more on the characteristics of the players that we have at our disposal, and from there decide which principles best suit our team."

Over the course of his first season as manager, Cuesta learnt valuable lessons as he sought to build a stable side.

At the beginning of the season he was alternating between a back four and a back five.

By February, Parma had moved more decisively towards a 5-3-2.

"That gives you more cover inside," he explained.

"Sometimes on the switch, if you don't handle the rhythms of shifting across you can suffer a little but it gives you density in central areas and you can be a threat on the counter, in relation to how you play with your strikers.

"If they do more blind-side movements, if they start to play a little bit more on the shoulder, it's good."

The debate around creativity, freedom and structure is widely contested in coaching circles, but it is clearly one Cuesta has given significant thought.

"The references, the principles, the macro guidelines allow you to have more creativity because if you don't have clear references and signals to recognise during the game, it becomes total chaos.

"We try to have people close to each other that are complementary. One way of getting players to interact better is to have them get to know the players close to them – on the pitch and socially. Spend time with them so you can better understand the likes of your team-mate.

"People think that all the pieces of the tactics board are the same but in practice, they all have different characteristics.

"Tactics are not just about space occupation. It's 'how do I take advantage of this space?' It's about timing. It's about habits."

"In football, I think that you need to choose black or white," Cuesta says. "It doesn't mean that if you choose black, for your whole life you will do black. But it does mean that in this context maybe black is the better choice.

"At the same time, this black needs to have different tones. If someone looks at it, they know what colour it is, but there is room for it to look slightly different depending on what you need."

This is a fitting metaphor for the work he has done so far at Parma.

Cuesta described the ideal version of his team as one that is "complete, very dominant on the ball, able to attack open spaces with speed and attack small spaces when the opponent is deep".

"At the same time," he said. "It is a team that is relentless without the ball, able to regain it high but when needed, able to protect the goal deep."

This season, Parma's shade of black has been shaped more by defensive solidity and efficiency than attacking dominance.

They ended the campaign with 44.4% possession and the second-fewest touches in the opposition penalty area per 90 minutes in Serie A, with 11.67. They scored 28 goals, the third fewest in the division, but those goals were worth an average of 1.68 points each - the best return in Europe's top five leagues.

Having laid the foundations for their project in an approach suited to the strengths of the players at their disposal, Parma and Cuesta will now want to build on their game model.

His work in Italy is still in its infancy but after an assured first season and a morning in his company, the intrigue around Cuesta feels less about his age and more about the continual evolution of his approach.