Mikel Arteta wants to offer Santi Cazorla a backroom role at Arsenal according to a report in the Independent.

It looks increasingly likely that Arteta will become the new Arsenal manager and it’s just a case of waiting for the club to announce it.

Arteta wants the job, Arsenal want him and City won’t stand in his way.

With the Kroenkes happy to sanction a deal for an unproven coach, all that seems left is the announcement.

Reports at the start of the week claimed that Arteta had already begun to think about the people he wanted around him as coaching staff and it seems like Santi Cazorla is one of those people.

Yes. I got excited at that thought too.

The Spaniard, as you know, is out of contract this summer and it is not clear what the future holds from him. To recover as well as he has when amputation was a real possibility is nothing short of a miracle but he is still some distance from being able to prove he can still play at this level.

Steve Bould has been offered an unspecified role under the new regime, but apparently has issues with Arteta and is not happy at working under someone so inexperienced. He is being linked with a move to Stoke to take over as manager, a position he is believed to be ‘weighing up’.

When I first came across this article, or a version of it, it was on the Spanish site, Mundo Deportivo. There, they hinted that Cazorla could be up for the assistant manager’s job, but it’s not clear if this is just a translation issue.