By that time Mikel Arteta, who had been Wilshere’s Arsenal team-mate for five years, was first-team manager.
Arteta guided the Gunners to the Premier League title in 2025-26, their first time as English champions in 22 years, and Wilshere felt the Spaniard had played a vital role in developing him as a coach.
“I got to see Mikel and how he coached and the influence he was having,” said Wilshere. “I would ask him questions, why he’s doing certain things, and I started to fall in love with it and how he started to prepare training sessions.
“I’d get an opportunity to practice that with the 18s in the afternoon and it was something I wasn’t that good at, and I felt uncomfortable at times.
“I was influenced by Mikel, but then I had to learn how to teach. I had to learn how to get that across, how to plan a session and how to get the outcomes that you wanted.
“I played under some good coaches and was quite good at understanding what a coach wants, but I never dived into ‘why is he asking me to do that?’ Mikel really made that clear and I was lucky enough to have a relationship where I could say, ‘well, why do you want that?’ And he was open enough to share it with me.”
Not only did his former club Arsenal become English champions, but Wilshere gained extra satisfaction as he had coached defender Myles Lewis-Skelly, winger Ethan Nwaneri and midfielder Max Dowman during his time at the club’s academy.
Wilshere was only 16 when he made his Arsenal debut, and Dowman was 15 when he first played for the Gunners senior team, with Wilshere spotting his talent early on.
“Max played for my 18s team when he was 13,” added Wilshere. “I remember calling my dad because I played for the 18s when I was 14. I was like, ‘was 13 too young?’
“In the first game we could clearly see that he was ready for it. And I remember calling my dad and saying, ‘you need to come watch this kid’. My dad did, and my dad’s very biased, as you could imagine. But even he said, ‘he’s better than you’.”
