Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has warned there will be consequences for the individual who leaked news of a bust-up between Dani Ceballos and David Luiz at a training session last week.
Revelations about the incident, a heated exchange between the two at London Colney after a challenge by Ceballos, emerged on Thursday evening, several days after the incident took place.
Though Ceballos himself would brand the initial story as "fake" Arteta himself offered little to deny that an incident had taken place, noting that "issues happen a lot of the time" and that any issue between the two was now resolved.
Rather than display any frustration with Ceballos or Luiz over the incident, Arteta reserved his ire for the source of the information, which has overshadowed the build-up to Arsenal's Premier League trip to Leeds United on Sunday.
"I don't like that at all and I will find out where it's coming from," Arteta said. "If that's the case [that the information was leaked], that goes completely against what I expect from each other, the privacy and confidentiality that we need.
"There will be consequences, yes."
Arteta will likely look to call upon both Luiz and Ceballos at Elland Road on Sunday, his need for the latter all the more pressing with first-choice midfield pairing Mohamed Elneny and Thomas Partey both unavailable.
Elneny tested positive for coronavirus on international duty with Egypt while Partey has not recovered from the thigh injury he sustained in the 3-0 defeat to Aston Villa prior to the international break.
That defeat represented the low point of Arteta's 11 month reign at Arsenal and one of the first occasions in which his tactics were questioned. Certainly the honeymoon period that came with the FA Cup and Community Shield wins in Europe seems to have long past at the Emirates Stadium even if the club hierarchy believe that the heaviest home loss of their manager's tenure was an aberration.
It is not his employers that are asking questions of Arteta so much as Arsenal supporters, whose absence he insisted was one of the hardest aspects of the changes he is trying to make at Arsenal.
"I always feel the same pressure because the demands I set to the football club, to myself and to the players are always the same: to be the best. When we don't do it and even when we win sometimes I'm not satisfied, most of the time I'm not satisfied.
"Honeymoon is a consequence when you do things right. The way we compete with our resources and we're where we are as a team. I've been here 11 months, since I've been appointed. Actually how long I've been training with these players is a completely different story and how many breaks we had within that.
"When I lose a football game it takes me a week to go through it. When we lose it the way we lost it against Villa it's even harder because it makes me think about things in the past I hated and I don't want to see again.
"There are a lot of things to change and improve, me first. It's going to be a bumpy road - I said that on the first day - but the optimism, belief in where we're going to get is great.
"Honeymoons, I hope we have more honeymoons very soon."
