Jonas Eidevall's departure was revealed to Arsenal's players on Tuesday morning, ahead of their training session before taking on Valerenga in the Champions League.

Arsenal captain Kim Little said: "We got made aware this morning in our team meeting before we went out to train.

"Jonas has been our leader for the last four years and he’s obviously made the choice to step away just now and we have a huge amount of respect for him.

"As a group of players, as a part of our leadership group we have to get the players together. Obviously it’s a big change but we need to move forward now and change our focus to what we need in tomorrow’s game.”

Little believes that Eidevall's tenure has set up the Gunners to have success, despite his departure just four games into the Women's Super League season.

“I think a strength of maybe what Jonas has left is that there is the foundations here. This incredible club has got everything in place for us to succeed, so we move forward with that.

"Everybody’s focused and we’ve got a group game tomorrow which is a really important one. The club has really gone through the taxing stuff today."

Former Scotland international Little believes that Arsenal's senior players, including herself, have a responsibility to step up under interim manager Renee Slegers.

"When we got told the news this morning we regrouped a little bit, got everyone together and said we had to refocus and move forward to these games, which are incredibly important. They’re coming thick and fast just now- it’s hard enough as it is to stay focused with that, and this added change adds to that.

"I also expressed with our other leadership players to refocus, take huge individual responsibility and also be as supportive as we can to our staff and Renee going into the interim manager role. That’s basically what we said and that’s all we can do. It’s challenging, but there's been a few occasions in my career this has happened. The most important thing is us staying together and putting on a really good performance tomorrow night.”

Arsenal take on Norwegian side Valerenga at Emirates Stadium on Wednesday night in their second Champions League group game.