Hello everyone, happy Friday to you. The Mesut Ozil situation rumbles on, which is no less than you’d expect really. Despite some people’s desire to explain this away as a casual piece of tactical thinking from Unai Emery – “He’s saving him for the more important games, like Burnley at home!” – when a player of his stature is dumped for a North London derby it’s a story that will reverberate.
In a report in today’s Times, it’s suggested that after training ground clashes over his work-rate and more, Arsenal are willing to sell Ozil as early as January but, understanding that the £350,000 a week he’s paid might well make a deal prohibitive for most potential buyers, would be willing to loan him while subsidising his wages to help facilitate the move. Talk of the club’s willingness to sell was also in the Independent yesterday, and regardless of how you view the veracity of those stories, it’s a remarkable turnaround from where we were back at the end of January.
With under 6 months left on his deal, with Alexis gone to Manchester United and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Henrikh Mkhitaryan just arrived, the renewal of his contract was met with genuine excitement. Even if eyebrows were raised at the size of the salary, it felt important that Arsenal held onto a star player – and one who could have left on a free, let’s remember. The idea of that was anathema at the time, and would rightly have had people asking serious questions about the ambition and direction the club was going in. I wonder if you asked people to revisit that situation now how many would think his departure might have been for best. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.
What we have now though is a particularly unhealthy situation for the club, the player and the manager. When asked on Wednesday evening if Ozil had a future at the club, it would have been very simple for Unai Emery to say something like ‘Yes, every player is important. We all want to see Mesut Ozil back to his best and on the pitch for Arsenal’. Instead he repeatedly skirted the issue, and ultimately dropping him for a North London derby sent a much bigger message than anything he might have to say.
I don’t think Emery is a stupid man, and I’m quite sure he would be delighted to have a Mesut Ozil at the top of his game available to him. When he arrived back from the World Cup he offered very public support, saying the ‘Arsenal family’, would be there for him after what was a difficult summer on, but especially off the pitch. He then got down to doing his new job, demanding more from a squad which had been in a comfort zone under Arsene Wenger, and while I’m sure he expected most of the players to buy into his methods, he’d have understood that some simply wouldn’t. That’s natural, it happens at every football club, and 6 months down the line it looks as if Ozil is someone who isn’t into what Emery is doing.
Maybe it’s because Emery has treated everybody the same way and expected the same from all of his players. He had to create a level playing field, but since his arrival in 2013 Ozil’s star quality meant he was indulged more than others. There’s an informative snippet from Aaron Ramsey in a Soccer AM video when asked who was the teacher’s pet at Arsenal. He says:
Probably Mesut. He gets a few extra days off than the rest of us. He’s always in the boss’s room asking for something … and he seems to get it.
It’s somewhat tongue in cheek but it not untrue. That was Wenger’s way. An arm around the shoulder, indulging him when he wanted time off, and I suspect that the new regime has not been anywhere near as accommodating. If a new manager comes in and gives one player an inch, why wouldn’t every other player try and take a mile? It feels like the root cause of this is disciplinary, because it can’t really be about footballing ability.
Leaving work-rate aside, Ozil is one of the most gifted individuals we have in this squad. His creativity and vision is matched by few in Europe, let alone the other players we have available to us, regardless of how dismissive his fiercest critics are of him. Look at his record in terms of assists, look at how many chances he creates, but there’s little doubt we haven’t seen him anywhere near his best for some time now. It was understandable last season to suggest the dying embers of Wenger’s reign made assessing individual performances difficult, but this season we’ve seen what we might consider the real Mesut Ozil, the Mesut Ozil we jumped around with joy about when he signed from Real Madrid, just once.
He was superb in that Leicester game, and you can be sure that kind of player and that kind of performance is something any manager would want in their team. It was a one off though. We haven’t see him play anywhere near that well since, and his dismal cameo against Southampton last week was the chalk to that particular cheese (Red Leicester?!).
It is a complicated situation however. There’s a PR machine set up to protect Ozil the player and Ozil the brand, so they would have you believe all is well. Arsenal, as a club, won’t add fuel to any fire like this, but Emery’s decision to leave him out of the derby and subsequent comments tell you a lot. Leave his idiosyncratic English aside, he could have publicly backed the player if he’d wanted to and played the whole thing down. He didn’t and you have to ask why, and ask why any manager would deny himself that kind of talent without good reason.
I know as player he’s many people’s favourite, and I get that, but I also believe it’s important that in this – as in any other walk of life – it’s important to think critically about what we’re seeing. There’s something serious going on here, it’s not healthy for the club or the team, and it’s important that the people running the football side of Arsenal act decisively to ensure that it doesn’t become an even bigger distraction than it already is.
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Ozil is the subject of some discussion on today’s Arsecast with James, along with the Sp*rs game, some Christmas waffle and more. Listen/subscribe below, back tomorrow to preview the Burnley game. Happy listening.
