Ozil is a casualty of Emery + defensive frailties IMO. Emery botched dealing with Ozil as badly as you could botch something. Funnily enough, vad was dead on about Emery being poor at managing higher profile players, but it was Ozil that he fucked up the most. Add in the fact that our backline was in a really poor place when Emery came in and it was not strengthened properly, we had to resort to 3 at the back which necessitates sacrificing either an attacker or a midfielder, Ozil being the natural choice to be left out. Ozil can only function in a team with 3 at the back if you go with 2 up top, but with Auba/Laca/Pepe all needing to be on the field this season, something had to give.
I am still of the opinion that Ozil is a quality player and that there could be a spot for him in an ideal Arsenal XI if the defense and base of the midfield could be figured out, but Arsenal just don't have the resources to fix all of those problems at once. If Auba had arrived 2 years earlier, I think he and Ozil would have been a match made in heaven (in addition to Alexis from the wing, he and Auba would have terrorized people) but sadly that can't happen except in my FIFA 16 Manager Mode.
Piece from The Athletic
Ozil feels unwelcome and unwanted. So is there a way out for him and Arsenal?
Amy Lawrence and James McNicholas Aug 3, 2020 343
Another summer. Another Mesut Ozil-shaped window that appears jammed when it would be no bad thing to breathe in a bit of fresh air. Another suffocating stand-off.
The extraordinary stasis that is Ozil’s Arsenal career right now is both odder than ever and painfully familiar. Here he is sidelined from the main event, a distant part of the FA Cup celebration only via social media. But anyone who watches Arsenal knows they have missed creativity between the lines this season and that the one man in their squad with that specific skill set has been shunted out the picture. Entering into the last year of a contract that has caused a strain on both sides, the question of whether there might be any movement shadows the summer.
It has been like this on and off for two years now. Crazy as it seems, this relationship seemed fractured just six months after his extraordinary contract was signed on the last day of the winter market of January 2018. Might this window be any different? From Arsenal’s side, the desire is strong to move on from Ozil so they can free themselves from the burden of their most expensive salary, spent on a player whose influence at the club has dwindled. They want to reinvest those funds elsewhere. But that depends on Ozil agreeing to leave and on his part, there is no change whatsoever from the stance that he intends to honour the contract and make himself available to play for Arsenal until completion in 2021.
It all feels like those painfully destructive latter stages of a break-up. It gets to that point where it is human nature to take almost anything the other party does in a bad light. The two parties seem miles apart. Allowing Ozil to leave the country the week before the FA Cup final — because Arsenal knew for sure he wouldn’t be involved — when a trophy is at stake is a very weird kind of footballing parable. Gabriel Martinelli and Shkodran Mustafi were there on their crutches. William Saliba, who hasn’t even played a minute of football for Arsenal, was part of the happy throng on the Wembley pitch. Sokratis Papastathopoulos, with barely a look in since Mikel Arteta took over, was available to come on as a late substitute and cherish the moment. No Ozil, no Matteo Guendouzi. That felt sharp.
The reality is that it is only a question of time and money until Arsenal and Ozil go their separate ways but finding a solution before the summer of 2021 is far from straightforward.
There are three options in the Arsenal-Ozil conundrum, but all of them tricky:
1) Pay the player up for the remainder of his contract, plus a possible early termination payment, to move on. The problem here is finding the money to do that — in any financial situation like this, banks would always prefer any business to spread repayments over 52 weeks rather than trying to cobble together the sort of lump sum that Arsenal can ill afford right now.
2) Arsenal wait for the market to get going and hope there is a deal somewhere to be had. If a club that Ozil would be happy to join is at least willing take on a portion of his salary, perhaps Arsenal would be satisfied to make up the rest. Any saving is worth consideration. But in the post-COVID market, it’s difficult to imagine too many clubs eager to pay the majority of that £350,000 per week salary.
3) Go into next season with the problem unresolved, the door still open to a reconciliation. But the prospects of all-round happiness seem less likely than more “what about Ozil?” questions and bad vibes when their most expensive asset doesn’t play.
The combination of his salary, his reduced impact on the pitch, his body language, and the awkward dynamic — the squad are aware its highest-paid member is on the fringes — all add up to a situation Arsenal want to do without. But how? A contract worth almost £20 million to Ozil in wages next season is not going to go away painlessly.
On the other side of this mountain is Ozil. Taking it as a given that while money does bring considerable benefits in life, it cannot buy any guarantees for happiness or health, Ozil has found periods of the last two years confusing. He is good at putting on a strong gaze, at smiling and looking good for the cameras, but things going badly in public never feels great.
Ozil has been omitted from several games this season. For matches, he has carried an injury. For others, he has been on the bench but unused. But most damning of all are those fixtures he has simply not been selected for at all, whatever his fitness. For two different coaches to reach that same outcome underscores the problem. Fitting him into the system in a fruitful way doesn’t seem to be working. Ozil has scored once this season and provided three assists. For the most expensively paid player in the club’s history to present with that data demonstrates something isn’t right.
“If you look at the way Manchester City play, which is the way Arteta wants Arsenal to play, can Ozil play that way?” ponders a leading Premier League data analyst. “We don’t know, it hasn’t been tried necessarily, but it’s based on positional discipline, defensive input. Ozil doesn’t seem like a guy you can motivate that easily. He is not lazy. He can run 12km per game. That’s a good start. The type of defending that’s required in the system doesn’t mean you have to be N’Golo Kante, it means you just have to be disciplined and stick your foot in.”
That is not Ozil’s strength, so questions persist about his suitability to the strategy into which Arsenal are trying to evolve.
There have been times when his absence, either from matches or training, didn’t make sense to him. Going back to the start of a fresh chapter for Arsenal when Unai Emery arrived, he got the feeling he was not to be trusted in away games. Then, after a spell out the team altogether, the coach came out in the open and ascribed Ozil’s non-selection as a club decision. The sense that people outside the coaching staff were in on his exclusion was unusual and troubling.
It began to build from there. Ozil has carried the reputation for picking up slightly mysterious injuries to the point that some critics wonder if his “bad back” is a euphemism. But sometimes, if he had a small injury, he would go through the usual routines — a hospital check, a short rest, a few sessions to sharpen up with the injured players — but then would not necessarily be reintegrated to first-team training according to a normal timeline. There have been occasions when his time away from the main group, training with fitness coaches, was prolonged when he felt ready to join the first team. He feels he was kept at arm’s length, wondering if it was deliberate and why.
Ozil is not, and has never been, the most energetic trainer. He has always been more leisurely than fired up, but he found this development unexpected and odd. At one point, he wondered if he was almost being isolated from his closest friends, especially those who were always part of his gang, namely Mustafi and Sead Kolasinac.
Ozil’s status in the squad has plummeted since football’s restart. He has been frozen out again. When Arteta first took over as head coach, he started his former team-mate consistently and was supportive. But post-lockdown, he didn’t give him a single minute on the pitch. Twice, Arsenal’s No 10 was included in the squad of 20 but watched as younger, less creative players were chosen as substitutes to come on ahead of him.
So what changed?
During lockdown, Ozil became a father and was given a few days off to be with his wife and new daughter. After a couple of days back training with the group, there were a few queries over how fit and committed he was. When he was left out of the team, Arteta was hoping for a positive reaction, watching to see if the player would prove to him how much he wanted to compete for his place. Arteta, an ambitious young coach at 38 years old, has been consistent in his non-negotiables and expectations. He has made it clear when he didn’t get the response he wanted. That gauntlet was laid down at different times to Ozil, Guendouzi, Dani Ceballos and Ainsley Maitland-Niles. Some bounced back in the way he wanted. Others didn’t.
The other event during lockdown that bought Ozil’s relations with Arsenal into focus was the club’s proposed pay cut. Ozil’s camp requested more time and more information about how this would impact on the club’s spending capacities. Ozil was willing to take a bigger share of a pay cut but was unwilling to sign up for the conditions Arsenal laid out without more detail. The club wanted everyone to be in it together and, in the end, there was only one outlier.
Was he frozen out simply for football reasons or penalised for not going along with the group? Arteta has spoken strongly about his desire for everyone to be “on the boat” having a united front. That was part of the idea sold to the players about the pay cut. It is not hard to imagine this as a contributing reason why Ozil was cast adrift.
Things have happened that have made him feel uncomfortable. Unwelcome. Untrusted. It chips away. It creates doubts. Is this situation sustainable? Is it enough to make you feel tempted to move on, so you can feel personally valued again?
Ozil is far from the first sportsman who has been on the receiving end of a club pushing for a move. It works the other way too often enough, with players making a nuisance of themselves to gain some leverage in the tussle between fulfilling a contract and seeking an exit. An unhappy or demotivated player can be a difficult distraction in a group or can find themselves isolated. Issues can be forced either way.
To an extent, though, if Arsenal were hoping Ozil would reach a point where he wants out, it seems to be having the opposite effect. All this has done is make him dig in his heels. He wonders if he is being punished for the money he earns, money the club were happy to give him in with a shiny new contract in 2018.
The statistical, non-emotional, non-financial assessment of Ozil’s contribution to the team is another interesting layer to this story. The decline in his number of goal contributions is a worry in any assessment. There are many potential reasons: he is getting older and playing with less frequency, which interrupts rhythm; the team around him has changed in terms of the number of creative players with whom he can combine; and, in general, old-school No 10s are being asked to perform different roles, to which it can be difficult to adapt.
Arsene Wenger spoke on this subject in an interview with So Foot recently: “We have progressively taken the NBA route, that of a very ‘athleticised’ sport. You only have one-vs-ones, shots for three points… today, as in basketball, certain creative players are being eliminated, under the simple pretext that they are not athletic enough. In time, the danger is that football develops into a sport where players run like crazy to win the ball back as quickly as possible, but who don’t know what to do when they actually have it in their possession. We have to keep a balance.”
Wenger was an ideal coach for Ozil. A collector of dextrous, nimble playmakers, he gave Ozil the freedom to maximise his gifts. The former World Cup winner, whose assist numbers shone for years, is best in a team that dominates possession. But here’s the thing. With the change in coach, Arsenal went from averaging around 200 individual possessions in the final third per 90 minutes under Wenger to under 100 under Emery. That is not a circumstance to naturally suit any creative playmaker.
The other significant change last summer that has had a direct effect on this season is that Arsenal decimated the number of creators in the squad. This is a club who not long ago had such a glut of No 10 types: Cesc Fabregas, Samir Nasri, Alex Hleb, Tomas Rosicky, Jack Wilshere, Aaron Ramsey, Santi Cazorla, Ozil. And then there was one.
When Arsenal let Ramsey, Alex Iwobi and Henrikh Mkhitaryan go last summer (even if the latter two were not considered to be fundamental players), they dramatically reduced the number of between-the-lines players at the club. Ozil always plays best when he has others around him to combine with.
“Ozil doesn’t like to play by himself between the lines,” observes another Premier League data analyst. “The entire City system that Arteta likes depends on two playmakers in those positions. Arsenal effectively have zero. It’s crazy. It was crazy to give away all those players without a replacement.”
In 2015-16, his peak season, Ozil had 28 goal involvements from 45 appearances. His creativity was at the hub of the way the team played. His link-up with the likes of Cazorla and Ramsey around him, Alexis Sanchez buzzing around, the contrasting attackers to aim for in the big man Olivier Giroud and the sprinter Theo Walcott, gave him a variety of options to catch his eye.
His touches per game in the final third have dropped off significantly in the past couple of years. In 2015-16 it was 45. Last season that fell to 28. A player who enjoys needling clever passes needs plenty of the ball and most recently when he plays he sees far less of it.
Is there a decline in Ozil’s quality, a decline in his conditions that means he can’t play his best, or both? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly. But what we do know is that the current state does not bring the best out of either player or club.
The original Ozil transfer from Real Madrid in 2013 was something of which Arsenal were so proud. After years of being regarded as a “selling club” that reluctantly lived with their best players leaving, suddenly they laid a serious glove in the market for a world-renowned player at a pre-peak age from an elite club. There was so much excitement, people all over the world started to put umlauts on random “o”s in their social media tags in his honour.
It came about because Real wanted to shunt out a player under contract so they could raise money to spend elsewhere. Sound familiar? They were desperate to buy Gareth Bale (who, in one of those weird twists of fate, now finds himself pushed to the periphery at the Bernabeu while another gargantuan contract plays out). The story goes that Real originally looked to offload Angel Di Maria and Karim Benzema to buy Bale. Arsenal were very much in the conversation.
But when those moves were blocked by Real’s coach Carlo Ancelotti, Madrid decided Ozil could be their bargaining chip. Arsenal duly shattered their transfer record and were thrilled with the outcome.
The renewal, when it was signed in 2018, had been on the table for a while. It was a similar scenario to that faced with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang now: the cost of a player who can instantly replace their contribution to the team would involve a huge transfer fee, with wages on top. It can be more economical to give a wage hike directly to the player to stay.
But down the line, those wages still need to be worth it.
Ozil turns 32 in two months. The word is he wants to play. He wants to play even beyond the expiry of this infamous contract next summer. If the impasse does continue until then, one thing is for sure: it won’t be for a lack of trying as Arsenal push for — and Ozil resists against — a premature end.
(Photo: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
