Arsenal: Fabregas’s Ozil Trump A Blow That Must Be Weathered

Arsenal are certainly still bitter about Cesc Fabregas, and when stats come out like we’ve just seen, all we can do is try to absorb the blow.

Arsenal has been struggling to get Mesut Ozil going ever since his brilliant start to the season and superb 2015/16 campaign. He has often looked the part of a sleep walker as the goal production has slowed to where it was in his first 18 months with the club.

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As if we didn’t have enough to moan about, a new stat comparison shows that Cesc Fabregas has done more than Mesut Ozil this year in far less time played.

The numbers are enough to make a Gooner’s blood boil. Ozil has played 1866 Premier League minutes and registered five goals and four assists while Fabregas has played 639 while chalking up three goals and seven assists. Simple math, ten is greater than nine.

There are a few garbage arguments we could make on behalf of Ozil. Maybe him having to play every single match is holding him back. Maybe Fabregas is staying fresh. Maybe we should include Ozil’s Champions League tallies.

But as I said, those arguments are garbage. What we have here is an indefensible statistic. The numbers say so much, but they probably don’t even say enough.

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I have been incredibly hard on Ozil this year, but I feel justified when numbers like this pop up. Arsenal and Chelsea, on paper, have sides that are very similar. There is just some sort of ideological or motivational difference between the two that makes Chelsea better.

And they are better with Fabregas, who comes on as a sub far more than he starts. If you really want to boil it down further, you could say that a guy that can’t even make the Chelsea starting XI is doing better than a guy that would never be dropped out of the Gunner’s starting XI. Both of whom do the same thing. Or try to, anyways.

And that hurts. Normally we would fly to the defense of Arsenal players (try to say Hazard is better than Alexis, I dare you) but there is nothing we can do here. Ozil has let us down this year, no matter how they try to chalk it up as him being the “scapegoat”.

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The numbers aren’t there to back him up, the effort isn’t there… what can we say? Fabregas is still driving a stake into Gooner’s even when he can’t get into the starting XI.