Arsenal: Mesut Ozil isn’t misunderstood, he’s too understood

Arsenal fans have been harder on Mesut Ozil than ever before, but Ilkay Gundogan is wrong about the reason why – he isn’t just ‘misunderstood.’

Arsenal and Mesut Ozil just haven’t jived this year. Unai Emery has put the German on the back-burner as the massive wages that Ozil is collecting continue to weigh heavily on the financial position of the club.

He isn’t producing an end product, with minimal goal production on the year, which you can’t attribute to lack of game time, because Aaron Ramsey has produced far more in less time.

But, according to Ilkay Gundogan, Ozil is just misunderstood. Gundogan threw out all kinds of adjectives: elegant, a huge talent, etc. He put him on the same level as Kevin De Bruyne. All of which is well and good, they are two talented players.

That said, Gundogan is missing the point. No one is denying how talented Ozil is, or how elegant he is. Of course we all put him on the same level as De Bruyne, his early numbers prove that they are quite similar in production.

Gundogan is focusing on the old argument, that Ozil has bad body language, and thus can be construed as not caring.

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I don’t think Ozil doesn’t care because of body language, I think he’s starting to not care because he can’t be bothered to adapt to Emery’s style of play.

And that’s what this primarily comes down to. Ozil isn’t misunderstood, he just doesn’t fit in with the current schematics within the club. Not at all. Emery is a high-impact, constant pressure kind of manager and Ozil’s ‘elegant’ style doesn’t fit in with the game plan that Emery is putting out there.

The problem is that Ozil is too understood. His abilities and faculties are so well known that there is no way around the developing truth around this knowledge – that he isn’t right for this club. That he just isn’t the player to lead this club into the next era of its existence.

Ozil is being criticized because he is making a ton of money and not delivering on those wages. He is being criticized because, under Wenger, he established exactly what kind of player he was, and it was something to build around.

Under Emery, it’s something different. We already know what player he is, we know exactly who he is, and he doesn’t fit in. That’s just how it is.