Arsenal: Mesut Ozil tweet a crude, unnecessary move

Mesut Ozil sent out a tweet with a Dennis Bergkamp quote about being an Arsenal fan. It was a crude, contorted, corrupt PR move that helps nobody but himself.

Arsenal put in their worst performance of the season. They lost 1-0 to BATE Borisov. The fans turned on Unai Emery, who was adjudged to have got his tactics wrong, failed to change the game with his substitutions, and allowed a stagnation during the season after a positive start. Mesut Ozil — and his social media team — saw this, sadly, as an opportunity.

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The next day, Ozil sent out the tweet embedded below. In it, he quoted Dennis Bergkamp, ‘When you start supporting a football club, you don’t support it because of the trophies, or a player, or history, you support it because you found yourself somewhere there; found a place where you belong.’

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Emery is clearly not the most likeable figure in Ozil’s eyes. He has publicly criticised the German, dropped him from the team, and seemingly planned to move on in the summer. Obviously, Ozil is not too happy about that. Anyone would be. It is a natural, human response. And I have no issue with Ozil not liking Emery and raising his concerns his private. But this tweet was very much not that.

This was a crude, directed, driven, full of intent, almost malicious move to pit himself against Emery when Emery is at his weakest. His self-professed love for the club is an apparent reassertion of his commitment, something that is strongly questioned by his doubters, and he is appealing to 23.8 million Twitter followers and 18.7 million Instagram followers.

https://twitter.com/MesutOzil1088/status/1096485650168233985

And many of these players are Ozil first, Arsenal second fans. There are few players in the world that boast the same individualised, iconic, vicious following as Ozil. That provides him with power, and he is now wielding it against Emery. There is very much an underlying theme of Ozil vs Emery in the discussion of how the Ozil situation should be handled.

Pitting a star player against a manager is never helpful. And usually, on the losing end of it all is the club. Not the player. Not the manager. The club. And this is where my biggest issue comes with Ozil’s actions here. They are selfish.

He is paid £350,000-a-week — and yes, that matters — to do the best for Arsenal football club, on and off the pitch. There is only one person that this helps: him. It does not help Emery, who must now face a barrage of questions about his clearly severed relationship with the highest profile player at the club. It does not help Arsenal, who are caught in the middle of a manager vs star player battle. It only helps him by invigorating his, and not the club’s, fans.

Look, Ozil may deserve to be starting. He may not. I don’t really know either way. But one thing that he should be doing is helping Arsenal football club in everything that he does, and this is most certainly not that.