Arsenal: Arsene Wenger’s isn’t talking about Mesut Ozil

Arsene Wenger has recently been talking about contracts and player motivation. Typically, the Arsenal manager’s words have been twisted by the media.

Arsene Wenger has been in the headlines recently. This time, it was from his speech at the Laureus World Sports Awards in Monaco on Monday, at which he was accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award.

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The former Arsenal manager was asked about Mesut Ozil, the German’s new contract and what he feels in regards to the changing priorities of the modern game that demand long-term contracts because of the increasing value of the players.

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This is what he said (I have pulled the quotes directly from how they are presented in a piece by The Independent. Their formatting grossly misrepresents what Wenger said):

"“Most of the time now we think when we sign a player for five years we have a good player for five years. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they practice, they play their best. Because they might be in their comfort zone. He has a contract but the problem is that if you want to buy a player like him you have to spend £100m. And to maintain the value of the player, beyond the Ozil case, it is more about the way football is structured. To buy players of top, top quality you need £100m. So the decision you have to make is whether you re-sign the player, who costs us nothing, or do we have the money to buy a new player?”"

The Independent ran with this title off the back of these quotes: ‘Arsene Wenger questions Mesut Ozil’s effort levels since signing new Arsenal contract’. But that simply isn’t true. Not only did Wenger not question Ozil’s ‘effort levels’ whatsoever, — he did not use any words that are even similar to the phrase — but he was not talking about Ozil and his application in the first place. The question was not about Ozil.

The quotes from ‘He has a contract…’ onwards actually come from him answering a completely different question which was directly asked about whether handing Ozil the £350,000-a-week contract. He said that he did not want to answer and interfere with the current running of Arsenal football club before then going back to his previous point about the difficulty of managing top players and their contracts.

Wenger never actually says that Ozil is in a ‘comfort zone’. He never actually comments on the ‘effort levels’ of Ozil. He simply uses the decision to hand Ozil a new contract as a case study for the dichotomous decision that top clubs have to make every year in regards to their star players: do you allow their contracts to run down a little to motivate them at the risk of having to spend £100 million to replace them or do you sign them to long-term contracts to preserve their value and prevent a heavy outlay at the risk of losing their motivation?

That is the question that Wenger poses. He does not provide an answer for it, though his behaviour hints at his preference to keep contracts shorter. He does not comment on Ozil specifically, rather raising him as an example. He does not question the German’s effort and commitment and application.

But because Ozil, his attitude and Arsene Wenger are such major topics in Arsenal circles, quotes like this that can be easily twisted to mean something that they don’t are like gold dust for a modern media hunting for clicks.

Oh, and if you don’t believe that the Independent was hunting for clicks and simply misunderstood Wenger’s words, here is their slug (the URL which links to words that are searched into Google and will push the article higher up the search order for those words): ‘arsenal-news-mesut-ozil-contract-arsene-wenger-questions-effort-levels-lazy-injury-illness-selection’.