Arsenal: Seriously, what’s going on with Konstantinos Mavropanos?

Arsenal’s defense is going to need answers this summer, but some of those answers may already be in the club, though it’s hard to tell when they never come out to play.

There haven’t been a lot of things to criticize Unai Emery about this year, and seeing as how it’s his first year, I don’t really like to criticize anything about him, since he absolutely has the right to figure out how he wants to handle things at Arsenal.

He’s been a remarkably fair manager, who approaches each match the way it should be approached, and he doesn’t choose favorites, which is perhaps the best part about him as a leader. It caused some turmoil with Mesut Ozil, but I think we’re all seeing that it has worked out for the best.

What baffles me, though, is his treatment of Konstantinos Mavropanos. Or not his treatment, necessarily, but the complete lack of anything.

Here’s a breakdown of Mavropanos’s career in North London thus far, you’ll see what I mean.

He arrives as a highly-touted Sven Mislintat prospect in January of 2018. He’s supposed to go out on loan, but Arsene Wenger sees so much in the young man that he keeps him around and by the end of the year, he is starting every match at centerback. The fans love him for the hard-nosed way that he plays.

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He picks up a poor red card. Bummer. Then he picks up an injury that keeps him out for the first half of the year. He returns to the first team, isn’t included in the Europa League roster, plays 11 minutes in the Premier League, 161 minutes for the U23s, and nothing else. It’s dead silence.

He pops up on a video alongside Sokratis (who himself said that Dinos was going to be better than him) and looked happy.

That’s it. Nothing else. He’s nowhere to be found and no one is talking about him.

I find this incredibly strange, especially seeing as how the defense needs help for the long haul, and Dinos proved last season that he was going to be here to help out. I thought that this year we would get a taste for if he was ready to be called on as a solution, but even if he started every match between now and the end of the year, which he won’t, I’m not sure we would have enough of a sample size because he just hasn’t been used.

Can anyone help me understand what’s going on?