Arsenal: Like it or not, Mesut Ozil can’t help himself anymore

Mesut Ozi was one slick dude in Arsenal’s win over Napoli, but we already knew that and other than securing the win, it really doesn’t matter.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there are few things more wonderful to watch in all of football than an in-form Mesut Ozil. And he has been blessing Arsenal fans for years with some fantastic, magical stuff that you can’t see anywhere else.

And that’s wonderful, and lovely, and all the other wonderful adjectives. And we got to see more of it against Napoli in front of an appreciative Emirates that loved his dinks and dives and his silky smooth attacking play. The man was in control, and that’s when he’s truly at his best.

But other than what it did for establishing the result, none of it mattered for his own personal value. This is all stuff that we know good and well that he can do. We know that when you put him in this set-up, he’s a singular-minded magician with enough tricks up his sleeve to wow 70,000 fans.

The problem is simply the situation that he is now in, where he is one of the highest earners in the Premier League and he can only perform well in half of our matches, and even that is being generous, as he’s not guaranteed to play every home match well, whereas he is essentially guaranteed to play every away match poorly.

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He is the very definition of a luxury player. If you have the financial capacity to pay him that much money in exchange for being effective maybe 35% of the time, then that’s great, and you keep him and you smile when he’s out there flippin’ and trickin’ and you don’t miss him in tougher, grittier matches when he’s sitting alongside the rest of the subs.

But that’s the problem – we don’t have that kind of financial flexibility, and as long as Stan Kroenke is alive, we never will (don’t get any ideas).

So you want my advice? You’re going to get it anyway – enjoy it while you can. Because something tells me that Unai Emery is not the kind of guy who wants to spend that much money for 35% of a player, no should he. And if his patience is as short as it should be after Everton, Ozil might not get another chance to prove otherwise.

I hate to sound like a cynic (although not really, it’s a good changeup from my usual shtick as an eternal optimist) but while I greatly admire the skills that Ozil has, nothing he can do now is going to change how he just isn’t right for this club anymore.