Arsenal: Half-price Shkodran Mustafi an unfortunate ending

Arsenal are set to offload Shkodran Mustaf this summer, but seeing the transfer price bantering about, it’s all a bit of a shame, isn’t it?

Arsenal‘s defense kind of sucks. It has for two years now, as it has progressively declined. All hopes have hinged on Laurent Koscielny‘s health and the odd bit of magic from Shkodran Mustafi. Sokratis has helped but the promise of youth is really all we’ve had to look forward to.

The investment has simply not matched the need, and a big reason for that is because the investment was made in Shkodran Mustafi.

We spent £35m on this guy. A guy that was supposed to fix everything. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t look up to the part from the start.

At the beginning, the only complaint was that he was too short. And that complaint went away in about a month when people saw how dominant he was in the air despite being shorter than your usual centerback.

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He went 19 straight starts without losing a match. And even as we saw glimpses of potential problems, there was hope that he would iron them out. He was just 25-years-old after all. Of course he can improve in two, three years.

Now, with Mustafi on the out, the rumored transfer fee that AC Milan are willing to pay is £17m. This is AC Milan, as in Ivan Gazidis’s AC Milan. And Ivan Gazidis as in the Gazidis that bought Mustafi for Arenal in the first place.

Gazidis sees clearly that Mustafi hasn’t just materialized, but he is worth only half of what he was worth just a few years ago. I don’t know if this ruffles your feathers quite like it ruffles mine, but in the meantime, it’s also quite sad. It’s a complete failure. Where else might that money have gone, since our club apparently has so little of it? Who else might have been brought int to be a solution and, for that matter, how would the club have been better off for it?

Last but not least, do we even want the answers to those questions? I’m not so sure I do.

Generally speaking, after a few years, a players value goes up. He’s proven himself as a top-tier player, or at least still has the potential to be one. But here, with Mustafi, we have seen the exact opposite happen. Bummerville.