Arsenal and Mesut Ozil: This must be the end, any way possible

Mesut Ozil put in a typical Mesut Ozil performance in Arsenal’s Europa League final loss to Chelsea. Surely, this must be the end, any way possible.

Very quietly, Mesut Ozil enjoyed a rather promising final two months of the 2018/19 season. Unai Emery publicly ostracised him earlier on, but with careful reintegration into the first team set-up, the German responded. He did not play with the same panache as when his previous best was on show, but he put together a series of extremely tidy performances, perhaps suggesting that he was willing to work with, and not against, his new head coach.

Find the latest episode of the Pain in the Arsenal Podcast here — Death, Decay, Despair

But then the Europa League final happened. Wednesday night’s 4-1 humiliation at the hands of an excellent Chelsea was the perfect microcosm of all of the Ozilian problems Arsenal have endured over the past half-decade or so.

More from Pain in the Arsenal

The lack of commitment, a seeming natural inconsistency, especially in the biggest moments, a lacklustre attitude, a shirking away from the limelight and shrinking under the pressure. This was arguably the club’s biggest game in more than a decade. They capitulated. And it was Ozil leading this car crash.

It would not be fair to attribute all of the issues that underpinned one of the most embarrassing defeats of the year on one man. Football is a team sport and one individual can never take full credit or blame. But Ozil and his slumping shoulders is the perfect illustration of the problems at the club. If you were looking for a picture of the predicament, you need not look far.

The discussion in the aftermath of Wednesday night’s loss almost immediately turned to Ozil’s future. Every conversation about the German is rightly shaped by his wages. £350,000-a-week is a lot to spend on any player. To invest that in someone who routinely retreats into the shadows in the big games, has missed almost a third of matches through mysterious illnesses and injuries, does not work very hard defensively and is not trusted to play in away games is utterly wasteful. And, as a result of this financial mismanagement, the Arsenal squad has suffered.

Assembling a team is about carefully, purposefully and efficiently investing resources in the right areas. You can spend all the money you want, but if you were to only buy left-backs, you would not have a very good team. The efficiency that you must invest is partly determined by how much you have to spend. Manchester City can buy bad players for high prices because they can afford to do so. Their margin of error is large. Arsenal do not have such a luxury.

Consequently, when a team with a small margin for error in the transfer window and limited funds to replenish a stagnating squad is ploughing the reported eighth-highest salary in the world into a player who plays only two-thirds of games and commits himself in only half of them, you have a recipe for disaster. And Wednesday night was an unmitigated disaster, a natural consequence of mismanaged resources.

This leads to a necessary action: sell Mesut Ozil, any way possible. Arsenal cannot afford Ozil, both from a footballing perspective and a financial one; they cannot afford to carry him on the pitch as much as they can afford to pay him off it, and that means difficult decisions must now be made for the progression of the team.

Letting Ozil go for nothing may sound extreme, and if I were Arsenal I certainly would not be shouting from the rooftops that they were my intentions, should that be the case, but his wages are a weight on the club that must be removed, no matter how radical the actions taken to rid of them are.

Next. Arsenal Vs Chelsea: 5 things we learned. dark

This must be the end of Mesut Ozil at Arsenal. His time has reached a natural, and unfortunate, conclusion. But for that conclusion to be fully realised, some hard decisions may be necessary.

Home/Arsenal News