Arsenal: Adidas ad shelf life maxing out at about a month

Arsenal ran a tantalizing ad with Adidas, featuring non-British players in distinctly British accents, but why were only players linked with exits featured?

If you haven’t seen Arsenal‘s Adidas ad yet, you need to. Don’t read any further until you have. It’s a brilliant piece of hype that, even for someone like me who hates hype, got me hyped. But there was one thing I found particularly curious about the ad, and no, it wasn’t the fake British accents.

The ad starts with Mesut Ozil and Sead Kolasinac in a barbershop. Ozil is seen first, the main man that fans want to see sold this summer, and then Kolasinac speaks up, another man that ranks incredibly high on the list of players suspected to be sold.

We move on into a restaurant, where Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Alexandre Lacazette are seated at a table. Both players are heavily linked with big money exits, with it being pretty well established that the likelihood of both remaining at the club is slim to none.

Fast-forward, we see Alex Iwobi, who many think could be sold, (with a surprise from Matteo Guendouzi who, thankfully, is the only player in this ad excluded from rumors), and we end up in the locker room with Laurent Koscielny, currently linked to both Lyon and Borussia Dortmund.

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Further we go until we end at Hector Bellerin, who many think Emery is trying to sell off for a big payday in order to fund more transfers. And Bellerin calls North London home.

It’s a great ad, I just found the player choice curious. All we were missing were Shkodran Mustafi and Henrikh Mkhitaryan. Where were guys like Sokratis and Bernd Leno? Guendouzi poked his head in briefly, so there was that, but Granit Xhaka (who is absolutely not leaving)? Dinos?

I get that a lot of players are linked with exits, and some of them didn’t even make the ad (Lucas Torreira), but it was an odd assortment of players, seeing as how, in a month, that ad will be riddled with players who have already held up the jersey of another team in the photo-op announcing their arrival elsewhere.

Maybe it’s a coincidence and I’m making too much of it. But I want this ad to be relevant for years, because it was that awesome. So to see so many sellable players dotting the production, well, it makes me wonder who we plan on selling at all.