Arsenal: Everyone that matters believes in Granit Xhaka

Arsenal’s captaincy choice is still under heavy scrutiny, but know that everyone who actually matters believes in Granit Xhaka.

It’s been about a week since the Arsenal captaincy team was announced. Unai Emery stuck with his plan of having five captains, one main captain and four vice captains. Granit Xhaka won out as the main captain, with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alexandre Lacazette, Mesut Ozil and Hector Bellerin rounding out the rest.

Of course, this lead to immediate uproar. The haters came out of their holes and griped that Xhaka isn’t captain material, that he isn’t a leader, that he’s worthless, should be sold, so on and so forth. You know, the typical fan mentality of support and positivity.

True to form, Xhaka ignored it all and stuck to a familiar method of dealing with the haters—knowing his own worth and accepting that the chirpers don’t.

Recently, Xhaka opened up about the captaincy, and his point was well seen—everyone that matters supports him as the captain. Everyone that matters.

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Unai Emery’s method of choosing captains was to have all the players secretly write down their choices. This wasn’t Emery slapping the armband on Xhaka without input. This was a team effort. And the team, our team, chose Xhaka. The players support him, Emery supports him. That’s all that matters. Whether bitter old John Doe doesn’t like how slow Xhaka is and that therefore disqualifies him from the captaincy doesn’t matter. Because guys like Aubameyang, Lacazette, David Luiz… these are guys that live and breathe the game and stand by Xhaka.

All you need to know comes across in Xhaka’s track record of leadership. He captained Switzerland. He captained Monchengladbach. He is one of the few players that will own up to his mistakes when they occur. He’s one of the only guys that you can see shouting on the pitch when things go wrong (or even when they go right).

Whether you like it or not, this man is captain material and everyone that matters knows it. So you can either get behind him and believe in this team, or you can continue to mouth off from your self-righteous soap box about how he’s a discredit to the red and white and further prove the point that you prefer self-gratification to the will of the team.

I don’t know, it seems like a pretty easy choice to me. But what do I know.