Arsenal: Is there a point to all this Shkodran Mustafi nonsense?

I empathize with Shkodran Mustafi, but at what point does it fall on the club to do something about the situation and not let it fester?

There is no one at Arsenal more universally unfavored than Shkodran Mustafi. The German centerback was meant to be our big solution to everything, the guy to take us forward into the future. But since then, he’s been riddled with inconsistency, mental mistakes, and a team philosophy that left him buried in failure.

But he’s still on the team. He sits there, sometimes on the bench, sometimes in the reserves, watching. He speaks openly about how much fan criticism hurt him. It’s become a bit of a forgotten plot line, but the freeze out of Mustafi is alive and completely unnecessary.

“Freezing out” is never a good thing. Maybe if a player declares he’s leaving and you freeze him out, that’s fine. But to freeze out someone as eager as Mustafi, who’s supposed to be in his prime years, is a tad bothersome. Not just from a club standpoint, but from a personal standpoint.

Even if you don’t like what Mustafi brings on the pitch, you have to empathize with him as a professional. He’s a footballer who wants to play the damn game. And at Arsenal he isn’t getting that chance.

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And yet according to all the rumors, Mustafi is going to be held on to. Mikel Arteta has shown resilience in keeping key players (like Granit Xhaka), but he’s getting a bit carried away with keeping everyone.

That couldn’t be any more true than in the case of Shkodran Mustafi.

It’s no secret we wouldn’t get much return on his transfer fee. We paid £35m for the guy and we’d be lucky to get half that. But at the same time, who’s to blame for that? Mustafi hasn’t been great for years. Why the Gunners continue to hang onto him is beyond me. In the current state of the club, it may come down to health. Calum Chambers is out. That’s a bummer. We definitely need help defensively. But I’d rather see Zech Medley at this point, not Mustafi. At least mistakes by Medley can be learning experiences. With Mustafi it’s just more of the same.

For the sake of Mustafi and the club, we have to let him go. He needs to play, and he’s not going to play here. It makes no sense.