On the final day of the summer transfer window in early September 2013,
excitement had built in the north London streets around the Emirates Stadium.
Mesut Ozil was rumoured to be moving to Arsenal from Real Madrid,
and with each update on progress, the clamour in those streets grew.
Finally, a £42.4m transfer was announced – a new club transfer record – and an uninhibited,
impromptu celebration began that lasted throughout the evening.
Eight years later, the relationship between Arsenal and Ozil would end in a protracted
divorce. What began as a love affair, with those street parties and supporters
deed-polling umlauts into their twitter handles, had turned very sour indeed.
But what happened?
Even the good years between Ozil and Arsenal weren’t simple.
A wonderfully talented and creative player, the German was a consistent source of assists
and watchable moments. Nevertheless, he operated much of the time in the centre of a culture war,
caught between those who appreciated the subtle nuance of his style and
others who bemoaned his perceived lack of physicality and workrate.
Whatever the virtues of either argument, Ozil rarely existed outside of that context. And
Arsenal, who had long since fallen off the post-Millennium Invincibles Era peak,
often bounced between extremes as a side, exacerbating that frustration.
But Ozil’s career in England would reach a fork in the road in 2018 when two key
events took place that changed his relationship with the club.
First, in January, it was announced that he had signed a new three-year contract at the
age of 29. Including wages, bonuses and image rights, it was worth an estimated
£350,000/week. This deal would become both a millstone for the club and a
significant obstacle in their path to – eventually – a wholescale rebuild.
Secondly though, in April of 2018, Arsene Wenger announced that he’d be leaving Arsenal at the end
of that season. Ozil had been Wenger’s signing at a time when the Frenchman exerted enormous
influence over every aspect of club life. But the two also enjoyed a special relationship.
Wenger wrote in his autobiography about the need not to be too harsh in criticism of Ozil
and how “like all artists, he needs to feel supported in his creativity.”
In the summer of 2018, Unai Emery replaced Wenger and brought a different approach to
the mercurial playmaker. Emery and Ozil started off on a good footing—the latter was even made
captain several times—but he was no longer a guaranteed starter. On a few occasions,
he was left on the bench or even left out of the squad for important games, with Emery
justifying those decisions with pointed remarks about the need for physicality in his team.
Simultaneously, for a variety of reasons, Ozil suffered through
one of the worst 18 months of his career. After the 2018 World Cup,
his international career had ended in deep and bitter acrimony. In the summer of 2019,
he, his wife and teammate Sead Kolasinac were the victims of an attempted car-jacking
in London. At the end of the year, Arsenal would distance themselves from comments Ozil
made on Instagram in which he condemned China’s treatment of the Uighur population in Xinjiang.
Arsenal sacked Emery in November of 2019, but Ozil quickly fell foul of his interim replacement,
Freddie Ljungberg. Ljungberg had been a member of the Invincibles
team. He was club royalty. In a home loss to Manchester City, Ozil reacted petulantly to
being substituted by throwing his gloves off and kicking out at them in anger.
In the aftermath, Ljungberg was happy to lay down the law:
“At Arsenal, that’s not how we behave, that’s not what we do,” he said.
Mikel Arteta’s arrival was initially good news. In fact,
Ozil enjoyed a long unbroken run of starts before the pandemic arrived and football
shut down in the Spring of 2020. But that was another complicated period for him.
During the game’s hiatus, Arsenal players and Arteta himself agreed a 12.5% pay cut. Ozil
declined, blaming a lack of advance notice prior to the announcement and stating that he didn’t
believe contracts should be changed without the involvement of a player’s representative.
According to reporting by The Athletic,
he also wanted assurances about how any funds from the wage cuts would be used.
“As players, we all wanted to contribute, but we needed more
information and many questions were unanswered,” he said at the time.
Ultimately, instead of agreeing to the pay-cut,
he used the money to fund food donations to homeless shelters and schools across London.
By now, his relationship with Arsenal had begun to deteriorate to pre-pandemic levels,
according to an Athletic article written by Art De Roche and David Ornstein. Even
after football resumed, Ozil would never be picked to play for the club again,
with “a perceived lack of training intensity” blamed, rather than any political issues.
His last appearance was against West Ham in March 2020, a match in which he provided an
assist for Alexandre Lacazette with one of his final touches. With over 15 months of
his contract still left to run, he was about to become football’s biggest white elephant.
It was a strange period. Ozil would periodically offer social media
commentary on Arsenal games in which he wasn’t involved. In one particularly surreal episode,
in October 2020, he responded to the news that the Arsenal employee who had played
Gunnersaurus for 27 years was being made redundant by offering to pay his salary.
A war was afoot. By the end of that month, though, it was over: he was omitted from Mikel Arteta’s
Premier and Europa League squads, confirming that he had all but played his last game.
Reporting for The Guardian, Nick Ames wrote that Ozil “will continue to be
an expensive problem until (the end of his contract) unless an agreement can
be reached between all parties in the meantime.”
And that’s what happened. In mid-January 2021, with six months of his contract left
to run and a reported £7m in earnings still unpaid, Ozil and Arsenal reached
an agreement for the early termination of his agreement. Finally, they had brought an end
to a saga which had drained the energy from the player, the club and the Arsenal fanbase.