Mesut Ozil has not featured in any competition for Arsenal since March 7, but he resisted attempts by the club to offload him this summer as he still makes £350,000-a-week. Since the restart of the season in June, he has not even been listed in any of Mikel Arteta’s match day squads.
That does not look to change any time soon, as just this past week he got left off Arsenal’s Europa League squad. Any football Index analysis will show you the quality that he still has, but Arteta claims the squad has evolved beyond Ozil now. So what will become of him?
Ozil is next to unmovable because of how astronomically high his wages are and what a bad return on investment a club gets in paying that salary.
However, he’s not completely unmovable, as potential suitor may have been found in Saudi Arabia.
Al-Nassr are interested, and they have made a £5 million ($6.5m) reports TYC Sports. The club also offered the German playmaker a two year deal, but he reportedly turned it down. Ozil was also reportedly wanted a team in Qatar as well.
According to the Daily Mail, Ozil doesn’t want to move to the Middle East, and he’d rather see out his contract. This despite the fact that Arteta has made it abundantly clear the team has “evolved” beyond the point of their needing to call upon his services. On one hand, you want to root for Ozil as 1. he’s frozen out, which usually elicits sympathy and 2. he offered to pay the wages of the man who plays the mascot Gunnersaurus, who was laid off on summer transfer window deadline day.
But on the other hand, Ozil refuses to take a paycut, which is tone deaf in extreme times such as these, and he seems content to be well paid to do nothing but train. Hard to root for someone whose ambitions fallen down to a level such as this.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank, partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated, Chicago Tribune and SB Nation. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.