Serge Gnabry has explained that he left Arsenal for his ‘development’ admitting that Arsenal wanted to keep him ‘badly,’ but shows serious deficiencies in his thinking and recollection of how things actually were.

“It was the right decision,” Gnabry told Kicker.

“Everybody who compares my development over the last four months to my time in England before that can’t come to a different conclusion,” Gnabry added, and with a senior German callup and a debut hattrick following his move you can maybe see why he thinks that.

While on the surface, it’s not hard to argue with his logic, it, and Gnabry, seem to forget that for a large chunk of the two years before he left, he was injured seriously or recovering from that knee problem.

Arsenal stood by him and the first chance he got, he was gone, despite Arsenal making it clear that they ‘badly’ wanted him to stay.

“That was the main reason for the transfer – I wanted to get more playing time and it worked,” he continued.“Arsenal wanted to keep me, badly, but I had to look after my development.

“If a player does not perform well, a club has no sympathy and they do not want to keep him.”

This is a nice little story that Gnabry is telling himself, but it is the total opposite of how Arsenal act in general and how they were with him specifically.

Before Gnabry starred at the Olympics, his name was on nobody’s lips. He’d just come back from a serious knee problem and flopped at West Brom. Arsenal were naturally waiting to see how he recovered from that injury before they offered him a new deal.

And Arsenal clearly wanted to keep him, by his own admission, even though he wasn’t playing. With the Ox and Walcott both under-performing last season, there was a slot just waiting for him to make his own.

At the time of the transfer it was strongly rumoured that it was really a backdoor move to Bayern Munich.

Let’s see where he is at the start of the next season.

And what little stories he’s telling himself then.