Whether you believe they like each other or not, it is clear there is a problem between Mesut Ozil and Unai Emery and former Arsenal man, Ray Parlour, believes it’s all Neymar’s fault.
Mesut Ozil is certainly not one of Unai Emery’s favourite players, the amount of minutes he’s played tells you that. On the flip side, Emery made Ozil one of his five captains for the season, but at this point you gave to wonder if that was merely a move to try and get more out of the German playmaker.
With rumours abounding that the club are going to let him leave in January, either on a permanent transfer if they can get someone to pay £25m for him or on a weird loan that seems to make no sense as Arsenal would have to subsidise some of his wages (why pay money for an extremely talented creative player that you have no option of using?), Ray Parlour thinks he knows what is going on.
“Ozil is not featuring and he wasn’t even in the squad against Spurs, so that’s a bit of a worry if you’re an Arsenal fan,” Parlour told talkSPORT. “Something has gone wrong behind the scenes, probably in training his attitude has not been right. When you get left out you’ve got to come back and make sure your attitude is spot on.
“You’ve got to show the manager you mean business and you’re going to fight for your place and maybe he hasn’t done that. So Emery had made that big decision.
“He’s probably looking at it saying, ‘I don’t want another Neymar’, what happened with him at PSG, he got Emery the sack at PSG.
So is it going to be the same situation here? ‘He’s on big, big wages and that’s the problem with another club trying to take him, whether Arsenal have to pay a bit of wages I don’t know. ‘You don’t want to see quality players going, but is there a place for him in the side?
“I don’t know when you’d put him in the side at the moment. ‘If you play three at the back it’s very hard to put him in, and if you play four at the back there’s one spare place in the midfield but Emery might look at it and think other players deserve the opportunity over Ozil. ‘People like [Aaron] Ramsey and people like that.”