Danny Mills has said that Alexis Sanchez clearly wants to leave Arsenal this summer and is unhappy at the prospect of staying at the club.
Danny Mills is the latest pundit to give his view on the Alexis Sanchez situation, and as always, it’s not a positive verdict. According to the former England international, Alexis clearly wants to leave Arsenal, and won’t give 100% this season even if he does end up staying.
“I think Arsenal might struggle this season, that is in the caveat that I believe Sanchez will go,” Mills said, reports the Express. “He clearly wants to leave, he only wants a year left. Do you keep a really unhappy player?
“Sanchez was pivotal to how sort of successful Arsenal were last season, I know it was their worst season for some time. But if you take Sanchez out of that side, they drop down in my opinion to sixth or seventh in the table.
“Even if you keep him with a year to go, he’ll be thinking ‘I don’t want to get injured, am I going to play absolutely full-tilt every game?’. It would be brilliant to say yes, and he should be a professional and he should do that job, but in the real world it doesn’t work like that.
“If he just drops by five or 10 per cent, that’s a huge margin for Arsenal Football Club. You’ve almost got to bite the bullet and give him what he wants to keep him at Arsenal and get back in the Champions League.”
In the real world, as Mills puts it, Alexis gives 100% in every game and doesn’t accept anything less. This is a player who plays on through injuries and fatigue simply because he wants to play. He could have easily phoned it in towards the end of last season once it became apparent Arsenal weren’t going to win the title, but he didn’t.
Alexis is pivotal to Arsenal and obviously we’d suffer a big drop in quality without him. It’s precisely for that reason that Arsene Wenger has decided to keep him. Yet, you never hear a pundit give the Gunners praise for digging their heels in and trying to keep their best player. The expectation still seems to be that Alexis will leave and Arsenal can’t do anything about it.