Toni Kroos has spoken out against Mesut Özil over his departure from the German national team, arguing most of the Arsenal star’s claims in his Instagram statement were nonsense.

Kroos was speaking German outlet Bild about the way his former teammate left the national team. He started by highlighting that Özil deserves credit for what he’s done on the football pitch with his country, but then went on to slam all of the 29-year-old’s racism concerns as ‘nonsense’.

“Basically Mesut is a deserved national player and deserves a better finish as a footballer. I have played with Mesut for many years and know that he is a nice guy,” he began. “The manner of his resignation was out of order.

“The proportion that is well and properly addressed in his statement is unfortunately overshadowed by the much higher proportion of nonsense. I think that he himself knows that racism does not exist within the national team and the DFB.”

In a turn of events nobody expected, white, blond Bayern Munich star Toni Kroos is claiming he doesn’t think racism is a problem for the Germans. Of course, if there were any race-related issues in the side, he’d know, given the history of German persecution of white German-born Germans with German ancestry.

Kroos joins Thomas Muller and Manuel Neuer in stating that the problem doesn’t exist. That’s that then.

It’s unfortunate Özil’s former teammates don’t feel they can back him up, or at least stay out of the issue completely. There’s really no reason why they need to keep speaking out to invalidate the Arsenal man’s statement on what happened to him.

From the looks of things, it’s definitely for the best that the playmaker got out of the team sooner rather than later.