Mikel Arteta believes players who don’t get vaccinated are putting the club and team at risk because it is them who ‘will pay the price’.

Over the international break, Granit Xhaka caught Covid and the Swiss FA confirmed Arsenal’s own personal clown, who is suspended for the next three matches because of his red card against Manchester City, had not been vaccinated.

Xhaka was forced to miss all of Switzerland’s games during this break.

Ahead of the game against Norwich at the weekend, Mikel Arteta was asked about the need to be vaccinated.

“Obviously, it will limit certain aspects if they don’t [get vaccinated], because we don’t want to expose ourselves in certain things,” said Arteta.

“For example, travelling. If they are not vaccinated and they travel or socialise in certain situations, obviously the risk increases a lot. We don’t want that exposure with any of our players. Because, at the end, the team and the club will pay the price.”

Of course, being vaccinated is not guaranteed to stop you from getting Covid, but it will most likely stop you from dying which, I’m sure you’ll agree is a preferable outcome.

At present, data from Public Health England suggest that being double vaccinated reduces the risk of hospital admission with the now-dominant delta variant by around 96%.

The British Medical Journal adds, “Even conservatively assuming the vaccines are no more effective at preventing death than hospital admission (actually, they are likely to be more effective at preventing death) this means the risk of death for double vaccinated people has been cut to less than one-twentieth of the value for unvaccinated people with the same underlying risk profile.”

In other words, a person the same age as you with the same lifestyle is 20 times more likely to die if they catch the Delta variant than a person who has been double vaccinated.