Emmanuel Frimpong is not a man who minces his words — especially when it comes to Samir Nasri.
“I have always had so much respect for senior players,” the former Arsenal midfielder tells The Athletic. “You can ask Aaron Ramsey, you can ask Jack Wilshere. I never disrespected anybody. But for me, the truth is I’ve never liked Nasri and I will never, ever like this guy. Even if he gives me five billion dollars, I will still not like him.”
Given Frimpong’s insistence that for him football was never about money, you can’t help but believe the man.
It was Frimpong’s on-field altercation with Nasri that helped firmly secure his place in Arsenal folklore.
In November 2011, the pair clashed repeatedly in an ill-tempered League Cup tie against Manchester City. By then, Nasri had defected to the Blues, and Frimpong’s fury echoed that of the Arsenal fans. However, there are also more personal reasons behind the enmity.
At the start of that season, Frimpong and Nasri faced Liverpool as team-mates. It was only Frimpong’s second league appearance for the club. After putting in an impressive 70 minutes, the 19-year-old was sent off for a second bookable offence with the match still goalless and Arsenal ended up losing 2-0.
“Nobody needs to tell me that what I did was stupid,” says Frimpong. “Nobody needs to tell me. I mean, I was a professional footballer, you know?
“After the game, everybody came into the changing room and Arsene was quiet, you know. Obviously, he was disappointed about the result but he was quiet. He didn’t talk, and then Nasri basically stood up in front of everybody and said we lost the game because of me.
“OK, I can understand that, but I was thinking, ‘Why would somebody — especially me playing, I think that was like my second game — why would any professional do that to a young player in that kind of moment?’”
The friction didn’t end there.
When Nasri for Manchester soon after that Liverpool game, team-mate Wilshere tweeted to wish him good luck. Frimpong, a prolific user of Twitter, responded: “Pffffff come on Jack.”
Frimpong thought little of it, until he says team-mate Alex Song passed him a mobile phone at Arsenal’s London Colney training centre, saying that there was someone who wanted to talk to him.
“I took the phone and then it was Nasri on the phone threatening me, telling me that when he sees me, this that. I told him, ‘I’m not one of the players that’s afraid of you. If you want us to sort it out as men, we can sort it out as men.’
“To be honest, at that time when he left Arsenal, I could tell him what I actually thought about him because he was there so I could basically let him know my feelings. So I just told him that I don’t like him, I don’t respect him and I will never respect him as a professional player.”
When the City game rolled around three months later, Nasri confronted Frimpong in the tunnel.
Frimpong simply told him, “I’ll see you on the pitch.”
He adds: “During the game, he told me he could buy me. That’s how stupid this guy is. He probably could then because he had millions, but that’s no respect.
“That’s what happened. I feel like he was a bully, I feel like he didn’t know his responsibilities as a senior player to be able to help younger players. I just found out that he’s still playing. He’s at Anderlecht so I’m hoping as a person he’s changed (and) now that he’s at Anderlecht he treats people different. Because from what I know of him back in the past, he wasn’t such a nice person.”
