You make a good point tam. Top players want to play with other top players, which they both were back in those days.
Clrnc wrote:
Big Willie wrote:
Of course you can split up the signing to two parts of his career. It's exactly how we judge Arsene as well, first by our glory years then by the poverty youth team years and the negligent Mustafi/Cech years. You can definitely take different periods of a players career separately when judging their career whilst still being able to comment on their overall effect on the team.
Ozil, whilst being a huge disappointment in the last couple of years, was instrumental in much of our best football alongside Sanchez, Cazorla and Ramsey during the barren years and was important breaking our longstanding run without a trophy in our winning 3 FA Cups. Regardless of what has happened over the last 2 or 3 years, his influence and impact on our team in those days was important. Let's not rewrite history shall we?
Do I agree that he was an important signing for us that pushed us to winning some silverware? Yes. Do I think we'd have had a better chance by upgrading Giroud instead? Also yes. Do I believe we'd have been better off not signing Ozil at all, that's a definite no.
This is a bit off topic by now but still fun to discuss since he's leaving 😆
Instrumental is a bit strong. He was part of a jigsaw, but not the key piece. He was extremely inconsistent and famously went MIA (be it by performance or random non injury absence) whenever the going gets tough. For 45m, if you looked back at the transfer thread everyone thought he would lift us up to another level. He couldn't, he is not a player you can build a team around, but only can surround him with the right jigsaw to bring his performance level up. If you fit him with crap he can't perform. Don't want to compare to Sanchez but Alexis was on another level, that kind of impact was worth every single cent.
Ozil was always a very divisive figure even in the first part of this career so we can't even say he was superb in the first spell. Just to answer your Wenger analogy, Wenger was godlike in that first spell.
Anyway the key question for me is overall was he as much of a success to justify that 45m fee bringing him in? No. Was he what we needed desperately at that time? No. Was he a signing I would have made if he was available? Yes of course. That kind of reputation, that kind of quality before he joined everyone would have made that signing 10/10. But the opportunity cost of bringing him in, the subsequent non impact and the subsequent 350k salary that dragged us down so much can't be ignored. With a proper striker we would have had a much better chance of winning more important trophies with so many playmakers those days. It's not a question of better off not signing Ozil, and we certainly couldnt have signed Ozil + striker. It was either a striker or Ozil.
You say everyone expected him to lift us up a level but that he didn't however we won our first trophy in like 10 years immediately after signing him with pretty much the same squad that finished the season previously. He may have been a part of the jigsaw, which is fair enough because this is a team sport after all. Unless you're a Thierry, you're not going to be single handedly be dragging the Arsenal team to titles for Arsenal. But he was a vital piece of the jigsaw that made the team function well enough to help us win the Cup with the same players from the season before.
Ozil was divisive at even at the beginning but a lot of it was media nitpicking on bullshit like tracking back, shit they continued for time despite att the stats showing that Ozil was one of the players with the most distance run per game. They then switched to picking on his body language.
The whole comparison to Sanchez is just more of the same line of thinking. I get it, people want to see someone running like a mad dog all game as can be seen by how excited everyone was getting over Elneny's pressing like crazy against United in the 95th minute.
Sanchez was a quality player and had his own strengths, but if you call his impact being on another level having come into a team that had just won the FA Cup the previous year, then you must also be able to acknowledge the impact that Ozil had on our team. At that point we went so many years without winning anything before his arrival and never seemed close to winning anything other than that one the few years before other than that one League Cup final.
I agree that with a proper too quality striker we'd have had a better chance at getting a title but we fucked that up. That said signing Ozil did not prevent us from signing a striker. It's actually the other way around. Our failure to sign a striker gave us the opportunity to sign Ozil. It wasn't a case of Ozil or striker at all. We went searching for a striker all summer and failed to land Suarez and baulked at the Higuain asking price once Napoli joined the race. We weren't even looking at Ozil at that point. By the time Ozil became available it really was just a case of Ozil or no Ozil at that point in the transfer window. It's not like we had another striker lined up on the final days and instead went for Ozil.
In any case good riddance to Ozil. He'll always be hated by some and loved by others. To me I'll remember him as a player who knitted together our attack post RvP and was, alongside Ramsey and Cazorla, the keys to us breaking out trophyless duck. He last few years have been a let down but I'm not going to pretend that we'd have been better off having never signed him up in the first place.
