Meanwhile, Granit Xhaka has urged Arsenal to let supporters attend training sessions to give them a fuller picture of how players have been working.
The midfielder said fans might be more sympathetic if they could see a player has simply had an off-day in a match, despite working hard during training. Xhaka has previously admitted that his relationship with the club’s supporters was permanently damaged after he clashed with a section of fans when he was substituted against Crystal Palace three years ago — an incident which led to him being stripped of the captaincy.
Xhaka, 29, cited Nuno Tavares, the left back, who is shown in All Or Nothing as struggling to come out of his shell in his first season in England, during which he made a series of high-profile mistakes. The 22-year-old has since been loaned to Marseille.
“I spoke with the club, ‘Why can’t we bring the fans maybe once a week so they can see how we train?’ ” Xhaka said. “It is not like we are coming here to waste our time and after we don’t care about the 90 minutes.
“We care more than people think. Me and Aaron Ramsdale, for example, can’t sleep after the game when we lose. This makes me very disappointed and very sad when people say, ‘You didn’t give everything for the club, you did that, you did . . . ’ This is bullshit.”
Premier League clubs do not let fans watch training sessions, except for on rare occasions during pre-season. Arsenal have said that Xhaka’s suggestion was discussed but they felt there were a number of obstacles.
Xhaka said it was different when he played at Borussia Mönchengladbach, before joining Arsenal in 2016. “It is so difficult in England to bring the people to the training ground whereas in Germany it is different, you have two, three, four thousand people and they come every day,” he said. “The people who do not see us training do not see how hard we work. They see us only for 90 minutes.
“Everyone has a good and bad day. Everyone loves you today, then tomorrow maybe you have one bad game and the story is different.”
Xhaka allowed his family to be filmed at home during the Amazon documentary to try to illustrate what they went through after a game. He is Arsenal’s second longest-serving player behind Mohamed Elneny but has been close to leaving on two occasions since he was angrily jeered off by home fans and responded by cupping his ear to them against Palace in October 2019. He was stripped of the armband when he refused to apologise but was persuaded to stay by Arteta, when he took over as head coach a month later.
God, he is so pathetic. You are an elite-level sportsman, of course you are going to be judged on your performances on matchdays. And this is the guy who thinks he should be our captain. I wonder what Henry, Vieira, Adams would say to letting Xhaka off for his shit performances because he runs around a lot in training and cries himself to sleep when we lose.
