Originally Posted by
Letters
When I talk about optics I mean how it looks. And how it looks is that they are driving trucks of money up to Ozil's house and to Atletico Madrid to get Partey while shitting on the little man, the man who has quietly worked for the club for decades and whose salary is trivial compared with the amounts they're spunking elsewhere. You do make a good point about his redundancy pay, he might actually have done pretty well out of this but people are fed up of these prima-donna, here today, gone tomorrow footballers getting obscene amounts of money. Especially when they're not fit to lace the boots of some of our best players. It just feels increasingly like clubs have lost any connection with their fans or the "common man", we identify a lot more with the Gunnersaurus dude than we do these mercenary footballers. So when we see him getting shafted (again, I agree he might not have been, but that's how it looks) then it doesn't come across well. At best doing it on the same day was tone deaf.
From what I understand Ozil asked for certain assurances before agreeing a pay cut. What are the club going to do with that money? Are they going to assure that none of the non-playing staff will get made redundant? Arsenal refused to give those assurances so Ozil told them to get stuffed. People are disillusioned with Ozil but they're disillusioned with lots of things in the modern game. Arsenal have not covered themselves in glory with any of this.
