MESUT OZIL HAS reiterated his desire to see out his lucrative contract at Arsenal, in spite of falling out of favour under Mikel Arteta.
Ozil is the club’s highest-paid player, and his £350,000-per-week remuneration earned scrutiny again last week as the club announced 55 redundancies. This was the latest round of cost-cutting at the club: (most) players took pay cuts, rather than deferrals, following the outbreak of the pandemic. The players took cuts on the agreement club staff would keep their jobs, but that proved not to be the case.
“My position is clear”, Ozil told David Ornstein of The Athletic.
“I’m here through to the last day of our agreement and I’ll give everything I have for this club. Situations like these will never break me, they only make me stronger. I showed in the past that I can come back into the team and I will show it again.”
Ozil’s contract expires at the end of next season.
It is also revealed in the Athletic’s interview that Ozil did not accept a pay cut when the squad were asked to by the club. He denies he is the only Arsenal player not to accept the cut.
Ozil said he was open to a deferral, but wanted more information from and consultation with the club over a potential pay cut.
“We were rushed into it without proper consultation.
“For anyone in this situation, you have a right to know everything, to understand why it is happening and where the money is going. But we didn’t get enough details, we just had to give a decision. It was far too quick for something so important and there was a lot of pressure.
“This was not fair, especially for the young guys, and I refused. I had a baby at home and have commitments to my family here, in Turkey and in Germany — to my charities, too, and also a new project we started to support people in London that was from the heart and not for publicity.
“People who know me know exactly how generous I am and, as far as I’m aware, I was not the only player who rejected the cut in the end, but only my name came out. I guess that’s because it is me and people have been trying for two years to destroy me, to make me unhappy, to push an agenda they hope will turn the supporters against me and paint a picture that is not true.
“Possibly the decision affected my chances on the pitch, I don’t know. But I’m not afraid to stand up for what I feel is right — and when you see what has happened now with the jobs, maybe I was.”
Can never understand the public’s outrage at a player not taking a pay cut. Big soccer teams like arsenal make millions and millions of euro a year. The owners don’t want to take financial hit and use the media to pressure players into taking pay cut instead. Arsenal signed a contract to pay him 350k a week, he is entitled to that and no less. I say good on him for sticking to his guns, the 55 staff let go was a business decision taken by the commercial managers in the club. It’s not ozils problem to fix
@guineon: well said couldn’t agree more,it’s business and a dirty business,and this is comming from an Arsenal fan who carry Ozil to his new club
@guineon: hes on 350k a week…a 12.5% pay cut..means hed lose 50k…Ffs..hes only left with 300k..poor him…im sure 50k would pay a lot of weekly wages in the club…i give this guy zero credit. Juan Mata asked a lot of the top paid EPL players to donate 1% of their wages to a charity recently i recall and he had little success. Says it all to me
@jay bernard: so Ozil should pay his coworkers out of his own pocket to save their billionaire employer having to?
@jay bernard: You’ve completely missed the point
@Kohn Jeenan: Arsenal is a business…and thinking is Ozil and his fellow players werent working…so i think they should be made contribute
@guineon: I would have more respect for him if that’s what he actually said. Instead he whined about having ‘commitments’ and a baby as if he needed to desperately cling onto the 350k a week for those reasons.
@guineon: people take paycuts in all types of jobs during recessions and economic turmoil, why should footballers probably the highest earning employees in the company be exempt?
Literally zero respect for players like him.
Imagine getting that kind of money for doing nothing…
350 grand a week – I mean how can he expect to survive and look after a baby on anything, even a small percentage less than that.
And he looking for sympathy, f#ck me, deluded or what..
@Barry Fulham: I’m no fan of Mesut Ozil but in terms of the pay cuts what he’s saying above seems fair enough. The players seemingly were told if they agreed to the cuts no jobs at the club would be lost, now 55 redundancies have been announced in the last week. It looks like Mesut was absolutely right to seek more info about what these pay cuts where going to go towards. It’s easy to look at footballers as greedy in cases like this but Arsenal is owned by a multi billionaire, they should never have been asking their players to take any cuts in the first place, nor should anyone be losing their jobs during a pandemic.
@Barry Fulham: Try turning the 350,000 into the e350 covid payment. See how that goes. Then he might cop on and realise how priviliged he is…..
@running man: but that’s besides the point. The sum is irrelevant. Ozil is saying that the club claimed that they would not let staff go if the players took a pay cut. Ozil thought that sounded like BS. And it turned out that he was 100% correct. I say that the sun is irrelevant because loads of the squad agreed to pay cuts and then 55 staff were STILL let go.
I appreciate the reasons he has for not taking a pay cut. But Arsenal really need him to leave this summer so they can invest that money in the squad as opposed to it being wasted on him sitting in the reserves.
@Despacito 2: Or they could play him
Only 350 thousand a week he sounds like a tight-fisted git
Similar issue that Man Utd had with Alexis in the sense that a deal is a deal is a deal. He has no obligations to move on and is married to the idea that his hard work and extreme talent have taken him this far. It’s not like he’s leaving himself out of the team or on strike.
He’s upholding his end of the bargain and the onus is now on the club to find a solution. The only real solution is a free transfer where they agree to pay out his contract or make a massive contribution to his wages at the next club if they send him on loan.
Either way it’s gonna cost them the bones of 20 mill and I don’t see them getting away from that.
Utd took their medicine on Alexis and Arsenal will have to do the same and try to learn from the experience.