Grain of salt: Telegraph says Özil could be sold

Before I start this - breathe. It probably won’t happen. This is probably all for nothing, but. Are you ready? Here we go. Strap in.

An article in the Telegraph - a completely unsourced, fact- and attribution-free article, mind you - says today that Arsenal would be willing to sell Mesut Özil if the German international does not lower his wage demands. The piece also says that those demands are for an eye-popping £384K/week - £20 million a year, or Jon Lester money, in MLB terms.

Özil is currently Arsenal’s highest paid player at £140K/week, and if that 384K number is even remotely close, that represents not just a breaking but a complete destruction of Arsenal’s wage scale; clearly Arsenal can afford it, but the question is, philosophically, will they want to?

Put another way: if Özil gets 384K/week, he’ll make substantially more than any footballer in the world, if these numbers are to be believed (and I’m not 100% sure they’re all that reliable either). More than Messi, more than Ronaldo, and not by a little. So, how realistic is that number as reported?

I knew Özil wanted a raise, as does Alexis, but that’s a bigger number than I had thought - not that that’s a bad thing, I just...wow. Anyway, as I mentioned above, absolutely nothing in this article has any actual sourcing or attribution to it, and it’s heavily larded with ‘some sources claim’ and ‘Telegraph Sport understands’ as lead-ins to sentences, which should be a giant red flag to everyone reading this.

Obviously, there are a lot more twists and turns to this, so don’t freak out too bad just yet; there’s a long way to go before the finish line here.