Mesut Özil reportedly demanding raise, reportedly giving up

My dislike for a lot of the aspects of transfer season either is or should be well known. The signal to noise ratio is generally imperceptibly small - how many CDM’s have Arsenal been linked with in the last six years? - and any golden nugget of truth is quickly drowned out by 27 more nuggets of, shall we say, a slightly browner shade.

I’m pretty sure this falls into the latter half of that spectrum, but here we go: The Daily Mail is reporting that Mesut Özil is “demanding” £300k a week to stay at Arsenal. The linked article about that report (the link does not go to the Daily Mail, so you know) also contains a lot of words from Martin Keown about how Mesut has “given up”, how Arsenal is “carrying him” right now, and about how Keown things Özil may be “trying to sulk his way into a move”.

I mean, yes. Özil is playing badly right now, and hasn’t really had the best season. But after a game in which the entire team played badly, is it really fair to single out Özil? How can Martin Keown know what’s going on in Özil’s head (hint: he can’t)? In a spring where very few Arsenal players have been consistently good, what’s the point in attacking him - is it just noise around his contract negotiations? Is it just Keown with nothing better to do? I don’t know, but I do know that at £300K/week, I’m not sure I need Arsenal to retain Mesut Özil. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to crap on him all the way out the door.