It’s never too early to start shopping Mesut Ozil

Arsenal has to figure out a way to get Mesut Ozil off the payroll, and that means shopping him as early as you possibly can. So like, yesterday.

Arsenal has spent over half a decade trying to figure out how to make Mesut Ozil a consistent performer. It’s failed, he’s making way too much money, and the club needs to figure out a way to move forward. Because as long as they are tied to him, it is going to cause other negative ripple effects.

Paul Merson has said what we all have been thinking, but since he said it, it makes headlines: That Mesut Ozil’s contract is causing a bit of an issue with the Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang contract situation.

Of course, I said that a few days ago too, but my name isn’t Paul Merson.

We need money to give Aubameyang more money, but all that money is currently going towards paying Ozil to not produce goals. It’s the same reason that Aaron Ramsey couldn’t get the contract he deserved. There was no money left.

So when it comes to Aubameyang, the same holds true, only it’s worse. Because Aubameyang wants more money than Ramsey did.

That handcuff will continue to exist, especially if we’re not going to get back into the Champions League, until we sell Mesut Ozil. But that is not an easy task. Because we have to think realistically. He’s making a ton of money, he’s got another year on his contract, he’s past his prime. We aren’t going to get a lot of money to sell him. That’s the simple truth of the matter. But we don’t need money from selling him, we just need money from freeing up his contract.

That’s going to take work though, and given the time limit to get it done before we can offer Aubameyang his raise it’s never too early to start shopping Ozil. In fact, I hope we’d have started already. Of course, Mikel Arteta wouldn’t have been interested in selling him in January because he had just taken over. But he’s seen enough now. He sees that it isn’t working and it’s time to adjust accordingly.

In this pause, with nothing exactly going on, I can only hope the brain trust at the Emirates is working on finding a suitable solution to move the club out of Ozil’s contract handcuff. Until we can shake that binding, we can’t move forward like we need to.