Arsenal's playmaker is enduring a sad decline but is there any way back for Mesut Ozil? Adam Bate takes a look at the numbers...
Wednesday 18 December 2019 06:27, UK
It was not quite anger that Mesut Ozil was exposed to as he walked off the pitch at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday. There was disappointment in there too. Had it really come to this? Arsenal's one-time magician rendered impotent as Manchester City and Kevin De Bruyne ran amok. Ozil had the look of yesterday's man. A game moving away from him.
It is easy to sympathise with Ozil, the man. Particularly on a weekend in which he attracted the ire of the Chinese government for his support of the country's Muslim Uighur minority.
His relationship with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan means that Ozil does not have the monopoly on the moral high ground but nor should he be damned for showing signs of a social conscience. Speaking to him last year, he said of a visit to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan: "It changed my life. I realised that I could be doing much more than I was doing."
Ozil is a sensitive soul. It is why he inspires loyalty among his friends and devotion among his fans. The instinct is to defend the man. But the player? That is becoming increasingly difficult. If he is to be judged on the job that he is doing on the pitch, then the verdict can only be a grim one. He is not delivering performances commensurate with his salary or skill.
In fact, he has not done so for some time now.
Supporters have long argued that Ozil's influence can be hard to quantify. Goals were never going to tell the tale. He is the man who makes the team tick. The assist king. There were once 19 of those in one season, 50 in his five campaigns under Arsene Wenger. Anything but ineffective, that was more than any other Premier League player during that period.
When the finishing of others let Ozil down, his admirers pointed to the chances created statistics instead. He topped those too through his first five seasons in English football. The Premier League's creator-in-chief, providing more opportunities for team-mates than David Silva, Cesc Fabregas, Eden Hazard or Christian Eriksen could muster.
There have been moments since then but the excellence has been fleeting rather than sustained. Last season's win over Leicester was the high point under Unai Emery. Ozil scored, provided a trademark assist to the assist, then came up with a flick, a dummy and a delicate pass all in one move for Arsenal's third goal. It was a tenth win in a row.
But that was as good as it got for him under Emery.
Arsenal won none of the next three games in which he started and he never really recovered the manager's trust. At 31, any conviction that he is going to return to his old levels now that the Spaniard has departed must be tempered by the knowledge that time waits for no man. Indeed, there has been a decline in every aspect of his game.
Ozil has not scored this season and that should not be a surprise because he is not shooting as much as before. He does have an assist, registered in the home defeat to Brighton, but the number of chances that he is creating from open play has dropped sharply too. He is not the conjuror he once was and that is leading to greater scrutiny on the rest of his game.
That spotlight is shining a light on his flaws.
Ozil was frustrated by his substitution against City but Freddie Ljungberg had a point. "I am the coach and I took the decision that we needed more energy in the team," Ljungberg explained afterwards. "We are a team that wants to have possession and stuff but sometimes we need to run and tackle and try to win the ball back."
Emile Smith Rowe, Ozil's young replacement, could not turn the tide of a game long since decided but he did make twice as many high-intensity sprints in half the time.
Perhaps it is optimistic to expect Ozil to make up for a lack of attacking output in other areas. And yet, he was once the most fluid of No.10s, noted for his movement when drifting to the flanks, forever in search of space. Ozil was never a tough tackler but he could cover the ground and was more than capable of putting the press on an opponent.
That player appears to be gone. Ozil is winning possession back for his team less often than ever before. When he does not have the ball, he is easy to play against. And the time he is spending out of possession of the football is only increasing.
Ozil's number of touches was consistent throughout each of his five seasons under Wenger, always enjoying at least 84 touches of the ball per 90 minutes. Under Emery, there was a significant downturn, not just in the number of minutes that Ozil was getting on the pitch, but the number of touches that he was getting when he was there.
As hinted at by Ljungberg, this partly explains Ozil's diminished influence. He is a possession player who finds himself in a team that no longer keeps possession as they once did. Ozil now lacks the speed to produce his best in a counter-attacking team. Like many who face City, he is likely to have looked at them on Sunday and felt that he was on the wrong side.
It might be a stretch to suggest that Ozil can still turn back the clock and rediscover his best form but the appointment of Mikel Arteta might represent his best chance of doing that at Arsenal. It is difficult to predict what Arteta would seek to do in his first managerial post but the principles of possession seem a safe bet given his relationship with Pep Guardiola.
In 2014, when still Ozil's team-mate, he outlined his ideas.
"I want the football to be expressive, entertaining," Arteta told Arsenal Magazine. "I cannot have a concept of football where everything is based on the opposition. We have to dictate the game, we have to be the ones taking the initiative, and we have to entertain the people coming to watch us. I am 100 per cent convinced of those things."
It is a vision for the game that sounds a lot like it would suit the Ozil of old. Whether that player is still in there remains to be seen. If he is to reappear, Ozil needs to buck the trend of decline that, for all the entertainment he has provided, has come to overshadow his time as an Arsenal player.
