Bukayo Saka reached back to the opening years of his Arsenal career when asked to name the best team-mate he has had. Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, Saka singled out Mesut \u00d6zil above the current crop, describing him in simple terms. “High quality player,” was Saka\u2019s take on the spindly German when asked by BBC Radio 5 Live to name his best teammate this week. “Fun to play with him, fun to watch him.”<\/p>\n
Saka remains a fixture of Arsenal\u2019s first-team, while \u00d6zil has long since left north London. The pair shared most of \u00d6zil\u2019s 17 appearances in the first half of the 2019\u201320 campaign before the COVID-19 pandemic halted football worldwide. By the time the Premier League launched “Project Restart” and matches resumed in empty stadiums, \u00d6zil was no longer part of Mikel Arteta\u2019s squad.<\/p>\n
The precise reasons for that change in status have never been fully clarified. \u00d6zil had previously attracted attention for politically charged statements yet continued to figure in Arteta\u2019s early team selections. Reports also linked \u00d6zil, the club\u2019s highest earner at the time, to a small group of players who reportedly refused a wage cut during the height of the pandemic. Arteta, however, rejected that explanation and placed the responsibility for the decision on himself. “Honestly I take full responsibility,” Arteta declared after leaving \u00d6zil out of the club\u2019s Premier League squad for the 2020\u201321 season. “I have to be the one getting the best out of the players. It is my responsibility. It is nothing related to any behaviour or, like I read, the pay cuts.”<\/p>\n
\u00d6zil did not accept his exclusion quietly, sniping from the sidelines and questioning a lack of “loyalty” before completing a free transfer to Fenerbah\u00e7e in January 2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bukayo Saka chose Mesut \u00d6zil as his best Arsenal teammate from their 2019\u201320 season together on BBC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4521,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,172],"tags":[826,1215,1019],"class_list":["post-4522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-epl","tag-bukayo-saka","tag-controversy","tag-creative-players"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}