When Doing the Right Thing Comes With the Benefit of Trolling
Mesut Ozil wants to pay Gunnersaurus' wages. Mesut Ozil will make his club look tremendously bad doing so.
I’m going to assume you all already know this, but in case you are not privy to this information: Arsenal fired Gunnersaurus, and it’s a shame. It was, presumably, in the name of cutting costs, which is an utter joke, considering how much money Gunnersaurus probably made, and especially is a joke when considering Arsenal shipped tens of millions of pounds to Atletico Madrid for Thomas Partey (a player who may or may not be the same exact person as Lucas Torreira, who joined… Atletico) on the same exact day. Add to this the fact that clubs are currently grousing for Premier League players to accept further wage cuts in order to help bail out the rest of the Football League, and you have one of those situations where a club executive is raising up a tiny guillotine blade over a sheet of paper with “IRONY” written on it, while several people with torches and pitchforks creep up behind him.
Enter Mesut Ozil.
When Mesut Ozil stepped in and offered to pay Jerry Quy’s wages, he was doing a simple thing, an easy thing for him to do, and also, the correct thing to do as a person. He was trying to do good. He was trying to help someone. And he is rightly being praised for such an act.
But what Mesut Ozil was also doing, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps otherwise, was make Arsenal look tremendously bad. Like, cartoon villain restraining a damsel to the railroad tracks bad. Kevin Costner’s accent in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves bad. Arsenal tried to pick on the little guy. They tried to continue on snapping up players like it was going out of style while sacrificing some of their most vulnerable employees to the transfer gods, and for what? To save a fraction of what they would already spend?
The thing that makes all of this really something special is that there is no separation between Mesut Ozil doing this good thing and Mesut Ozil making Arsenal look bad. It’s not some added consequence to an act of virtue. It’s simply a mirror that Ozil holds up. That’s all he needs to do in this situation.
Obviously, Arsenal and Ozil don’t have the best relationship to begin with. His up and down performances throughout the years, sometimes looking like the best player in the world, sometimes like he didn’t even wake up that morning, leave much to be desired from a player making so much. And it was easy for many fans to scoff as Ozil was one of the few players who rejected a cut to his salary outright at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. He was overpaid, he was pompous, he refused to give up money for the good of other people working at the club.
Even now, though, Ozil has been proven right. When criticized for not taking the salary cut, he pointed to the fact that information on where the player’s money would be going was scarce, and he didn’t feel comfortable simply letting money go when he didn’t know where it was going. And he was right, too: after many Arsenal players did accept salary reductions, the club still furloughed 55 people. That is a practice some people might refer to as “predatory.” Now, Ozil is simply being consistent with what he said several months ago, that he would indeed give up money, if he simply knew what the full financial outlook was that the club refused to provide for the players. He knows where his money is going this time: to Gunnersaurus, and subsequently, to one of the silliest but most prominent pictures of the club as a whole.
The man has bought himself goodwill, yes. But he’s also turned the tables once more on Arsenal. And I, for one, can’t wait to see how all this pans out over the remaining months on his contract.
I Wrote This
And performed in it. And had some clutch last-second casting in it. Please enjoy our immaculate and totally accurate, believable accents.
On a related note, it’s very cool to have a bunch of people enabl- uh, I mean, believe in you and support you when you pitch very stupid things to them, and then go out and make it.
HEEMS
This is probably not a big deal to most of you, but to the four to thirteen people reading this who know who Das Racist is, please feel free to freak out with me. I burned through those mixtapes in college. They got me through multiple summers of lifeguarding and doing maintenance work at a family campground in Upstate New York. I’ve listened to Heems say a lot of words. So seeing my friends interview him about soccer? Well, I am happy, yes, but it’s also sharp, unrelenting pangs of jealousy.
The Most Timeless Story of Them All
The story of a good club servant being taken about behind the shed.
Read a Smart Thing
You all know, at this point, that I give Joe Lowery a big vouch in general. But in particular, I really enjoyed this piece and I feel smarter for reading it, without even feeling dumb while I was in the process of reading it. That’s a tough trick to pull off. So learn something about pressing like me.