We will soon be celebrating, if that’s the word, the third anniversary of Granit Xhaka’s farewell to Arsenal. It is in any case what we believed then: that the exasperation of the fans vis-à-vis their then captain had reached such a point of toxicity that no other outcome than his departure was possible.
This October 27, 2019, in the 61st minute, Unai Emery, for the second game in a row, decided to replace Xhaka, by Bukayo Saka in this case. Today’s opponent was Crystal Palace. The score was then 2-2, after the Gunners, fragile as usual, had allowed Roy Hodgson’s team to come back from 0-2 (goals from Sokratis and David Luiz, which indicates that we’re talking about another time) at 2-2.
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“Fuck off”
The Swiss midfielder took the direction of the touchline, very slowly, under the ironic applause of supporters who could not stand him anymore. The feeling was mutual, as Xhaka’s gestures (hand over ears, encouragement addressed to the crowd, also ironic) indicated it most clearly. You didn’t need to be a professional lipreader to grasp the message to the fans in front of the cameras: Fuck off.
He took off his shirt before he reached the bench, and ignored the outstretched hand from his manager, who then suggested that his player apologize. A few days later, Xhaka lost the armband to Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. He had only put it on his arm a month earlier.
(Almost) three years later, Aubameyang passed through Barcelona on his tortuous journey to Chelsea, and was almost erased from the history of Arsenal, the club for which he nevertheless scored 92 goals in 163 matches distributed over five seasons. , the last of which was a nightmare for all parties. Granit Xhaka, he has just been elected player of the month for September by these supporters who wondered how Arsene Wenger could have paid 40 million euros to Borussia Moenchengladbach in 2016 to bring him from the Bundesliga; and last weekend, when this season’s captain Martin Ødegaard was replaced by Tierney at the end of the game, it was Xhaka who was given the armband.
Granit Xhaka (Arsenal)
Credit: Getty Images
In the stands where he was shouted at until recently, his song was sung, We’ve Got Granit Xhaka, on the air you Happy All Over the Dave Clark Five, the Crystal Palace anthem (hey?) that Man City fans also put on Guardiola sauce. It had taken six years for Xhaka to have his chorus, while only a few weeks had been enough for Tomiyasu (Super, super Tom, super Tomi-yasu) and Zinchenko (Zin-chen-ko! Always believe in your soul) have their own, which Xhaka suffered from, and confided in his teammates.
Xhaka is the anti-Casemiro
Such a transformation, from confirmed zero to legend in the making, has no real equivalent in the modern history of European football. A friend suggested the case of Mario Balotelli, whose sinusoidal career zigzagged for almost ten years before fading away after his departure from Marseille in 2019. It is a fact that Balotelli sometimes won back his audience, only to lose it. again almost immediately. But these zigzags were so frequent that they became predictable, which Xhaka’s comeback is certainly not.
Another mentioned Kaka, vilified by the fans of Milan after the 2005 Champions League final, for the simple reason that Milan had lost it in the circumstances that we know against Liverpool; but Kaka had been bright in the first period of the famous 3-3. Two years later, Milan took revenge on the Reds, and the Brazilian was elected Ballon d’Or. He had put things in order, shown the absurdity of an injustice. Xhaka is something else.
It was because he had often braided the rope with which he had been hung, miscarriage of justice or not. Those stupid free kicks and penalties conceded at the worst times, those lost balls where losing the ball hurts the most, those bloody shots automatically punished with a card… Xhaka is, or was, the anti-Casemiro, anti-Højbjerg, anti-Fernandinho, these players who seem surrounded by a magnetic field which disturbs the sight of the referees, a shell which gives them a form of invisibility when they twist their necks or the ankle to the laws of the game. He, with each prank, was pinched.
Granit Xhaka expelled in 2020 with Arsenal
Credit: Getty Images
This season, it’s better, but it’s not that yet. He has only committed six fouls in eight matches, but has been cautioned twice. It’s better than in 2021-22: 27 PL matches, 29 faults, ten yellows and one red, but, obviously, Xhaka is not of the race of rogues. Højbjerg, for example, had committed 28 fouls – penalized – in the same season, but had only been cautioned three times. Concealment is not Granit’s forte.
The very good shot of Mikel Arteta
The transformation took place elsewhere. The statisticians will insist on Xhaka’s higher placement this season, his assertive presence in the opponent’s thirty meters, his superior performance in terms of chances created, assists and even goals: two already in nine games this season, i.e. as many than in the fifty-eight matches played the previous two. All of this is correct. But this is only the manifestation of changes that have taken place elsewhere, and earlier.
From August 2021, in fact, when Mikel Arteta was able to convince his player to sign a contract extension until 2024, when he would have entered without his 32nd year. The manager had made his choice. He had seen in Xhaka the midfielder who would accompany the youngsters of the club in the process of creating a new team. He had managed to convince a hypersensitive man that his place was indeed in the club whose public had turned against him. In other words, he had shown qualities of “human management” that we did not know or doubted that he possessed. Xhaka was not the easiest of his patients to convince, but he succeeded.
Granit Xhaka and Mikel Arteta
Credit: Getty Images
This transformation is also that of the relationship between the public reputed to be the most severe in the Premier League, which has now become one of the “hottest” in England, and a team with which they identify without equivocal, including in the person of a player he hated. Of all the signs of the Gunners’ revival, this is one of the most striking, and most encouraging.
In the case of Xhaka, we spoke of “redemption”, a little easily. The stories of “redemption” are legion in football. Most of the time, they come down to a coin toss between success or defeat. The coin falls on the right side, and everything is back to normal. The story of Xhaka, unfolding over almost six and a half years, is different, more complex, to the point of being unprecedented.
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