Mesut Ozil Is Becoming a Luxury Arsenal Can't Afford to Carry

"It will all be alright in the end," the saying goes. "If it's not alright, then it's not the end." Arsenal fans go into the Christmas period with plenty of time to ruminate on this maxim, at the end of a week which has left their title credentials withered on the vine and their most expensive player looking little more than a product of the obscenely bloated transfer market.

Once, £43 million would have bought a relative guarantee—if not of success, then consistent contributions at the very least. Few £43 million players go missing when their team's season begins to pull apart at the seams.

For Mesut Ozil, things are most assuredly not alright; they may indeed be reaching their end. The signing that was supposed to answer all the questions at Arsenal has ultimately served only to amplify them.

The declaration of intent that bank-busting outlay in September 2013 was supposed to have delivered now seems reduced to a croak, squeaking out timid protestations about this team being robust enough to climb to the top of the league and stay there, while the same old rickets rot the foundations.

Arsenal’s remains a palace built on quicksand, with Ozil its glistening, fatuous minaret.

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The similes are as numerous as they are amusing—the gardener pruning his topiary as root rot takes hold, or the maitre d' buffing the crystal as the Titanic rattles towards the iceberg. The same allegations have been levelled at Ozil with even consistency and for as long as he has pulled on a Gunners shirt. Now more than ever, though, the longsuffering Arsenal faithful are bereft of any cause for cheer.

This last week has brought back-to-back defeats at Everton and Manchester City and seen a nine-point gap open up to Chelsea at the top of the Premier League; that feels eerily decisive for Arsenal and their playmaker.

In both games, the Gunners had taken the lead and been in relative control. Both City and Everton have led their supporters into asking deep and probing questions of late, and when Arsenal took the lead with characteristic verve and swagger they planted psychological obstacles between their opponents and any possible fightback.

Yet fight back they did, a reminder to Arsenal—as if one could possibly still have been necessary after all these years—that fortitude of the mind is as important in this league as the most exquisitely crafted attacking football.

Then there was Ozil, at times a passenger when Arsenal have crumbled over these past three-and-a-half seasons, but at Goodison Park and the Etihad Stadium, the extent of his absence made him borderline complicit in his team’s collapse.

The criticisms are no longer just tired; they are beginning to feel exhausted.

Part of the problem surrounding Ozil, is that those criticisms have long been converted by too many into thinly veiled praise.

The Germany international's lack of work rate continues to be dressed up as something enigmatic and charming, that he carries an untameable streak which renders him immune from any collective effort at game management and making him—somehow—all the more charismatic for it.

Ozil has helped usher in a whole new breed of luxury footballer, one who is so idiosyncratic in his creative propensities that any attempt to coerce him into a cohesive tactical unit would implicitly be a crime against his talent. It is symptomatic of the Premier League’s inane entitlement; it's all too Arsenal.

When the boat starts shipping water, there are no passengers, and disaster relief becomes paramount. The crushing thing about each of Arsenal’s two recent defeats is that they could be seen coming, as the defence dropped deep and the gaps between front and back became gaping. This had little to do with Ozil, but once it became clear that the game was slipping away, there was no renewed hurry to battle, scrap and seek out balls that weren’t coming with their usual ease.

There is another old saying dished around the game’s breakout stars; when they play, the team plays. The German playmaker has the power to be that breakout star—even in a side like Arsenal’s—yet instead something deep in the DNA turns his head the other way. In the middle of which comes talk of contract renegotiations, which could not have been more poorly timed.

In 2013, Arsenal invested heavily in Ozil and have continued to do so since, all on the assumption that this was a player who would alter the perception of the club as a selling outfit, slaked of suitable ambition.

The perception of the Gunners did change with the acquisition of Ozil, but at the expense of a different disposition—that of the archbottlers, void of a tempered edge.

To what extent, then, should the club be ploughing time and energy into clinging to Ozil as his contract enters its final 18 months? The record signing has scored big goals in big games—a sterling volley against Borussia Dortmund at the Emirates in 2013; the strike that finished off Chelsea before half-time in September; and a finish slammed home against Manchester United after six minutes. But when Arsenal have been on the ropes, there has been little from him.

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Perhaps Ozil deserves not to be stung with the full venom of the fee he commanded. Maybe there was never a time in transfer history when £40 million-plus was much of a guarantee of anything, because by the time clubs had become willing to engage with these kinds of figures the market had already been distorted out of all recognition.

That £43 million in 2013 was not a great departure, relatively speaking, from the £11 million paid to Juventus for Thierry Henry in 2000, or the £7.5 million paid to Inter Milan for Dennis Bergkamp in 1995. Lazio hit Manchester United with a bill of £28.1 million for Juan Sebastian Veron as long ago as 2001. The market moves on and standards readapt.

However, this is a crossroads for Ozil and for Arsenal. The German will likely never change, but the Gunners must. There is much at stake—far more than just the thousands the club are ready to etch on to a renewed deal to keep their man in place for another three years of disappointment.