Shkodran Mustafi says he never felt his Arsenal career was over, despite a torrid start to the season that saw him largely confined to the sidelines before Unai Emery’s dismissal in late November.
The centre-back’s rehabilitation has been an unlikely success story of Mikel Arteta’s mini-revolution in recent weeks. He has started their last six games in all competitions and, in a twist few supporters will have seen coming, has forged a solid partnership with David Luiz to help Arsenal keep three consecutive clean sheets. Earlier he was confined to cup appearances and, with his stock low after an error-strewn end to 2018-19, the club had made several efforts to move him on.
“If you think things are over for you, then you should retire,” Mustafi said after another respectable showing in Thursday night’s 1-0 win at Olympiakos. “That’s not like you should think as a professional. You always get the opportunities and a team has more than 20 players for a reason.
“The main thing for me was to be professional because as long as you stay professional, you have no fault for anything. Stay professional, wait until you get your next opportunity and then obviously you have to take it.”
He has succeeded in doing that, responding well from a mistake in last month’s 2-2 draw at Chelsea to perform almost faultlessly since. The 27-year-old admitted that this had been the toughest season of his career but that life outside the game had kept things in perspective.
“In the beginning of the season, not being selected, not making the squad, it has been difficult,” he said. “But I am a person who tries to see more the positive things than the negatives. I think that helped me a lot. Having my family around me – my kids, my wife – because life is not only football. That’s something I kept remembering to myself. Being in training every day, playing a lot of games, you get a lot of attention but still at the end of the day I am a father of two kids and I try to focus on this as well.”
Mustafi’s contract expires in the summer of 2021 and, even in the context of his return to the side, it remains difficult to imagine player or club rushing to discuss a new deal. He rhetorically asked “Why not?” when it was put to him that his future could lie at Arsenal, and was noncommittal in response to suggestions he could stay into next season.
“I have always taken things day by day,” he said. “I always gave everything until the last minute and when I decide or when the club and I decide it is going to continue I am happy to continue. If not then we have to go forward.”
The likeliest scenario is that Mustafi will depart in the summer, but with his reputation at least partly restored. He credits Arteta for much of his and Arsenal’s upturn, saying the manager “speaks about things I have never heard before” and praising him for boiling football down to its essentials.
“[He speaks about] simple things, but simple things you have to remember,” he said. “These days football is so quick and complicated because there are a lot of systems out there, a lot of stuff you have to think about, but you start to forget about the easy things.
“He is putting this in the team. I think we still need to work on it a lot as sometimes we complicate our lives too much, but I think he has had a very good impact.”
