There was a time, a few years ago, when I could have kicked a ball with my eyes closed and hit multiple goodbye offerings; in fact, a part of me had started to feel less like a football writer and more like one that exclusively wrote Arsenal farewell pieces.
The last time I wrote one of these was in February 2020, and it wasn’t even a goodbye per se, more like me finally finding the words for a Santi Cazorla tribute. So, by my 2018 and 2019 standards, it has been a while. In that 2020 piece, I wrote about the inevitability of goodbyes and of “always feeling like we could have used more time with that thing, that place, that person”.
Yet here I am, sad, but with a rare clarity that Granit Xhaka departing for Bayer Leverkusen is the best possible outcome at the best possible time for both him and Arsenal Football Club.
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Borussia Monchengladbach’s Xhaka arrived at Arsenal in the summer of 2016 as the club’s third-most expensive signing at the time (only Mesut Oxil and Alexis Sanchez were higher). There had been many recent departures, including the retirement of a certain perfect-haired Spaniard, and, after breaking the trophy drought plaguing the Londoners with back-to-back FA Cup triumphs, signings like this one signalled a certain intent from Monsieur Wenger.