Ray Parlour has defended Mesut Ozil after the midfielder rejected the club’s plea to take a pay cut and he instead questioned the leadership and togetherness among the current players.
Arsenal asked their players to voluntarily give up 12.5% of their wages for the next year to help the club save some costs now that it isn’t earning money following the suspension of football.
However, Ozil and several other players decided against giving up their share and the German came under increased scrutiny yet again.
He wasn’t the only player that didn’t give up some of his earnings, but he is the only player that has been mentioned and Parlour has defended him.
Parlour reckons that he didn’t blame the German and that several players around the world wouldn’t give up their paycheque either.
He blamed the club for giving the contract to the German in the first place and questioned the leadership among the players for Ozil to be mentioned and not the other players who didn’t take the cut.
Parlour told talkSPORT that the playmaker’s situation is of the club’s own doing: “It’s not his fault he’s on £350,000-a-week, I look at it and say it’s Arsenal’s mistake to give him the money.
“You’re never going to do it turn, are you, if you’re a player?
“So that doesn’t come into it really.
“I do believe that if there are three or four players who haven’t agreed then they should all be named, why is it only Ozil?”
Parlour added: “It shows a bit of the leadership qualities again.
“In my era, Tony Adams would have been the captain, he would have gone, ‘Right I’m going to go round to every single player, and we all agree together – we either all do it or we don’t do it’.
“That’s what it would have been and I would have gone, ‘Yeah Tony, I totally agree I’m going to do it as well’.
“And it would have been a decision that everybody does it. So it shows a little bit of a lack of leadership again.
“Even Patrick Vieira, when he was captain, would have done exactly the same.
“Because it’s down to the players, they wouldn’t have had meetings with managers or anybody like that. Patrick would have been on the phone or in a Zoom meeting with quite a few players.
“So it’s negative news again, that they don’t need at this time.”
