There was always going to be another side to the story and reports are starting to come in revealing why Laurent Koscielny felt he had no choice but to effectively go on strike.
You can break it down into three parts, first, the Frenchman feels that the club is deliberately pricing him out of a move. Secondly, he believes they mismanaged his return from injury and thirdly, he is dismayed at the direction the club is taking.
Now, it can be argued that he has a point, Arsenal is more or less pricing him out of a move, no one is going to pay the reported £8.8 Million they are demanding for a player of his age who has just come off an injury.
It is also no surprise that he feels they mismanaged his return from injury, there is enough evidence that foreign players tend to travel abroad for a lot of their treatment and there has to be a reason for that.
Finally, he is absolutely right to be dismayed at the direction the club is taking. I would suggest the vast majority of the fans feel the same.
But none of that justifies in any way his decision to not travel to the USA with the team and down tools.
He is the captain, he has a contract and Arsenal are within their rights to value any player as they see fit and as for the other reasons they seem to me as just making excuses for the sake of it, I mean, Arsenal is in such a bad condition that he wants to move to clubs that are actually inferior. You literally cannot make this stuff up.
There is only one way I could defend Koscielny on this and that is if the club had an agreement with him, which they clearly have not or he would have said so already.