Granit Xhaka has certainly had a love/hate relationship with Arsenal fans during his five years at the Emirates, and he occassionally hasn’t helped his cause by publicly hitting out like he did in the Crystal Palace game when Unai Emery was our coach.
That saw Emery strip him of his captaincy and freeze him out of the team, and probably would have ended with Xhaka being sold if Arteta didn’t step in and persuade him to stay.
It didn’t help when he got sent off against Burnley in December for stupidly lashing out, which probably cost us points, and that brought his critics back out in force.
The Swiss captain obviously still feels he gets harsher treatment than he deserves as he has told Blick in an interview: “You have to live with criticism in football, but there have to be limits.
“There are other players who get red cards, but they don’t get criticised as much as I do.
“I sometimes feel that with me it is deliberately made into a bigger issue than it really is.
“But it won’t break me. I overcome it, and this time it has made me come back stronger – no doubt to many people’s surprise.”
There definitely seems to be a lot less criticism this year, and Xhaka does seem to be less error-prone, but there still seems to be a feeling on here that the 29 year-old is not quite good enough to help Arsenal back to the top.
But leaving aside your personal opinions of Xhaka’s playing style, do you think that he has been harshly treated by Arsenal fans?