MESUT ON THE MONEY

The donation of 10,000 protective masks by Bradley Johnson and Dexter Blackstock is simply magnificent. For them to go to 16 care homes and deliver much-needed PPE is legendary work. When people ask, ‘What are footballers doing in our time of need?’, I sa

FOR Stan Kroenke to ask Arsenal’s players to take a 12.5 per cent pay cut is a liberty and Mesut Ozil is absolutely right to tell him where to stick it.

Kroenke and his wife Ann, a Walmart heiress, are worth around £8billion and, as a club, Arsenal aren’t exactly struggling financially.

They have been operating at the top end of the Premier League, the world’s richest, for the past 28 years, and raking in top-division money for all but about five years of their existence.

The days when the narrative at the Emirates was: ‘We can’t spend a penny as we have a stadium to pay for,’ have been and gone – that stadium has been another significant revenue-generator for several years at least.

German international Ozil is under no contractual obligation whatsoever to give Arsenal one brass farthing of his salary and I make him well within his rights to take the stand he has.

That’s because this notion that clubs who have made a lot of cash over the years should be going to their players to ask for a prop-up is a complete and utter nonsense, especially when it’s the third-biggest club in the land behind Manchester United and Liverpool.

Persuasive

I thought it was a bit naughty of Arsenal to use boss Mikel Arteta (below) as their propaganda merchant by asking him to be the mouthpiece for the proposed “voluntary reduction.”

Fair play to Ozil, he wasn’t having any of it.

Martin O’neill, my manager at Leicester, was very persuasive and, after listening to him and having a chat with my agent, I might just have folded.

I got on with Roy Evans at Liverpool and Frank Clark at Nottingham Forest but that doesn’t mean I would have gone along with a pay-cut just because they’d asked.

As for John Gregory, who I was in combat with at Aston Villa, I’d have told him straight away where to go.

Before people criticise me for sticking up for Ozil, I’ll remind you that he has a contract which says that under all circumstances he will be paid his wages.

He signed that contract with an organisation which cashes cheques for £200million, £300m, £400m year after year, so it is a reasonable expectation that only 40 to 50 days after it last played a game, the club can still afford to pay him.

I can’t pretend to be a monster fan of Ozil the footballer in terms of the impact he has made at Arsenal but he has every single right – legally and morally – to take this stand.

Watertight