Interview ‘Ozil? He will probably quit for Esports’
His opinion about his client will grate with many Arsenal fans, but agent Dr Erkut Sogut is not afraid of controversy
An interview with Mesut Ozil’s agent, Dr Erkut Sogut, is certainly entertaining. He breezes through the plot of the novel he has written, Deadline, about nepotism in football – name-checking the influence of the Fergusons at Manchester United and the Rummenigges and Hoenesses at Bayern Munich.
Sogut then states how his star client Ozil – who he calls the “Muhammad Ali of football” – was worth every penny of the £350,000 a week he earned at Arsenal, before revealing the midfielder is likely to become an Esports player, a professional video gamer, when his football career ends. “He will go more into Esports, play himself and maybe become an Esports athlete,” he says of the 33-year-old.
But really?
“He’s really good at Fortnite and I think, one day, I wouldn’t be surprised if he is competing,” Sogut says. “He owns a team – M10 Esports – and he has players. He has a gaming house in Germany. He has footappearing ball, like Fifa, and Fortnite.” It is a statement that will surely grate with Arsenal fans, given the manner in which Ozil’s eight years at the club unhappily petered out and how there were allegations that he already spent too much time playing video games.
Ozil eventually joined Turkish giants Fenerbahce, after his contract was terminated six months early in January 2021, and his future there is now in question after he was excluded from Jorge Jesus’s squad.
Nevertheless, Sogut expects Ozil to stay. He has two more years on his contract and if he is forced out he is more likely to retire than seek another club. “I think he will not play football in any other club any more. I can’t see that – it will be Fenerbahce and that’s it,” he says.
Sogut’s novel is the first in a series he is planning on issues in football: nepotism, then child trafficking and then racism. It is a work of fiction because, he says, it is “the best way to tell stories”, but there are real-life references, such as Sir Alex Ferguson giving his brother, Martin, a job as Manchester United’s chief European scout and his son, Darren, playing for the club.
Is he not worried about libelling them? “Like why?” Sogut says. “Their names are there. The Panorama show [on Ferguson] was done. I am not saying something that is not out there and it’s legally correct. I am a lawyer as well, so… I’m not scared about losing out on business.
“If I want to tell the stories, I don’t care about the consequences of boards or their club now. [Karlheinz] Rummenigge [whose brother and son are football agents], [Uli] Hoeness [whose brother is an agent], they don’t work at Bayern Munich any more. Both are gone. Ferguson is not there any more [at United]. But Ferguson, he was saying agents are the worst in this business but his son became an agent?
I’m not saying they are bad people. I’m just saying like what it is. I’m leaving it for the reader to decide – it’s not illegal, but is it ethical?”
Sogut’s thriller novel sounds something of a romp. It is based around a fictional investigative journalist called Annabel and one of its more colourful aspects is the “Table”, which “is a group of powerful agents who control the world of football” and who meet to decide “which coach goes where, which player goes where”.
But does he not worry about to mix fact and fiction? “I don’t think so, because they are real facts and the rest, to create the ‘Table’, that’s a fictional part of it,” Sogut argues. “It doesn’t exist. It’s more showing how powerful agents could be, maybe.” But is that not farfetched?
“Nothing is unrealistic to me, because if you see how powerful players have become, with the power of players, agents also become more powerful. Players are becoming more important than clubs. We are going to the American model.”
Maybe Sogut has also felt the benefit of having such a highprofile client as Ozil, who is undeniably one of those players who is “powerful”, who has a huge global profile and who joined Arsenal from Real Madrid in 2013 for an initial £37.4 million in a deal that was regarded as a coup.
“Something people forget with Mesut Ozil is that he is big on the commercial side, not just football,” Sogut says. “If someone like Mesut earned £200,000 a week on footballing ability, he earned £350,000 because the extra £150,000 was for his commercial rights. A lot of players in the Premier League are very good players, but they are not brands. Mesut is someone with an opinion, someone who polarises. That’s what brands want.”