Why Mesut Özil is being unfairly criticized

Mesut Özil. Any ordinary football fan must have heard of this magician of turkish decent. Quickness, vision, passing, dribbling, assisting.. the Nemo-eyed has the skillset to be called the best playmaker in the world. But like every footballer, he too has his weaknesses, like the fact that he barely uses his right foot, scores goals and defends well. While usually people would accept that, a vast part of the football fans chose to bash him and make him the main scapegoat of all their problems, ignoring the fact that football is a team sport.

Let's start with the mythe that Mesut Özil is a lazy footballer. He is not. He may look lazy but as someone who has followed him since he moved to Werder Bremen, Özil's off the ball-movement is remarkably well and makes him a great player to pass to when his team get the ball. If he was lazy, why was he part of José Mourinho's counter-attacking Real Madrid team in 2011-2012? Why was he amongst one of the most running players in the Bayern Münich game in the season 2013-2014? An attacking midfielder is supposed to link-up with other attacking players, to provide and assist them in scoring goals and create goal scoring opportunities. Whenever Özil's team does not have the ball that becomes nearly impossible. It is also part of a football coach's responsibility to actually instruct the player to defend, especially when that player is an attacking midfielder. Attacking players are attacking players for a reason and not defenders. Now if Löw, Mourinho and Arsene all gave him defensive duties, and he still did not contribute to the defensive that would be on Özil, but that didn't happen as far as we know. Add the fact that he was regular starter under one of the most disciplined coaches in the world, Mourinho.

Then there is the myth that Özil is a Flop. He is not that either. He averaged more than 2,9 key passes per game in his first season in the Premier League, without having a pre-season. He did fine considering the circumstances and has been Arsenal's best player along with Aaron Ramsey for a very, very long time. It is very tough to be the difference when the players around you cannot convert the chances you have been creating for so much time. It was frustrating to witness how the likes of Cazorla, Giroud and Podolski wasted chance after chance after chance this season. And as if that wasn't enough, Wenger refused to get a new striker in the January transfer window, and ultimately bought an injured midfielder from the Russian league. Arsenal were genuine title contenders when both of Ramsey and Özil were fully fit.

For 50 million euros Arsenal got the second best player of Real Madrid back then. Top assist giving playmaker who was quite the master in creating goal scoring opportunities for his Portuguese team mate Cristiano Ronaldo, but also Karim Benzema and Gonzalo Higuain.

Most of this ''Flop'' talk seem to come from the 2 games against Bayern Münich where he had a bad game in both of them. He missed a penalty in the first game, then had to defend for at least 60 minutes after one of his team mates got a red card. Then, in the second game he got injured after already playing 2 minutes of footy, but continued to play till the end of the first half. That was admittedly not great but that doesn't mean he flopped. If we judge a player on 1-2 games, we might call Messi and Ronaldo weak players because even they have bad games, and they are the best in the world!

 
Özil is the kind of player that may look not interested, a bit cocky, but still delivers on a regular basis... in his own way. Some of his passes look very easy but are very hard to give, which is why he is sometimes underrated. His work ethic should go up, but that doesn't mean he is lazy all the time because he is not. Scoring goals is not his biggest skill, but he did score 9 goals in his final season at Madrid, which is certainly not something someone who barely scores, would achieve.

Let's take a short look at Özil's main rivals. Iñiesta had a pretty average season and a worse World Cup. Same for Cesc who even got sold to Chelsea. Mata was riding the bench for Chelsea, then got moved to United where he scored a few goals against some random small English teams. Sneijder is somewhere playing in Turkey and it's almost as if Götze was more a benchwarmer than regular starter at his new club Bayern Münich this season.

Right now Özil is playing in the World Cup - and to be quite frank he hasn't been great but he is being played out of position yet still managed to give 2,6 key passes per game in his last 5 games, scored an incredibly important goal against Algeria, almost decided the France game by almost assisting Chelsea-player Schürrle who wasted a big opportunity.

Can Özil do better? Yes. Does that mean he is a Flop or lazy? No. The best playmaker in the world, that is what he is.