'You're judged or condemned' - Mustafi on Arsenal, Arteta and burden of a €41m price tag

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Former Arsenal defender Shkodran Mustafi has revealed that while his time at the Premier League club was the most successful period of his career, the abuse he received while playing for the London side and the cloud that hung over him due to his huge transfer fee somewhat spoiled his time there. 

The Germany international undoubtedly burst onto the international scene with his performances at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, which propelled Mustafi into the minds of some of Europe’s biggest clubs. Just two years after winning the tournament with his nation, the defender joined Arsenal from Valencia in a deal worth €41 million. At the time, Mustafi’s transfer was the club’s fourth largest move ever and undoubtedly put a degree of pressure and expectation on the defender that he struggled to live up to. And now, in an exclusive interview with Transfermarkt, the 31-year-old defender looks back on his career and why his time at Arsenal was perhaps set up to fail from day one. 

Success but not content: Mustafi looks back on troubled stint in London

“You always have something like that in the back of your mind a bit, because people associate that sum with a player,” recalls Mustafi, when asked if that transfer fee felt like a burden at the time. “You think: If I don't play well in two or three games, then this €41m will blow up in my face - although I don't really have anything to do with the money. But I preferred to focus on the things I could influence in order to celebrate as many successes as possible at this giant club. I can only influence transfer fees with my performance, which increases my value for other clubs. That's all I can do. The way the market keeps developing, we'll be laughing about that €41m fee in a few years.”

Although Mustafi spent much of his playing career in Italy and Spain, as well as his native Germany, the largest chunk of the defender’s career was at Arsenal. Over the course of five seasons, the former Hamburg and Everton youth product made over 150 appearances for the Premier League side and had some notable high points, such as the FA Cup wins in 2017 and 2020, as well as reaching the Europa League final in 2019. Despite that, Mustafi struggles to look back on his time in England as the most enjoyable period of his career. “I've been asking myself that question a lot in recent months,” notes the 31-year old, as he contends with his career coming to an end. “In difficult situations, you always like to remember beautiful moments. When I look at my career, I probably had my most successful period at Arsenal. But the happiest period, when I was able to get the maximum out of myself, was the first year at Valencia.” 

This, undoubtedly, is due to the abuse Mustafi used to receive on social media or in the press when he made mistakes on the pitch. Labelled as “error-prone” or a “transfer flop”, the defender struggled to live up to his transfer fee from day one and while inflated transfer fees or expectations have always been a part of football, Mustafi had to contend with a very modern phenomenon: abuse from complete strangers on social media. “You think - in general and not just in soccer - that you've experienced everything. And then you're proven wrong,’ notes Mustafi. “Social media is a platform with which you can do a lot of good, but unfortunately also a lot of bad. It's very easy to sit behind a screen, express yourself without any background knowledge and more or less lash out at someone. Of course that touched me, it hurt to read that. Especially because my family was also confronted with it. I've been in this business since I was 14 and I know very well: you need a thicker skin and you don't have to care what people think about you as long as you think you're doing your absolute best.”

While Mustafi can look back on that period of his career and take encouragement from the way Mikel Arteta offered him advice and stood by him, despite the online abuse, the defender is concerned that social media platforms rarely help and seem to be getting worse. “With a striker, things calm down again after a brace,” adds Mustafi. “I was glad that with Mikel Arteta came a coach who didn't mind all the criticism, who thought a lot of me and nominated me for the starting eleven again. And I felt that people understood that maybe I was just one of many and that the team in general wasn't working. I was one of two or three players who were picked out. Mesut Özil also got a lot of things. You're judged or condemned as a player. That's the way it is today and it feels like it's getting worse.”