Mesut Ozil has revealed he turned down a £100m offer from China to remain at Arsenal last summer. The Germany international will only have 12 months remaining on his current Arsenal deal in the summer and his long-term future is still in doubt beyond the end of the current campaign. Arsenal want Ozil to sign a new deal but are unwilling to shatter their wage structure and hand him a deal in excess of £200,000-a-week, which would seemingly mean Arsene Wenger’s side would have to sell Ozil this summer rather than risk losing him for nothing at the end of next season.
However, the 28-year-old has revealed he could have left Arsenal last summer after receiving a blockbuster offer from China that would have earned him £100m over the duration of his contract. “When I got an offer from China last summer, however, I didn’t need his [Robert Pires’s] advice because the offer was too absurd,” Yahoo! quote Ozil as saying. “The Chinese were prepared to pay me £100 million net over a period of five years. A fairy tale amount of money that went beyond the limits of my imagination. “In spite of this, it look me less than three minutes to decline the offer. My agent, Erkut, called me to let me know about the bid. He said: ‘I think we’re agreed what we’re going to do, aren’t we? You won’t consider it, will you?’” “‘I’m nowhere near the end of my career,’ I replied. ‘I still want to win titles with Arsenal. I don’t want to play in China no matter how much they’re willing to pay. No way’.
“And so the matter was settled. In the knowledge, by the way, that Chinese president Xi Jinping is a fan. On one occasion Arsenal’s managing director came to tell us that the president had contacted the club asking for my jersey with a dedication. In fact, he wanted a Germany shirt and we promised to sort it out. That same day a courier picked up the shirt from my house.”
Ozil’s performances have been below his usually very high standards and he is a long way off recording the numbers he posted last season. He will have the chance to improve on six goals and six assists in the Premier League this season when Arsenal travel to Middlesbrough on Monday night looking to avoid a fifth straight league defeat for the first time since December 1984.
