On-song Xhaka banishes discord to become symbol of Arsenal’s progress | Arsenal

A couple of months ago, Granit Xhaka was warming up at the Vitality Stadium before Arsenal’s game against Bournemouth when he noticed that the travelling fans were serenading Oleksandr Zinchenko, one of the club’s summer signings. (“Zin-chen-ko! Always believe in your soul”). Xhaka sidled up to his new colleague. “Alex,” he said. “I’ve been here for six years and I don’t have a song. You’ve been here for three weeks.”

And somehow you just know how Xhaka would have said it, too: with that unique Xhaka-esque blend of blitheness and hurt, insecurity and defiance, the throwaway comment that actually comes from the most tender of places. Every player knows their songs. Every player knows when they don’t have one. And while some players don’t care, Xhaka has never been very good at disguising how much he cares about things.

Take his extraordinary outburst after the 2-0 defeat at St James’s Park at the end of last season: a scathing rebuke to his teammates delivered not in the intimacy of the dressing room or on an access-all-areas documentary, but on live television, straight down the camera. “If someone isn’t ready for this game, stay at home,” he spat in disgust. “If you’re nervous, stay on the bench, don’t come here. We need people to have the balls to come here and play.”

For much of his Arsenal career, Xhaka’s no-filter approach won him as many adversaries as admirers. The passion was never the problem; rather it was the lack of self-control, the red cards, the simple errors, the time he told the fans to “fuck off” after being substituted against Crystal Palace. As Arsenal floundered on the pitch, Xhaka somehow came to embody everything that was holding them back: all mouth and no assists, a thermostat set permanently to “heatwave”.

Like tempestuous lovers, for years Xhaka and the fans was a relationship that appeared doomed to failure. The mutual attraction was there, but also an intense and often deeply personal mutual irritation. So how did we get here, with Xhaka closing in on 200 Premier League appearances, enjoying the most prolific goalscoring season of his career and finally – finally – having his own song?

“It was an absolutely amazing, amazing feeling,” Xhaka said of the moment he heard the new tune (“we’ve got … Granit Xhaka”, sung to the tune of Glad All Over) for the first time.

It has become fashionable to speak of Xhaka’s renaissance as a “redemption arc”, as if there were a certain narrative inevitability to it. In fact, it is the sort of trajectory that rarely occurs in modern football, where the tempers are short, the judgments are snap and the labour market more fluid than ever.

Once you fall out with the fans, that’s generally it for you. Perhaps there is a comparison with Joelinton at Newcastle or Moussa Sissoko at…