Charles Watts reveals Arteta was desperate to keep Euro 2024 star

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·2 juillet 2024

Charles Watts reveals Arteta was desperate to keep Euro 2024 star

Granit Xhaka has had a fantastic year after leaving Arsenal in the summer of 2023.

The Swiss midfielder left the Emirates after arguably his best season in the Arsenal shirt. This year, he won the Bundesliga and German Cup at Bayer Leverkusen.

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He is leading the Swiss team in Euro 2024, and they have reached the quarterfinals.

The midfielder is having a superb time in his career, and Arsenal fans wish they had kept him.

Xhaka left with Mikel Arteta’s blessing, but the Spanish gaffer had attempted to keep him happy at the Emirates for several seasons.

In 2022, he convinced the Bayer Leverkusen star to stay, just as was the case in 2020, but he could not stop him from leaving last year. Charles Watts reveals this in his exclusive column on Caught Offside:

“Ideally, Arteta would have liked Xhaka to have stayed at Arsenal, but Xhaka wanted to go. Arteta had managed to convince him to stay with the club 12 months earlier when the Swiss International was again pushing for a move. But he was unable to do the same in 2023.

“Xhaka only had a year left on his contract and made it clear to Arsenal during the final few months of the 2022/23 campaign that he wanted a new challenge. Arsenal could have kept him of course, but then they would have lost him for nothing in the summer of 2024. So they had to let him go really.”

Just Arsenal Opinion

Xhaka was at the peak of his career when he left us, and we wish he had stayed for at least one more season.

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