Mikel Arteta says Arsenal now "manageable" after three players axed from squad

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has admitted that he is pleased that is pleased with his squad after axing three players as it is now “manageable”.

Sead Kolasinac left the Gunners on loan for German strugglers Schalke at the start of the month, while Mesut Ozil and Sokratis Papastathopoulos have had their contracts terminated.

And Arteta has opened up about his pleasure at trimming his bloated squad, while also giving a short update on Ozil’s move to Fenerbahce.

He said: “We couldn’t carry on with 31 players in the squad.

“That was unmanageable and it makes it even more difficult when you have to leave out some of the foreign players.

“It’s really complicated to do that for a period of months and still maintain the health, the ambition and the chemistry around the place.

“The important thing for me is for everybody to be involved and to feel that they have a chance of fighting for the opportunity to play.

“But when you are completely out of that equation it makes it really difficult to find motivation.

“Mesut is a really talented footballer who has done a lot for this club but at the moment I want to take the team in a different direction.

“He was part of some of our plans at the start, but at the end he wasn’t and obviously that situation had to be resolved.

“It was a tough decision to let him leave for many different reasons but there is a history of what happened in the past few years and how things developed in terms of how I thought the team should evolve and his position at the club.

“When you have such an important player who is not in the squad, it’s a really difficult situation for both parties to sustain because the player wants to play and we cannot give him the minutes.

“So one of our main objectives this month was to make some decisions to offset that.

“The quarantine situation in Turkey is making Mesut’s final step the longest ever because they have a lot of restrictions there.

“There are still things to be done before announcing anything but everything seems to be going OK.”

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