“The players would just absolutely go bananas at him playing to the camera.”
Alexis Sanchez’s time at Arsenal came to an end in January, and it appears neither party were upset about the break-up. It was obvious for the best part of a year that the forward wouldn’t extend his contract with the club, and he expressed his frustrations on several occasions during matches.
The swap deal which took Sanchez to Manchester United, and saw Henrikh Mkhitaryan join Arsenal, was a rare example of a transfer suiting every party involved, including the Arsenal players.
According to football journalist Raphael Honigstein, Sanchez’s former teammates weren’t fond of the Chilean. In fact, Honigstein claims that their dislike for Sanchez has been “under-reported” and that the dressing room is now a much happier place without him.
“I think that it’s been under-reported just how badly the whole Arsenal dressing room hated Alexis Sanchez,” Honigstein said on The Totally Football Show.
“They really felt that he was just playing up to the camera, doing all these things like, ‘oh, I’m trying, but no-one else is, what am I doing here?’ And then, quite tellingly, Wenger, he talked about this last year, at Arsenal, they put up stats inside the dressing room after every game, showing the amount of kilometres run, and Sanchez would regularly come out with the lowest by a big distance. The players would just absolutely go bananas at him playing to the camera. So, they really wanted to get rid of him. Whether they’ve improved as a team is a different story, but I think it is a happier dressing room.”
Sanchez probably doesn’t miss the Arsenal players either. United host the Gunners at the end of April in the Premier League, expect the former Barcelona forward to be on the end of a crunching Jack Wilshere tackle.
