Arsenal traumatised me – they took away my passion for football and I felt disgust for the game, says Nicolas Pepe
ARSENAL flop Nicolas Pepe has revealed he was so traumatised by his Gunners stay he almost quit football.
The Gunners paid Lille a club record £72million for the Ivory Coast winger in 2019.
However Pepe, 29, managed just 27 goals in 112 games and came in for severe criticism.
He had a season on loan to Nice before Arsenal tore up his contract with a year remaining last September.
France-born Pepe spent last term with Turkish club Trabzonspor, scoring six goals in 23 games, but was released at the end of the season.
He told L’Equipe: “I suffered a kind of trauma with Arsenal. It was as though they had taken away my passion for football.
“I felt disgust for the game. I was no longer playing, and I asked myself why I was doing this job.
“I felt so many doubts, and thought about packing it all in. I asked myself why people were attacking me so angrily.
“They went as far as calling me the biggest flop in Premier League history. But I refused to mope about it.
“I wanted something different when I left Arsenal last summer, and I didn’t care a damn about the money.
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“At Nice I was on just 25 per cent of my Arsenal salary. I just wanted to play.
“I wanted to cancel my Arsenal contract sooner, but they were unwilling to do so.
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“They said they had paid £72m for me, so could not let me go for free. They were asking big fees for me, so every possible transfer deal fell through.
“Arsenal only accepted letting me go after the European transfer market had closed, so that just left the Gulf countries and Turkey.
“They also made me promise not to go to Saudi Arabia, for image reasons, and in the end I got an offer from Trabzonspor.
“I hadn’t asked Arsenal to pay £72m for me. With a fee that high people don’t care what level you come from – they just want you to perform straight away.
“Sadly the reality is that it’s statistics above all. Few players score 25 goals a season with a new club, and I’m not even a number nine – I wasn’t going to roll over the Premier League like that.
“But that brought me a wave of criticism. It was almost harassment, and it affected me.
“It also came from the media and certain people within the club at Arsenal. They didn’t realise it can play on my mind and affect my performances.
“The only people who always supported me were the Arsenal fans.”