You might have noticed that Pablo Mari wants to stay at Arsenal. After all he has not shied away from reaffirming that fact.
Indeed whenever a microphone is thrust in his general direction he will make his play to convince Arsenal that they should pick up the £8million purchase option in their loan agreement with Flamengo.
Take this innocuous question from an interview last month. “You must have done a lot of travelling so far in your career, having played for so many clubs in so many countries,” he was asked.
Mari replied: “I’ve seen maybe five clubs in the last four years but this is our life. If you want to play football and improve every year you need to move.
“Maybe when you find a good club for you you can stay and improve with the club. At the moment I never found this club but now I think I’ve found it.
“It’s Arsenal for me. I want to stay here. I want to improve as a player and a person. I want to be here a lot of years.”
Mari is shooting his shot and who could blame him? His dream of establishing himself at the game’s top level seemed to have passed him by after a string of loan moves from Manchester City that never really saw him catch alight.
It is hard to overstate just how peripheral he was at the Etihad Stadium after City brought him in from Gimnastic in Spain’s second division in August 2016 but it is typified in the fact that he and Mikel Arteta, who so campaigned for a left-footed centre-back in January, had never once met before he flew into London to complete his move to the Gunners.
The same was true of Pep Guardiola. Mari was a City player but not a true part of the team. He understood that reality even if he hoped his time on loan could convince his parent club that he was worthy of a shot in the Premier League.
“In that time, for me in my mind, I wanted to play with them,” Mari said last month in his first interview with the British press. “This was not possible.
“So now for me it is another situation. I want to play a lot of years here with Arsenal.
“It is another situation and I am really happy now.”
There Mari is again, reaffirming that determination to stay at Arsenal. On and off the pitch he has gone about things in exactly the right way even if in the former category his opportunities to prove his worth have been limited.
Those who know Mari well told football.london that his move to Arsenal was “the stuff of dreams”. He is humble, hardworking and gregarious, the latter perhaps evidenced by his willingness to do more than his fair share of media work during the lockdown. This is a second chance in England that he was determined not to waste.
Whether coronavirus has robbed him of that opportunity is another matter. In his two games so far Mari did what Arteta would want from any defender above all else and kept clean sheets.
There were hairy moments, especially an early challenge in the 1-0 win over West Ham that saw him simply bounce off Michail Antonio as they vied for the ball and then completely misread a through pass to allow his opponent a clear path to goal, but there was plenty of elegance to Mari as well.
His pass completion rate lay at 92% with plenty of those raking balls out to the channels that his compatriot David Luiz specialises in. Remove those more risky attempts from the equation and he completed 133 of 137 passes against West Ham and Portsmouth.
Therein lies the caveat; Arteta is still yet to see what Mari can do against top tier opposition with the Hammers hovering above the drop zone into the Championship and Portsmouth battling in League One. A return to Manchester City looked destined to be the first occasion where the 26-year-old could be truly assessed but that was the first game in England to fall foul of the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet Mari ought not to abandon hope. There is certain to be plenty of churn in Arsenal’s centre-back corps over the coming months and, with little money to spend, the £8million purchase clause seems an easy, affordable option at a time when investing heavily is out of the Gunners reach.
Shkodran Mustafi is set to be made available this summer, as he enters the last year of his contract. Sokratis Papastathopoulos also indicated in March, on the night Mari made his debut, that he will not see out the remainder of his deal through to 2021 if he feels he is no longer wanted at Arsenal. Notably both Mari and Mustafi seem to have jumped ahead of him in the pecking order.
William Saliba will be added to the first team once the 2020/21 season is underway but will need time to build the fitness and physicality required for the Premier League. Mari has already had a headstart of three months.
Mari has never made a secret of his desire to join Arsenal and, at a time when higher grade purchases are out of reach, it would seem that there is no reason for the Gunners not to fulfill his wish.
