France icon Marcel Desailly has just made a claim about William Saliba that will not go down well with Arsenal fans.
Saliba, in our eyes, is already one of the best defenders in the world. He has been unbelievable for Arsenal since the start of last season, and nobody can convince us otherwise. Desailly, however, has a completely different opinion.
Marcel Desailly says Arsenal’s William Saliba is ‘not extraordinary’
Arsenal signed William Saliba from Saint-Etienne back in the summer of 2019, when Unai Emery was still our manager.
The Frenchman got zero opportunities at the Emirates in his first three years as a Gunner. There were even doubts over whether he had a future as an Arsenal player.
However, after returning from his loan spell at Marseille last year, Mikel Arteta gave him his long-awaited opportunity in the Premier League, and Saliba, in our opinion, has been better than every other defender in the country since.
Desailly admits that Saliba is a top-level defender, but he thinks players like Liverpool‘s Ibrahima Konate and former Gunners target Dayot Upamecano are much better than the Arsenal man.
He told GFFN: “There is the one at Arsenal too (William Saliba) – he hasn’t yet had the game time to adapt to that necessary association (for France).
“I don’t believe his individual qualities to be above average. He’s at a very, very high level but not extraordinary. So before absorbing the international level, he needs to acclimatise to those associations.
“As things stand, I don’t know how to associate him with Konate or with Upamecano so that he can excel and develop all the talent that he has in him.”
Arsenal fans disagree with Desailly
Desailly’s comments on Arsenal star Saliba really are unnecessary, aren’t they?
Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, but to say Saliba doesn’t have the ‘individual qualities to be above average’ is just ludicrous, in our opinion.
Arsenal fans, unsurprisingly, think Desailly has no idea what he’s talking about.
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