Even if Mesut Ozil is an excellent signing for Arsenal, being able to get Luis Suarez from Liverpool would have been better for the club in terms of both getting the better player and filling in an actual need.
While Mesut Ozil is one of the best attacking midfielders in the world and is better than both Santi Cazorla or Jack Wilshere, finding a player to feed strikers with passes wasn’t the most urgent thing in the world for Arsenal to address.
Finding a striker who can score goals was a bit more of an immediate need. Not that Olivier Giroud isn’t a fine option for Arsenal up front, as he’s proven so far this season with four goals in four matches, showing he’s finally adapting to being a target man on a top club in a big Premier League club, but adding to his ability by signing an even better player would have helped Arsenal be more of a threat on the Premier League title.
Ideally, Arsene Wenger would have signed a top class midfielder, preferably in a more defensive role than Ozil, and a striker like Suarez or Higuain, which Giroud recently mentioned would have been inferior to the Uruguayan. But Arsenal didn’t really succeed in making the right bids for the right players, and the German arrived from Real Madrid at the last possible moment.
Injuries have decimated the Arsenal front line, as Olivier Giroud might have to play injured as Arsenal are also missing Yaya Sanogo and Lukas Podolski. Another option is playing with Theo Walcott as the lone forward, but in any case, it’s clear Arsenal should have addressed their depth at the striker position as well as bringing in Ozil, Flamini and the inexperienced and unproven Sanogo.
Suarez wouldn’t just have been a better striker, but also a player who can play in a number of positions, filling both winger spots if Wenger needed him to so he would have played with both him and Giroud in the lineup. However, bringing him proved to be impossible this summer, and Ozil was an opportunity they couldn’t afford to pass on considering the time they had and the pressure the club was under.
Ozil is going to do very well for Arsenal, but if the choice would have been between him and Suarez, signing the striker would have been a better decision.