Nicolas Pepe has described his time at Arsenal as a “kind of trauma” and revealed he is thinking about quitting football.
The winger joined the Gunners in 2019 from Lille for a club-record fee of €80m (£72m), and struggled to deliver on his promises.
Pepe was loaned to Nice for the 2022-23 season, with a pay cut, but left Arsenal by mutual agreement with one year remaining on his contract 12 months later.
The 29-year-old joined Turkish side Trabzonspor but is now a free agent after his contract expired there and now, for the first time, he has explained the effect of his move to Arsenal.
“At Arsenal I had suffered a kind of trauma, as if they had taken away my hobby, I had an aversion to football,” Pepe told L’Equipe.
“When I didn’t play anymore, I wondered why I was doing this job. I doubted myself to the point of thinking about preventing everything.
“I wondered how it is possible that they had attacked me so much. People went so far as to call me the biggest failure in Premier League history!
“I didn’t ask for them to spend 80 million euros on me. With that amount, others don’t care where they come from, they need you to play clearly.
“There are many players who without delay score 25 goals a season, and I’m not even number 9. I wasn’t going to play like that in the Premier League. But that’s what earned me this avalanche of criticism.
“It’s almost harassment. I don’t look at social media much, however, if my brother told me “they said that about you,” subconsciously, he moved me.
“It also came from the media or some members of the club. They do not realize that it can affect the brain, the family and that it affects performance. The others who have supported me are the Arsenal fans.
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