take florian wirtz for exmaple, a player who notoriously was heavily critised by fans and media at the beginning of the season when liverpool were suffering from a goal drought, everyone took the easy way out by calling him a flop. very few considered his actual status of being a bundesliga player that is playing in the premier league for the first time, the bundesliga being very notorious for being slower pace compared to the prem, players like alexander hleb who played previously at arsenal in the prem and barcelona in la liga, going on to slam the bundesliga by saying, "the tempo is quite slow, at least compared to the premiership", and it begs the question, did we give florian wirtz enough time to adjust before we started slamming him for being 125 million quid waste of money? i'll let you form your own opinion on that

now, i'm not saying we shouldn't have expectations of a player, but those expectaions have to be reasonable, there will always be a learning curve especially when it comes to the premier league but ladies and gentlemen we have to be reasonable. there was no chance that wirtz was gonna come in and immediately be a goal scoring machine! that rarely happens, we saw it with haaland but haaland is a freak of nature (affectionate)!!!! florian wirtz was always going to do well eventually, and in my opinion he did do well when he first joined liverpool but it was all swept up in the narrative that liverpool was struggling as a whole, between that and wirtz struggling to find a comfortable position in liverpool in that starting eleven really showed in his performance. making a relatively okay performance look even worse than what it actually was

but beyond that, some fans also tend to have a propensity for perferring to look at goal and assist numbers and stats as opposed to watching the actual performances we see on the field, because, yes, unfortunately goals and assists are not everything. this of course, sprouted the '007' and similar nicknames for wirtz which were funny, don't get me wrong. but goals and assists are only half of the performance, we take the easy way out by looking at numbers because they don't lie, but they're only a fraction of truth, easier to compare and contrast and form a solid opinion instead of toeing the line of "lets give him time".

and we have seen him come into his element, winning man of the match four times in a row, getting solid and crucial plays in while being smart about it, he's a much larger force than we give him credit for.

similarly, gyökeres suffers the same opinions from the public, claiming that he should have more goals and assists than he currently does - this i can understand more because i think a lot of the criticism comes from a place of actual constructive discussion as opposed to poking fun at a struggling player. not to say, there haven't been people literally fat shaming him despite him possibly being the buffest dude i've seen in the prem in a hot second, not my fault people don't understand anatomy. again, what goes beyond some people is the fact that gyökeres simply does not get time on the ball, or at least as much time as he should be getting in theory. but again, there's always a multifaceted view to have on these scenarios.

arsenal is not built around gyökeres. why would it be?

arsenal is arguably very bukayo saka centric which makes sense! saka is an academy player that graduated into the senior squad so of course he's the one that gets the team built around him! arguably, the hierarchy of forwards goes:

saka -> ødegaard -> [havertz] -> gyökeres

and again, this makes sense, ødegaard is the captain, he's been there longer than gyökeres, it's who players naturally trust and have faith in to score. it can be argued that gyökeres is essentially a stand in for havertz, not that i feel that personally but i think thats what it seems like to most people, and havertz slowly coming back from injury maybe puts gyökeres in a place of threat which puts way more added pressure onto him !!

again, there was no grace period with gyökeres, lets keep in mind he was part of a team that was built around him as opposed to being in a team that focuses on him personally. arsenal has a much more even attacking and striking force than sporting did previously, and that can be seen in his stats

taken from transfermarkt

if we compare his goal contributions to saka and ødegaard i fear it's evident that he is lacking, but again, comparing stats to stats is almost unfair, it's being ignorant of anything that happens on the field. but as i said, the attacking and striking force of arsenal is far more spaced out than that of most other teams, we have people in midfield like trossard and even as far back as leftback aka calafiori scoring goals and making goal contributions. it's clear that arsenal is a far more free form team than the likes of say chelsea for example

again, i'm not saying we're not allowed to make expectations for players, he was bought to score goals and he hasn't done that and criticism can be warranted in this scenario but it gets to a point where we have to consider team influence as well

this gets especially difficult when we're talking about players who are young, like endrick and estêvão, it's unfair!

a lot of people since 2022 have really put endrick on a pedestal considering how well he performed for brazil, and then being signed with real madrid. but now he often gets labeled as a failure for the sole fact he doesn't get played, he doesn't get minutes, he sits on the bench a good 80% of the time - he's 19 !!!!! he arguably has the career a 19 year old should realistically have, the fact he got edited and compared to the likes of pelé, ronaldinho, and neymar honestly put him in an early grave

taken from google honestly its not super hard to find the comparisons between them

this is a level of expectation that literally no 17-18 year old kid should realistically be put under. and i realise that this is an issue with possibly the entire brazilian national team as a whole, they have a habit of debuting players at an obscenely young age which inevitably makes them burn out faster.

take the prince of brazil, neymar jr, as a prime example of this; he debuted for the senior team at just 18 in 2010, now he's back at brazil playing for santos fc at just 33 years old while being riddled with injuries including awful ACL issues. it's like their careers are fast tracked and it puts an unnecessary pressure on them at a young age.

"whats the difference between them and (insert national team here)?" other countries aren't fighting for the next neymar, first it was raphinha, then it was richarlison, then it was vini jr, then it was endrick, now it's estêvão - it's a never ending brutal cycle of awful expectations that will never be met because there won't be another neymar, or ronaldinho, or pelé - these players are one of a kind, let the next generation be one of a kind too.

but thats the thing; rebranding a youngster as the "next neymar", "next messi", "next ronaldo" is the easy thing to do, we dont need context to call them that. in order for them to make their own name we, as a football community, have to learn and have perspective on who they are, we dont learn because we're too lazy to.

the loudest narrative is the easiest one to follow, it's easy to be swept up in the crowd, the majority yelling something easy to say, but that's not the case with football. we need to have perspective, we have to have an eagerness to learn and debate and argue the easy thing.

just because it's easy doesn't mean it's true, and just because it's not true doesn't mean it can't be argued.