After his memorable debut for the German National team against San Marino, where he scored a hat-trick as the Die Mannschaft demolished their opponents by 8 goals to nil, many rued the decision of Arsenal selling the player in the summer to Werder Bremen. After spending a year in the Arsenal youth academy, Gnabry signed his first professional contract with the Gunners in 2012.
His talent was spotted early by Arsene Wenger who included him in the first team in the 2012/13 season as he was involved in the friendlies and made his Arsenal debut in a league cup tie along with his first Premier League and Champions League appearance a few days later. Next season, the attacker made 9 appearances in the Premier League, 14 in all competitions and thereby convincing everybody of his quality. By the end of 2013/14 he was nominated for the Golden Boy award.
Just as the opportunities began to come his way the winger got injured and missed most of the 2014/15 season due to a knee problem which became the turning point of his Arsenal career. While the injury was bad a setback which forced him to travel to America for a surgery resulting in missing an entire season made things far worse.
In competitive football, when a player is out for that long it becomes very hard for him to immediately come back to terms with the first team’s level. It was the reason why the German was loaned to West Brom to get the game time he needed but it turned out to be a disastrous move with manager Tony Pulis giving him a single game to show his talent in the Premier league as a substitute.
Arsenal recalled Gnabry back from loan in January with the player severely lacking first team action but spent the rest of the season building up his fitness with the reserves. The work on his fitness proved crucial when Germany included him in the squad for the Olympic Games in 2016 which Arsene Wenger welcomed.
The winger was brilliant in the Olympics scoring six goals to be the joint top scorer of the competition as he helped his team to reach the final. With his performances in the Olympics, it was expected that the winger will feature heavily for Arsenal this season something which was made clearer with Joel Campbell moving on to Sporting Lisbon on loan.
Unfortunately, Gnabry didn’t extend his contract with the club and decided to move to Werder Bremen where he has since scored four times in the opening nine games for the club. Serge Gnabry is a player of real quality and would have had a good future at Arsenal if he stayed but he decided not to repay the faith shown in him by the club and the manager during the tough times like many others before him.
While the start has been promising only time will tell if the player would end up regretting his move away from the Emirates wasting the chance of developing under the man who continues to do the job for the club impeccably for 20 years now.
