Sunderland. Arsenal. Xhaka. ‘It was the worst day of my life. It was the best day of my life’ – The Athletic

Just after nine o’clock on Monday night, Granit Xhaka scored his first Sunderland goal and celebrated with a knee-slide into the corner at a raucous Stadium of Light rejoicing in the moment with its new captain. Here was another flashbulb entry in the professional career of the 33-year-old in the No 34 Sunderland shirt.

Just after nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, Xhaka was at the club’s training ground talking about it. His equaliser against Everton lifted Sunderland to fourth in the Premier League.

In both situations, Xhaka arrived right on time — punctuality is one of his things.

Newly promoted, Sunderland’s 18 points from 10 games have shocked everyone. And on Saturday, they host the leaders, Arsenal.

Xhaka’s association with Sunderland is new and growing; his relationship with Arsenal is long-established, if tangled. Seven fluctuating seasons with the Gunners, a rise and fall and rise again — Xhaka will be central to the action on the pitch and to everything around it.

“I mean, everyone knows Arsenal is in my heart,” he says. “To be in the football club for seven years is special.”

Granit Xhaka knee slides his way towards the corner flag after scoring against Everton (Owen Humphreys/PA Images via Getty Images)

Xhaka was sitting downstairs at the Academy of Light opposite the players’ sliding glass-door entrance. It turned out to be an appropriate setting because, while he did not exactly ignore the significance of his shot 12 hours earlier — “It’s always special to score the first goal for a new club” — he adds with a laugh, “I don’t think Sunderland brought me here to score every game.”

Instead when nominating a favourite moment in his four months on Wearside, Xhaka nods towards the door where his colleagues are clicking in quietly in ones and twos. “It was the first day I came here, for sure — the first time I walked through this door. It was the feeling here.

“I believe in first steps and making your first steps into the dressing room, you need to have a positive feeling. I felt it. The first steps are important.

“You have to feel like you’re at home. This is our place, we’re here from nine until three most days and if you don’t feel it when you come inside this place, it’s not so good. But I didn’t have that, I felt positive. There were not a lot of people here; not a lot of players, but the people I met on the first day were very positive, exactly what I was looking for.

“After that, you are building day by day to get the feeling and after 10 games, if someone told us we’d be here with 18 points, they would laugh. But we knew what the club is building, what it’s looking for. Where we are, it is deserved.”

As he says, first impressions matter to Xhaka. He speaks of being 17 at Basel in his native Switzerland and, wide-eyed, training with the first team; and he speaks of Mikel Arteta and how, on Arteta’s first day as Arsenal manager in December 2019, the Basque set the tone with what, almost six years on, will be viewed as classic Arteta behaviour.

Mikel Arteta relays instructions to Xhaka and Mohamed Elneny in May 2023 (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

“I will never forget the first day Mikel came in,” Xhaka says. “At the training ground, we had a big room and there were some chairs in there, but the chairs were everywhere — chaos.

“He took all the people who were working in the building into this room and said: ‘Guys, from the outside, you look like this. Chaos’. So everyone takes a chair and puts it in the right place and he says: ‘I want you to be like this every day’.

“You think ‘wow’, he’s started already with these standards — the first day. After that, he was building our mentality, standards in training, pre-training, activation, recovery. He brought people in who did a great job. It was unbelievable to work with him because he saw football in a different way.”

Xhaka remains in close contact with Arteta, a figure he credits with career- and life-changing influence. Xhaka played 297 times for Arsenal and was part of many milestone matches across his seven years at the club. Signed by Arsene Wenger in 2016, aged 23, the Swiss played in Wenger’s last game, Unai Emery’s first, Arteta’s first, two FA Cup finals (both won) and one Europa League final (lost).

Yet to some Arsenal fans and other neutral observers, Xhaka’s Arsenal years are distilled into a blur of red and yellow cards — actually, after two reds in 2016-17, the next was not until 2020. And then there was the day in October 2019 when he was substituted by Emery to a cacophony of boos from the home support during a wasteful 2-2 home draw against Crystal Palace.

Xhaka cupped his ear as the crowd roared its disapproval at his demeanour, took off his armband, then his shirt, as he was replaced by an 18-year-old Bukayo Saka, and walked straight down the tunnel.

Xhaka rips off his shirt after being substituted by Emery (left) (Mark Leech/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

That might have been that for Xhaka at Arsenal, and in his head it was.

He had been Arsenal captain for just four weeks — the decision, after a player vote, was made earlier but the announcement came on Xhaka’s 27th birthday. Now Emery removed that symbol of authority. The noise around Xhaka was at, well, fever pitch. He missed the next five games, none of which were won.

Emery re-selected Xhaka at the end of November for a home game against Eintracht Frankfurt in the Europa League. Arsenal lost again. The next day, Emery was dismissed.

Xhaka still had an exit plan for the January 2020 transfer window but through a door at Arsenal’s London Colney base came Arteta. Frank but encouraging discussions followed. Xhaka explains what happened next.

“After this misunderstanding…,” he says. “I call it a misunderstanding between myself and the fans.”

Surely it was bigger than that?

“It was bigger than that, absolutely, for sure. I don’t need to lie about it; everyone knows the story. I still don’t know what exactly happened this day and why, let’s say that.

“When Mikel came, he had a very open conversation with myself. My luggage was already done (packed). I was ready to leave. I already had a contract on the table from another football club.

“Mikel had two conversations with me and he convinced me to stay, to give me another chance. He wanted to show me that I am in the right place. From this day, I just had the feeling that every word he told me in this first conversation, everything was exactly like he said.

“That’s why I say that in 2019, when Mikel came, he changed me completely — as a human being, on the pitch, outside the pitch.”

That’s quite a statement, a big thing?

“It’s a big, big thing; 2019, it’s nearly seven years now, I was 26, 27. Maybe at 26, 27, you have some people who are more mature, maybe I wasn’t — not every day, let’s say that.

“I didn’t have doubts about myself, about the quality, about how professional I needed to be — because I was — but there were these little mistakes, yellow cards, red cards. Silly red cards, where you don’t need to… but Mikel, he changed it.

“He changed a lot of things, the people coming in speaking, I changed some of my people as well. My family helped, of course. Alone, it is difficult to do that.

Xhaka is consoled by team-mate Olivier Giroud after being sent off against Burnley in 2017 (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

“I knew when I signed in 2016, I was prepared. I was very young but I’d had the chance to go to Arsenal one year before. I had a call with Arsene Wenger in 2015 but I said to him that I was not ready. I’m very honest with myself, nobody needs to criticise me, I criticise myself — very hard. I wasn’t ready in 2015 to go to Arsenal; I felt I needed another year.

“I was prepared, I was prepared for ups and downs, for the UK media, who are harder than in Germany — my ex-agent had UK experience. I was prepared for everything but I wasn’t prepared for 2019 and 60,000 people to be against me. For this, I was not prepared. It was the worst day of my life, in football, but it was also the best day of my life.

“From this moment I took many positives, I saw many things that were not real, even friends and people around me, sometimes the fans — of course when you live in London you have a lot of tourists. I don’t think that everyone there was a proper Arsenal fan. Small things like this, but for me it was still learning and I learned from it.”

There is an alternative scenario, where Arteta does not have these conversations, Xhaka leaves north London amid disdain, fades away, does not join Bayer Leverkusen, does not win the club’s first-ever Bundesliga title, plus the German Cup, where he scores the only goal in the final. And does not join Sunderland as a player with 141 Switzerland caps and voted in the 2024 Ballon d’Or top 20.

The glass door opposite slides open again as he says: “Sometimes you don’t come back.

“You get punished by them, then by yourself and you end up somewhere else. It could have gone another way, but instead of going down, my way went up — with the help of my family, the club, Mikel, team-mates.

“Alone? As I said before, no chance.”

Xhaka celebrates winning the Bundesliga with Bayer Leverkusen in 2024 (Mika Volkmann/Getty Images)

Time and events have distanced Xhaka from this and it is perhaps telling that if there is a tinge of regret in his voice, it comes when season 2022-23, his last at Arsenal, arises. The team accumulated 84 points and, with nine games left, had an eight-point lead over Manchester City. “And we missed winning the league,” he says.

“But every year Mikel was doing new things, every year he brings something. And if you look at them in these first 10 games this season, they look very stable with and without the ball. I’m not surprised, I know how they work.”

Xhaka has not faced Arsenal competitively since his 2023 departure and his overall assessment of his years there is: “I’m very happy to have had the chance to win trophies with this football club. It was up and down, not so easy the first couple of years. Different coaches — after 22 years Arsene Wenger left and a new philosophy came with Unai Emery, who did a great job, got to a Europa League final.

“Saturday will be special, for sure, because I am now on the opposite side, against them for the first time. Let’s see what happens.”

When Arsenal line up for their first visit to the Stadium of Light since 2016, they will be met by captain Xhaka. Leadership, so often doubted at Arsenal, has become him at Sunderland, though he points out that duty and trust were given to him at an early age.

“I was a captain in my childhood,” Xhaka says. “When I was four, I was given the keys by my parents.

“I was four! My second little one now is four and I can’t imagine giving her the house key. I was already taking a lot of responsibility.

“But I did not have an easy youth career. I was never the guy being looked at to be a professional footballer. In my generation, there were always players in front of me, who were further on physically than me. I was very skinny, very small. But then I took a big jump when I was about 16 and winning the under-17 World Cup with Switzerland (2009), that was the open door for me. I got the chance in the first team in Basel. And after that, step by step.”

A young Xhaka playing for Basel against SV Weil am Rhein in July 2010 (Patrick Straub/Bongarts/Getty Images)

Along the way, Xhaka has encountered many captains of varying stripes and Arsenal fans will be surprised to hear the name of the one he rates most highly. “I had the privilege to play under a lot of good captains but, if can say one, it is Stephan Lichtsteiner.

“He had eight years at Juventus, won everything. He was my captain with Switzerland, but I was lucky he came to Arsenal for one year at 35. I saw how hard he worked day by day. I was thinking, ‘I’m not surprised this guy is so fit he can play for Arsenal at 35’. And he’s a leader, human being, professional, all these things. He was just en pointe.”

At Sunderland, Xhaka has been referred to by head coach Regis Le Bris and assorted players as a “second coach” and “coach on the pitch”. He is doing his coaching badges via the English PFA and already has his ‘B’ and ‘A’ Licences. “I am waiting on my UEFA Pro (Licence), but I can’t do it while I am still active as a player,” he says.

“But I don’t want to be the ‘second coach’ or something. I’m still a player. Coaches always tell you to stay on the pitch as long as you can because afterwards it’s different. But of course I try to help the team with my experience on a daily basis.”

That saw Xhaka turn up with other first-team players at Sunderland’s Under-21 game against Anderlecht last week, although we should not read too much into it, he says.

“I was there because I’m interested in watching different types of leagues and our youth, of course. It’s always interesting to see how they’re building themselves. But I was there for fun, not for some big reason. I have another part of my life, raising a family, but to have the capacity to go to watch games, I love it.”

Xhaka issues instructions to Sunderland team-mate and ex-Arsenal youth player Dan Ballard (Michael Driver/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Xhaka’s enthusiasm for Sunderland is visible, and measurable via metrics showing him top or near top for running, forward passes, interceptions and so on. The intangible is presence.

On the morning he assumed the armband at Sunderland, Xhaka told The Athletic, “this word ‘Championship’ is not in the dressing room”. It seems the room listened. Sunderland have their chairs in order. They are fourth and “top-10 finish” has entered the vocabulary of owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, five years younger than Xhaka.

He is not saying this. “After 38 games, let’s see where we are,” says Xhaka. “After 10 games, nobody went down and nobody won the league. If you lose the other 28 games, forget about the 10 games so far.”

Sir Alex Ferguson once said of his captains, “I only ever wanted a leader, rather than someone who might look good on top of a cake”, and Xhaka agrees. “For me, to be a leader is just to be real, not fake, not to try to show to someone that you are the captain, to be yourself. It’s how you behave in the dressing room, on the pitch, everywhere. The others, the coach, everyone else will decide if you’re a captain or not.”

Arsenal’s Premier League title challenge is real. Sunderland’s survival optimism is real. Granit Xhaka’s impact is real.