Sead Kolasinac appears set to leave Arsenal for good this summer, with the Gunners reportedly looking to sell the left-back.
Kolasinac rejoined first club Schalke on loan in January – and, unusually for a loanee, was made captain – but won’t be joining them on a permanent basis, with the German outfit ruling themselves out of a move following their relegation from the Bundesliga.
“In view of the current budget and squad structure – all the known and publicly discussed challenges – there was no alternative,” said Schalke’s Director of Sport and Communication, Peter Knabel.
According to football.london, Arsenal will still look to offload Kolasinac this window, with Napoli rumoured as a potential destination.
You could be forgiven for forgetting that Kolasinac was even still an Arsenal player. After all, the 27-year-old last’s Premier League appearance – his only one in 2020/21 – came back in September in the Gunners’ first home game of the season, a 2-1 win over West Ham – and such was the unprecedently chaotic nature of this most intense of campaigns, it doesn’t take much for once familiar faces to slip the mind.
With Kieran Tierney and Bukayo Saka both in such fine form and firmly ahead of him in the pecking order, Kolasinac can pretty much say goodbye to any chance of a future with the club for whom he’s made 113 appearances since signing from Schalke four years ago.
Still, assuming he does move on, the Bosnia-Herzegovina international will no doubt look back on his time at Arsenal with fondness, having won the FA Cup last year and played in the Europa League final in 2019 (ok, they got battered by Chelsea in Baku, but it was still the first European final of his career, so come on).
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