‘I wanted to leave Arsenal after just three months – I begged my agent to help me move’

Willian has enjoyed several Premier League stints across the years, most notably swapping Chelsea for Arsenal in a controversial transfer he quickly came to regret

Willian hated playing for Arsenal so much that he begged his agent to leave just three months into his contract. The Brazilian winger played for both the Gunners and Fulham, who will face off against one another on Saturday evening – and it’s not hard to decipher who he will be supporting.

Willian first spent seven years with Chelsea, making 339 appearances and scoring 63 goals alongside 58 assists for the club. He then swapped west London for the north and put pen to paper on a three-year contract with Arsenal.

While he was initially excited about the prospect of working with Mikel Arteta at the Emirates Stadium, things quickly soured and he planned to leave as soon as possible.

Speaking to Rio Ferdinand on his YouTube channel in 2021, Willian said: “I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t happy. That’s why I didn’t perform. I don’t want to go into the details.

“When I arrived there I was happy, from the beginning I was motivated, I wanted to do well – new club, new mates, new project.

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“But after three months, I said to my agent, ‘Please, I want to go.’ I don’t want to speak bad about the club, because it is a big club. Arsenal has a big history.

“In football, big players played there before as well. But it didn’t work, it didn’t work. It was, of course, the most difficult time of my career.”

Willian walked away from a £240,000-a-week contract with the Gunners, tearing it up just one year into a three-year deal. He left behind around £20.5million in order to find happiness elsewhere.

Reflecting on the cost of this decision, he added: “It was big money that I gave up. But sometimes money is not the most important thing in life. I think you need to be happy, get pleasure every day waking up in the morning to go to train. I wasn’t having that.

“So I said to myself, with my family, I cannot stay here, I am not happy here. I have to leave, find a way out, leave the club, because if I stay I am going to stay the same. For me, it’s unfair to stay in a place that you don’t want to stay just because of the money. For me, it was that.”

Originally, Willian had wanted to remain at Stamford Bridge, but he wasn’t happy with the deal offered at the time. He said: “It was difficult to decide, because I wanted to stay at Chelsea.

“But I wanted a three-year contract and Chelsea say, ‘No we want to give you two years.’ So it was like this: they say two, I say three, they say two, I say three.

“At the end of the season, I decided to join Arsenal and also because before we had conversations with Edu and Mikel [Arteta] as well. They showed me a good project, they showed me a lot of good stuff that they want to do. It was because of that.

“I say well, I want three years, Arsenal wants to give me three years, I want to stay in England, I want to stay in London, my family is happy in London, maybe it is a good opportunity to go there and continue what I am doing.”

Willian returned to his native Brazil with Corinthians after his nightmare year at Arsenal and then went on to have two separate stints with Fulham, and is now back plying his trade in his home country at Gremio at the age of 37.

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