I Considered Giving Up On Football At Some Point – Yaya Sanogo

Ex-Arsenal player, Yaya Sanogo has come out to admit that he considered retiring from football at 27. He recently opened up on the struggles he has battled throughout his career, and fans have been reacting.

According to him, he remembers being told he had a shoulder injury that made him fail a medical, and that reality ended up making other suitors stay away from him, which led to a lot of frustrations during his career.

Sanogo added that doctors eventually told him there was no injury in his shoulder at all, and it was a wrong diagnosis.

His words, “It was at the time of Covid-19, after my three seasons at Toulouse. I spent 14 days in quarantine without being able to meet anyone. Once this period was over, I did the visit. They supposedly detected a problem with my shoulder that required an operation and three months of rehabilitation, according to them. So my contract… It was serious, it was hard. I went to see a shoulder specialist once I got home. They told me that I had nothing at all and that they had put it on the wrong way. That stopped me in my tracks, for the other clubs, I was injured. The worst part of all this was that the press wrote that I had failed the medical. So, the other clubs that were interested believed it and that stopped me completely. I was 27 at the time.

Yes, I considered giving up, we are human after all. I sometimes told myself that it was dead. When I was 16, I was told that the attack of the French team, a few years later, would be [Karim] Benzema and Sanogo. But, I am a believer, I could not stop, I wanted to go to the end of the story. There were times when it was very very hard. At Auxerre, I thought about it but I never gave up. It made me grow on the field and in my life. Those periods of time when I could not play, when I was injured, between us, how many would have stopped?”

WOW.

Arsenal Football Club is an English professional football club based in Holloway, North London. Arsenal compete in the Premier League, the top flight of English football.

The club has won 13 league titles (including one unbeaten title), a record 14 FA Cups, two League Cups, 17 FA Community Shields, the Football League Centenary Trophy, one European Cup Winners’ Cup and one Inter-Cities Fairs Cup. In terms of trophies won, it is the third-most successful club in English football.

After conducting an overhaul in the club’s operating model to coincide with Wenger’s departure, Spaniard Unai Emery was named as the club’s new head coach on 23 May 2018. He became the club’s first ever ‘head coach’ and second manager from outside the United Kingdom.

In Emery’s first season, Arsenal finished fifth in the Premier League and as runner-up in the Europa League. On 29 November 2019, Emery was dismissed as manager and former player and assistant first team coach Freddie Ljungberg was appointed as interim head coach. On 20 December 2019, Arsenal appointed former club captain Mikel Arteta as the new head coach. Arsenal finished the league season in eighth, their lowest finish since 1994–95, but beat Chelsea 2–1 to earn a record-extending 14th FA Cup win. After the season, Arteta’s title was changed from head coach to manager.