Nicolas Pepe has described his time at Arsenal as a “kind of trauma” and revealed he considered quitting football.
The winger joined the Gunners in 2019 from Lille for a then club-record fee of €80million (£72m), but he struggled to deliver.
Pepe was loaned to Nice for the 2022-23 season, taking a pay-cut to do so, but left Arsenal by mutual consent with a year to go on his contract 12 months later.
The 29-year-old joined Turkish side Trabzonspor, but he is now once again a free agent after his contract expired there and now for the first time he has opened up on how his move to Arsenal impacted him.
“At Arsenal, I had suffered a kind of trauma, as if my passion had been taken away from me, I had a distaste for football,” Pepe told L’Equipe.
“By no longer playing, I wondered why I was doing this job. I doubted to the point that I thought about stopping everything.
“I wondered how they could have attacked me so much. People went so far as to call me the biggest flop in the history of the Premier League!
“I didn’t ask for €80m to be spent on me. At this amount, people don’t care where you come from, they want you to perform directly.
“There aren’t many players who immediately score 25 goals per season, and I’m not even a No9. I wasn’t going to play in the Premier League like that. But that’s what earned me this flood of criticism.
“It was almost harassment. I don’t look at social media a lot, but if my brother relayed to me “they said that about you”, unconsciously, it touched me.
“It also came from the media or certain members of the club. They don't realise that it can have an impact on the mind, on the family and that has repercussions on performance. The only people who have always supported me are Arsenal fans.”
