‘I cost Arsenal €30m and I found myself playing with the U23s’ – How William Saliba bounced back from the ‘worst-ever year’ of his life | OneFootball

Arsenal centre-back William Saliba (25) is expected to start France’s World Cup opener against Senegal in East Rutherford on Tuesday night. The 2025-2026 Premier League champion’s entourage has agreed to lift the lid to L’Equipe on Saliba’s journey to the top, despite going through the worst period of his life on the back of his move from formative club Saint-Etienne to Arsenal in 2020.

“95 % of players who would have experienced what he went through would have given up“, according to Fabio Frasconi, who coached Saliba when the latter was barely a teenager at Bondy. When he was 19, Saliba had to deal with the passing of his mother, with whom he was very close. “It was something we rarely talked about, it was so hard for him”, said former Nottingham Forest midfielder Ateef Konaté, one of his childhood friend. 

“With the loss of my mother, nothing was going right and everything was difficult. It was the worst year of my life“, Saliba underlines. Because on the pitch as well, Saliba’s time at Arsenal was off to a rough start. Given that France opted to put a halt to the Ligue 1 season in 2020, due to the COVID outbreak, Saliba arrived in London completely out of fitness. Overweight, the centre-back struggled to match his teammates’ intensity and his sub-par performances raised eyebrows in pre-season with the Gunners.

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta, who didn’t have any say in the Gunners’ purchase of Saliba the year before, told the centre-back that he was not part of his short-term plans for the 2020-2021 Premier League season. “At that moment, everything came flooding back”, remembers Saliba’s agent, Djibril Niang. “It wasn’t just the sporting sanction that was hurting him, but everything else.”

Saliba recalls his mood was truly down for his first season abroad, when he was sent to play with Arsenal’s reserves. The Bondy-born defender was not even registered to play in the Europa League. “With all due respect to anyone, it wasn’t the Arsenal of today. I cost €30m and I found myself playing with the U23s. It was tough, my mood was really low because I knew that, even if I trained well, I wouldn’t play.”

According to his entourage, Saliba never told Arteta that he was mourning the loss of his mother at the time, partly because he didn’t speak English well, but because he didn’t want to be given a chance to play out of pity. In January 2021, Saliba eventually faced the truth: he had to leave on loan. He flourished with OGC Nice, and shines on a weekly basis with Marseille the following season. 

“I think that period was important for him. Will was a child”, according to one of his closest friends. “He didn’t have the maturity for that world. But would he be the player he is today without those six months? I don’t know.”

GFFN | Bastien Cheval