Goodbye Abou Diaby

Arsenal released midfielder Abou Diaby today, ending his nine year career at the club. If you're a casual soccer fan, or even a casual Arsenal fan, you might have not even known or remembered that Diaby was still on the team. This is due to him having one of the most prolific injury records in world sports. The Daily Mail claims Diaby was injured 42 times during his nine years at Arsenal. Transfermarkt, a crowd-sourced player value platform, recorded a more reasonable figure of 19 injuries over that time. Either way, the dude has seen some shit.

It's easy to forget that Diaby was once one of Arsenal's most promising players. During the 2009/10 season, Diaby formed a midfield core with Alex Song and Cesc Fabregas, the latter of which had one of the best midfield seasons in EPL history that year. Diaby didn't just play a lot that year—the fifth-most minutes of any Arsenal player that year in league play—but he played very well, too. According to WhoScored.com, Diaby was the third-highest rated player on the team, behind only Fabregas and Robin van Persie.

Hindsight is 20/20 etc. etc., but of all the players mentioned in that last paragraph, Diaby was the one player Arsenal should have sold, rather than the only one they kept. After that season, the injury plague set in for good. In the following five years, Diaby started fewer league games combined than in the 2009/10 season alone (13, 0, 10, 0, and 0, respectively). Diaby is now 29 years old and has played only a handful of competitive matches in the last three years.

Diaby's last five years read like a Greek tragedy: a man is betrayed by the very muscles he relies on for physical excellence. These muscles took him to the precipice of international recognition before quitting on him. It's easy to make fun of Diaby's injury history but, like nearly all jokes, it's less fun if you think about it happening to you. I can hardly imagine a more trying set of circumstances for a professional athlete than being so close to greatness before your body quits on you.

Given all this, his release hardly comes as a surprise. Arsenal has a dearth of better central midfield options, as evidenced by his one appearance in a League Cup match despite being relatively healthy last season. Diaby's career is not necessarily over; he's 29 years old, which is not young, but he's not dead, either. Some club is going to give him a look. Perhaps it will be a brief one as they realize he has been stitched together more times than a treasured childhood toy, or maybe he will find a new life somewhere else. Here's to hoping we see Abou Diaby again soon, because nobody deserves the last five years he's had.