On the banks of the Bosphorus, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is pointing out his new surroundings. He gestures towards the oldest of the bridges between the European and Asian sides of Istanbul, only to find it has disappeared behind a dark cloud.
“I haven’t seen it like this,” the former Arsenal and Liverpool midfielder says. “Genuinely, this is the worst day I’ve seen since I arrived here. It’s been lovely the whole time.”
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We are at a hotel in the Besiktas district, not far from his new club’s stadium. He recently moved into a house on the Asian side of the city, across the Bosphorus and nearer the Besiktas training ground, but for his first few weeks in Istanbul, he stayed here, trying to get his bearings in one of the world’s most enthralling, intoxicating cities.
“It’s very multicultural,” he says. “Some parts feel very European and don’t feel alien or different at all. And when there’s something that’s different, I find it interesting. I want to learn about it. The chefs at the club have been showing me different foods, traditional Turkish foods, and teaching me different words. I’m enjoying it.”
Football-wise, too, it has been an immersive experience from the moment he arrived in mid-August: straight into the action — just what he needed after a frustrating final season at Liverpool — and the chaotic world of the Turkish Super Lig: from the Besiktas supporters’ rapturous acclaim for his winning goal against Kayserispor to the fury of the same fans as they protested against the club’s management two weeks later.
He had gone 13 years under Nigel Adkins, Arsene Wenger and Jurgen Klopp without experiencing a managerial departure since Southampton sacked Alan Pardew in August 2010. But Senol Gunes, who signed him for Besikas, has already gone. After a brief respite for the international break, Saturday brings the away derby against their fierce rivals, Galatasaray.
Across an afternoon in Istanbul, Oxlade-Chamberlain reflects on life at Besiktas but also discusses…
- The unforgettable highs and spirit-crushing lows of his six years at Liverpool
- His disappointment at how his departure from Anfield was handled, saying there was “silence” over his contract until he was told in mid-May his departure was about to be announced
- His concern in the summer as several Premier League clubs backed away from him, citing concerns about his injury record
- Being “tempted” by interest from Saudi Arabia after initial scepticism but concluding that, for football and family reasons, joining Besiktas was the right move
- The challenges of juggling his career with that of his fiancee, Perrie Edwards, from pop group Little Mix
- His fond memories of his seven years at Arsenal and his feeling that a talented team lacked the collective winning mentality he found at Liverpool
- His sense of unfinished business, having played less football than he hoped over the past couple of seasons, and his determination to drive standards in Istanbul at a “proper, proper football club with ambition and a big fanbase and expectation”.
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In six seasons at Liverpool, Oxlade-Chamberlain won the Champions League, the European Super Cup, the Club World Cup, the Premier League, the Carabao Cup and the FA Cup (although he was left out of the squad for the 2022 final against Chelsea).
He was an unused substitute for the 2019 Champions League final in Madrid, having just returned from a long-term injury, but that felt like the culmination of a journey that had begun the previous season when he played a starring role in the quarter-final victory over Manchester City before suffering the devastation of a ruptured cruciate ligament in the semi-final first leg against Roma — “I was just really happy for the boys. I knew what it meant having lost in Kyiv the year before and how hard that was to take.”
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He made 30 Premier League appearances (17 starts), scoring eight goals in all competitions, in the title-winning season that followed. “It would have been better to lift the trophy with the fans in the stadium, but it still felt amazing,” he says. “I scored against Chelsea the day we lifted the trophy. Even though there were no fans, they did the big firework thing and it still felt special for us as players.”
It rankles with him that they didn’t win another Premier League title or two, pipped at the post by Manchester City in 2019 and 2022. “You’ve got to give them credit for that, but maybe it could have been more,” he says. “That (2018-19) season we got 97 points and there really isn’t much more you can do in the Premier League. That was ridiculous and it was tough to take. But the thing about the team is that whenever we just missed out, we came out swinging. We went to Madrid and won the Champions League. The next year we won the Premier League. We can be really proud as a group.”
An “incredible squad”, he calls it, under a “brilliant” manager. He enthuses not just about those he was closest to, such as Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andrew Robertson, but also Alisson, Virgil van Dijk, Sadio Mane, Mohamed Salah and others. “That group of players was so close,” he says. “Everything we achieved, we achieved together. It was an amazing team to be a part of, absolutely amazing.”
On May 20 this year, after Liverpool drew 1-1 with Aston Villa in their final home game of the season, Oxlade-Chamberlain joined Milner, Roberto Firmino and Naby Keita in being applauded onto the pitch by their team-mates and the supporters — “A lovely send-off,” he says — before their contracts expired a few weeks later.
“And then we all went upstairs and had a little thing with the team and the staff, like a presentation of our best moments and stuff like that. The manager (Jurgen Klopp) did a little speech and then we went up and said a few words individually. That was really nice.”
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But the occasion was bittersweet. He spent the final months of his Liverpool career in the wilderness, out of favour.
He knew he faced an uphill battle to earn a new contract having started just 17 matches in all competitions in 2021-22. Needing to hit the ground running in 2022-23, he suffered a hamstring injury in a pre-season game in Singapore. He had just come back after three months out when the campaign was put on hold for the World Cup in Qatar. By the time the season resumed, his hopes of a new deal seemed remote.
“And then in January, I was getting a bit of momentum, scored at Brentford, then we had a bad result at Brighton — lost 3-0, got battered — and that was it for me,” he says.
He came off the bench at 3-0 down at Wolverhampton Wanderers, 5-2 down on aggregate at Real Madrid, and 3-1 down at Manchester City. “And that was all I got,” he says. “I was out of the squad for the majority of the rest of the season, training with the team, then on matchdays training on my own. I carried on, kept my head down and did everything to make sure I was ready, but ultimately the manager was going in a different direction that was sort of out of my control.”
Oxlade-Chamberlain respects the reasons for that. “Some of the younger players were getting an opportunity to be involved, getting them ready for years to come, which I understand,” he says. “I just guess you want that communicated to you because you start going out of your mind thinking, ‘What more can I do here?’. And it was never really written off that you’re not getting offered a new contract.”
When was that decision communicated?
“It was never said,” he says. “I obviously got the picture (laughs). I got told before they released the statement (three days before that Villa game): ‘Just so you know, we’re putting this out about you, Milly, Bobby and Naby leaving’. And I was like, ‘Oh, OK. Thanks’. But there was nothing official at any point before. It was just… the silence was enough to know what the situation was.”
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He is reminded of Klopp’s effusive praise when he left. “I love him,” the manager said, reeling off his many qualities as a person and a team-mate as well as a footballer.
“Yeah…” Oxlade-Chamberlain says. “I want to be the best person to everyone around me and a good person to have around the lads, the staff, stuff like that. You just… expect certain things to be told — whether it’s good, bad, whatever, that’s how the game goes. The lack of communication was… a bit surprising.
“We (he and Klopp) had a good relationship. There was never any falling-out or anything like that. I understand as a manager it’s not easy to navigate every player’s needs, but when I was playing, I definitely enjoyed him a lot more than when I wasn’t even on the bench (laughs). But that’s how it goes.”
He more than accepts Liverpool’s decision to move him on. He enthuses about Dominik Szoboszlai, excelling in the advanced-midfield role Oxlade-Chamberlain never quite made his own at Anfield. “And Trent is always telling me how good he is, telling me he’s got a better shot than me. Alexis Mac Allister) too, you can see his quality. A different type of No 6 to Fabinho, but it’s the way the team has been evolving the last couple of years with Thiago, Harvey Elliott, Curtis Jones. It’s a different style from when I first went there when it was less possession-based and more chaos. Really good.
“The longer I play the game, the more I realise you’re just an entity in the grand scheme of a business really. There will be many more after us and there were many more before, people who have had great experiences. I had great, great times at Liverpool. I couldn’t say anything bad about my time there. I wouldn’t even say it ended badly. At the end of the day, the club is bigger than any one player. Sometimes there’s bigger fish to fry.”
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Oxlade-Chamberlain had never been out of contract before. Even if he didn’t have to worry about paying the bills, he didn’t like it. “Going away on holiday but not having a club to go back to,” he says. “And that sort of dreaded ongoing period of trying to stay fit but not knowing at what point you need to be really ready for.”
There was plenty of interest in his services: from clubs in the Premier League as well as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. But in several cases, it did not develop into anything more serious. Doubts were expressed about his injury record and his physical capabilities.
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That irked him. “If I was picking up muscle injuries all the time, I would understand it,” he says. “But my whole career I’ve had three hamstring injuries across 13 years. My problem is my injuries have been big injuries, requiring knee surgery. But once I’ve returned from that, it’s been fine. Towards the end of last season, people would say, ‘Oh, you’re injured, are you?’. But I wasn’t. I just wasn’t being selected.”
He and his representatives provided interested clubs with data about his fitness, but he sensed hesitation and, as he prepared to turn 30 in August, he started to worry.
“I remembered when Danny Welbeck, a good friend of mine, left Arsenal,” he says. “For a long time, he didn’t sign anywhere and I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘That’s Welbz. What’s going on? Why is no one snapping him up for free?’.
“And now I was having conversations with clubs and people were questioning if I can play for this team that’s not Liverpool and you stop and think, ‘Hang on a minute. This is different’.”
Given the sums on offer, was he not tempted to follow the exodus of stars — in particular former Liverpool team-mates Henderson, Fabinho, Georginio Wijnaldum, Mane and Firmino — to the Saudi Pro League?
“I was tempted,” he says. “This isn’t a big part of it, but… it didn’t seem too realistic at the start. Over the transfer window, the whole shape of it changed as more boys went there and it became more appealing with how many lads were going to be there and how that’s going to improve the league. So for sure, I wasn’t like, ‘No I would never do that’. I respect the boys who have gone there, for whatever reasons. From what I’ve seen, the league looks quite good.”
It came down to two factors.
One was geography; Istanbul is a three-and-a-half-hour flight from London, whereas Riyadh is another three hours on top of that. If, for example, he had joined Henderson and Wijnaldum at Al Ettifaq, based in Dammam, that would have been at least nine hours with a connecting flight — “six hours to Riyadh and then change (flight) and, if that’s my family visiting, that becomes a different experience”.
The other factor was football. He was just about to turn 30 — younger than Henderson, Wijnaldum, Mane and Firmino — and, after his Liverpool career fizzled out somewhat, he wanted to push himself and prove himself in a Besiktas team that would be playing in the Europa Conference League and, he hopes, challenging for the Super Lig title.
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“I spoke to the manager (Gunes), spoke about positions and the main decision for me was about just getting back to playing football as quickly as possible,” he says. “It’s a big club, it’s not too far from my family — they’re back and forth a lot — and the whole thing made sense for me to come here. The team finished third last season and maybe people see us as underdogs, but I like that. I like that challenge, coming here with guys like Eric Bailly and Ante Rebic and pushing to try to win the league.
“You’ve got to go somewhere where you’re wanted, where they really want you to come in and play. And I’ve always felt I’d like to try a different culture and play in a different league.”
In his first week in Istanbul, having taken 45 minutes in the city’s notorious traffic to reach a restaurant barely a mile away, Oxlade-Chamberlain and a friend decided to try something different.
“We thought it would be a good idea to try to take a scooter back,” he says. “And we got about 200 metres to a busy strip of bars and I started getting mobbed, so we bailed on that and got a cab back.”
It sounds rather different to Henderson’s experience in Dammam, where he says he gets recognised “a bit”. Indeed, there is an obvious contrast to be drawn between Henderson’s move to Al Ettifaq (average league attendance this season, 7,021) and Oxlade-Chamberlain’s experience move to Besiktas (average attendance, 27,276). It isn’t just about numbers. If the Al Ettifaq experience appears rather soulless, Istanbul looks like the other end of the spectrum.
Oxlade-Chamberlain had tasted it as an Arsenal player, visiting Besiktas and Galatasaray. “And the Besiktas game (a Champions League qualification play-off in 2014) we drew 0-0 here and it was a really tough game. It was actually at the (Ataturk) Olympic Stadium, but I remember walking out and there was this sea of black-and-white flags on the far side. The whole atmosphere at that game was really difficult as an away player. But when you’re on the home side, it’s a great place to be.”
In terms of passion and intensity for football, Turkey is almost in a league of its own. “It’s very emotional, the fanbase and how much it means to the people,” he says. “It’s their life, their passion and, yeah, obviously it can be volatile because the big teams are expected to win most of their games without fail. From what I’ve seen in the first few weeks, when you win and you’re doing well, there’s no better place. If you’re underperforming, you know about it.
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“That’s always the case at the top level, but it’s slightly different to England in the way the fans are connected to the club — and even the structure of the club, with the elections for the president. They have a big voice out here. If you’re doing well and doing what you need to be doing, they’re so supportive.”
Besiktas lie fourth after eight rounds in the Super Lig, but they are already eight points adrift of Fenerbahce and six points behind Galatasaray. At any one time in the Turkish football soap opera, one of Istanbul’s ‘Big Three’ clubs is portrayed as being in crisis or on the verge of it. Having dropped a few careless points in the Super Lig and started slowly in the Conference League, Besiktas are feeling the heat going into Saturday’s derby.
The sudden departure of Gunes, the day after a 3-2 home defeat by Lugano in the Conference League, shocked Oxlade-Chamberlain. “It wasn’t nice to see it happen because he brought me here and I wanted to be able to repay that a bit more,” he says. “I had it in my first season at Southampton with Alan Pardew, but I was sort of dipping in between the youth team and the first team at that time. I was only just 17. And then I had Nigel Adkins at Southampton, then Arsene (Wenger at Arsenal), then Jurgen, so yeah, that’s my first real experience of how it goes sometimes in football.
“But I think we’ll get there. I think the new manager (Burak Yilmaz), who was the assistant, is going to do a good job of that. He’s got a lot of respect from the players. Hopefully, we can build on that.”
Over the past few weeks, Oxlade-Chamberlain has, like many of us, watched the David Beckham documentary on Netflix. “I thought it was amazing,” he says. “It was a big eye-opener for me actually. Even as a footballer, knowing how things can be, I didn’t realise how much Beckham had gone through. Even Perrie watched it. She loves Posh Spice (Victoria Beckham).”
At times, Oxlade-Chamberlain and Edwards, a high-profile England footballer and a member of a globally successful girl band, have been described in tabloid reports as “the new Beckhams”.
“I think they were a bit of a bigger deal than we are,” he laughs.
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True. But Little Mix have sold more than 60million records worldwide, which makes them one of the most successful girl bands of all time (behind the Spice Girls and The Supremes). Edwards has 19.2 million Instagram followers, which, as well as being more than her fiance’s 5.2 million, is more than all but a handful of Premier League players.
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“People recognise her and know who she is,” he says of her visits to Turkey. “It’s not like when we’re back home or in France or Italy or other countries, but she’s definitely known out here.”
Edwards and their two-year-old son, Axel, have flown back and forth to Istanbul to stay with Oxlade-Chamberlain. They all took a trip to the Turkish Riviera last week when he was given a couple of days off during the international break.
He has found the distance from family the hardest aspect of playing abroad — far more than the language barrier or the sense of unfamiliarity. “But even when I was at Liverpool they would often come up for a week and go back down for two weeks because Perrie has to work in London a lot of the time,” he says.
That is one of the aspects of the Beckham documentary that resonated with the couple. “There were elements I could relate to,” he says. “Perrie could relate to a lot of it, too, travelling back and forth and recording while looking after our little boy.
“He talks a lot now and he’s a bit more switched on at two-and-a-bit, so he’s starting to question where I am and what I’m doing, but he’s slowly understanding.
“But these are the sacrifices you have to make for your future and your family’s future. They understood this (Besiktas) was the best opportunity to tick all the boxes that I need to tick and come and play some football. They came here last week and it was like a little holiday for us. We’re making it work.”
Oxlade-Chamberlain looks back on his six years at Liverpool like a rollercoaster ride, hurtling forward at breakneck speed, enjoying exhilarating highs as part of a highly successful team… but interspersed with sickening jolts and dispiriting lows when injury or, latterly, loss of favour left him on the sidelines.
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His six years at Arsenal were a different matter. More carefree, less intense. “I genuinely don’t have a bad memory of the place,” he says. “Maybe because I was young and free and not as conscious of everything going on around me. Maybe as you get older, you become more in tune with stuff that you get the hump about.”
He loved playing for Wenger. “Even when things weren’t great, he was like a father figure, a mentor to everyone,” he says. “Even when I left there, he was so supportive to the end and very adamant he wanted me to stay. I was very comfortable there. I loved it.”
The word “comfortable” seems apposite. Although Arsenal had just won the FA Cup for the third time in four seasons when Oxlade-Chamberlain left in the summer of 2017, they didn’t have quite the same sense of purpose, belief and momentum he found upon joining Liverpool — a move that, despite his respect and affection for Arsenal, he never had cause to regret.
“At Arsenal, we always went into those big games thinking, ‘This is going to be really tough’,” he says. “That was the biggest difference at Liverpool, where, even in the first season (2017-18) when we were a bit of an unknown entity, there was this unbelievable complete and utter focus where there was nothing else happening but us winning the game. I don’t know why, but at Liverpool, the big games, we just knew we were going to win.
“That’s maybe what we were missing at Arsenal. We won FA Cups, but we probably never achieved what we should have done. We had unbelievable quality. Football-wise we had everything we needed to do the business. We were just missing…”
Belief? Toughness? Ruthlessness? “I don’t know. Maybe it was a bit of that,” he says. “I just think back to some of the big games. Getting battered by Liverpool when we were top of the league and we were 4-0 down in 20 minutes (in 2014). Losing 8-2 at Old Trafford (on his debut in 2011), games against Chelsea and Manchester City. Too many big games where we couldn’t get over the line.
“The year Leicester won (the Premier League title in 2015-16) was the most disappointing. We were top in January and the other so-called big teams weren’t doing well that year. But we dropped the ball in games we should have won.”
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He contrasts the two managers who have been so fundamental to his career: Wenger a sage-like figure (“the way he spoke to you and the way he spoke about football”) and Klopp more like a human whirlwind (“that fear factor, that real ‘COME ON!’ thing, amazing at motivating and getting every inch of effort and belief out of everyone”). He is grateful to have played for those two great managers at two great clubs: two very different experiences he feels blessed to have lived through.
More than 13 years have passed since Oxlade-Chamberlain made his debut for Southampton as a 16-year-old. By the time he moved to Arsenal in a projected £15million deal barely a year later, he was arguably the most coveted teenager in English football. He was still only 18 when he started England’s opening game against France at Euro 2012.
“It goes quick,” he says. “And in some aspects, I don’t feel any older than I did at Arsenal. I struggle to think of myself as 30. I’ve always thought you don’t retire before you’re 35, but I guess I’m into the business end of it now where you’ve got a lot more perspective on everything and you have a lot more reality thrown at you than when you’re 21.”
He wrestles with the question of whether he feels fulfilled, given the potential he showed as a teenager.
He feels he spent too long as a round peg in a square hole at Arsenal, playing on the wing when he felt he wanted to evolve into a thrusting central midfielder. And then after getting that opportunity at Liverpool, he was enjoying arguably the best form of his career when that anterior cruciate knee ligament injury struck at the worst possible time in that Champions League semi-final. At that point, Klopp recalls feeling, “I had no idea how to replace him, honestly. Ox was that good.”
“Everyone’s got a different journey and a different path,” Oxlade-Chamberlain says, appraising his career as a whole. “There have been times in my career when I’ve been flying and it feels effortless, like absolutely effortless, and I could run miles and miles. And then there’s other times like I had last year where you’re running your nuts off, you’re trying your best and you’re looking and thinking, ‘This isn’t making sense to me at times’. People can underestimate how hard it is to do it consistently year after year — and that’s before you take injuries into account.”
He is proud of everything he has achieved, the trophies he has won and the heights he has scaled at various stages with Arsenal and Liverpool, but there is lost playing time that he wants to make up. He suggests the frustrations of the past year or two have strengthened his desire to achieve more, rather than quelled it.
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He wants to play regularly — and to prove he can play regularly — in a team challenging for honours in a competitive league. After six years at Liverpool, he wonders how it would feel had he gone “from a team like that to a smaller club where, all of a sudden, for the first time, you’re not looking to win the league and some of your team-mates are alright with losing a certain game where you’re not expected to win”.
There will be none of that at Besiktas. If anything, it is the opposite situation. But he likes that. “I’m at a proper, proper football club with ambition and a big fanbase and expectation,” he says. “That need to win and that need to perform is definitely still there.
“At this point, the most important thing is minutes and football because I’ve spent a few too many years not playing, even when I felt ready and capable and good to go. There was obviously a bit of apprehension coming out here because it’s new and it’s different for my family, but football is still so important.
“Whatever your career path is, it’s about what keeps you motivated. For some people, it could be money. For others, it’s winning. Others might just want to score goals. Whatever it is, you want those needs to be met. That’s what gives you the will to keep going.”
So what keeps Oxlade-Chamberlain going? “I just want to play,” he says. “I need to play, to take this opportunity and see what I can still achieve while my legs are still moving.”
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(Top photo: Oliver Kay/The Athletic; design: Sam Richardson)
