OPINION: Arteta will quickly learn that Ozil is a time-waster at Arsenal

All football managers have egos. It's a necessary part of the make-up. If you don't believe in yourself, who else is going to?

Sometimes, though, it can get in the way and it is to be hoped Mikel Arteta is aware of this as he begins life at Arsenal.

It would be nice to one day be known as the manager who finally figured how to get the best out of Mesut Ozil. Equally, it would be foolish to waste too much time trying.

This is the condundrum facing Arteta at his first meeting with Arsenal's most technically gifted player. For his own sake, I hope the 37-year-old places the ball in the court of the German and leaves it there.

Speaking articulately at the Emirates Stadium on Friday, Arteta perhaps unwittingly reached the very heart of the matter. Players, he said, 'either are or they are not'. What he meant was that they 'either have it or they don't'.

Ozil has always had the skills, the ability to see things that other players cannot, to play passes that others can't imagine. But the rest of the stuff needed to survive and thrive in the Premier League? He has never been near it.

Arsene Wenger's indulgence of the player he signed in 2013 was pitiful and embarrassing. Unai Emery came at the problem from another angle. He tried tough love, dropping Ozil for away games and then freezing him out altogether.

If Emery hoped that would relight some kind of fire in the player, he was wrong. So a pattern has been set and it would be a surprise if Arteta can alter that greatly.

On Friday, he spoke of trying to find out what is wrong with Arsenal's players and of offering them solutions. It was indicative of the humanist, empathetic style of management that works so well for football's top coaches these days and we hope it works.

Arteta will know, however, that when he has these conversations, he must find someone staring back at him prepared to offer something to work with. There must be an innate desire and will.

It is this that has enabled players like Cristiano Ronaldo, David Silva and Eden Hazard to do so well in England.

Forget for a moment, the great skills of these players and concentrate on, for example, the willingness to learn that Roy Keane recognised in Ronaldo when he was only 17 and the strappings that Silva places on his ankles before every game at Manchester City, a legacy of the decade of painful attention from defenders desperate to interrupt his relentless flow.

These things, as much as anything, set the special players apart. Ozil has never had it, never shown any desire to have it.

At Arsenal many players have tired of his rather relaxed attitude to time keeping and training.

Caretaker coach Freddie Ljungberg admitted on Saturday that Ozil would not have been in his squad at Everton had he been fit. Ljungberg has made his own mind up already and it will be surprising if Arteta's thinking eventually runs on a vastly different course.

Arsenal's new coach is right to give everybody a chance from day one onwards. You don't turn your back on a player as gifted as Ozil without giving it a go.

But when Arteta analyses and dissembles all the damning traits, habits and frailties that have been allowed to fester at the Emirates over the last decade, it won't take him long to realise they are all presented in one horrible, hopeless bundle by the bloke wearing number 10.