The evening of August 28, 2022 and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is at home in Barcelona, playing video games and waiting for news as talks continue about a potential transfer to Chelsea.
Aubameyang is relaxed — content to stay in Spain or help ease Barcelona’s financial worries by returning to England, where he flourished for Arsenal before leaving somewhat acrimoniously.
This is a footballer who started at Milan and also counts Borussia Dortmund among the sides he has represented in a 16-year career featuring more than 300 senior goals and transfer fees totalling around $100million (£81m). The possibility of another move for Aubameyang, wife Alysha and their young children, Curtys and Pierre, is nothing abnormal. Suddenly, however, the relative calm turns into chaos.
“My eldest son came running and said to me, ‘Dad, some guys are in the house’,” says Aubameyang. “I said, ‘Just hide’.
“They came in from outside, where my wife was smoking with my cousin and her boyfriend. They took him (the cousin’s boyfriend) and came into the house. My wife was screaming. They had a gun.”
Aubameyang says he “grabbed a big bottle” and went upstairs to try to confront the intruders.
“At the same time, my sister-in-law was there with our little one,” he continues. “I said to her, too, ‘Just go. Try to hide somewhere’. This is when I saw the guys. There were four or five, I think.
“One had the gun and said to me, ‘Just go down’. I said, ‘No, no, no. Tell me what you want’. We talked and he said, ‘Sit down’. I said, ‘No’. This is when he started to punch me.”
Aubameyang describes a man in gloves containing metal landing multiple blows that broke his jaw. “I wanted to fight but one guy went down and took my kids and sister-in-law,” he says. “At that point, I couldn’t do anything. If you do something wrong, something can happen to them. We went through the house and I gave them what they wanted, so we could be OK.”
Barcelona had only just organised for security staff to begin work that week, yet the delayed arrival of outdoor toilets impacted their start date. The consequences weighed heavily. Stolen jewellery, watches and other expensive items were one thing; the psychological damage was quite another.
“If I was alone, no problem,” Aubameyang insists. “I can handle it, as mentally I’ve been prepared for everything in life, thanks to my parents. But when you have a wife and kids, it’s different.
“After that, the kids told me, ‘Papa, I don’t want to go to school, I’m scared something is going to happen there’. For a year my little one said, ‘I cannot sleep alone’. It was a big struggle. You have it always in the mind.”
Aubameyang and his family soon left Barcelona as he moved to Stamford Bridge days later and the following July he joined French club Marseille, though the trauma remained.
“I was always thinking about this,” he says. “I did so many nights like this: not sleeping at all, just thinking about that s**t. You have some nightmares. I’m a guy who, if I’m not sleeping well, I’m not going to give (a football team) what you expect from me, I’m not going to be at my best… Every time the kids are alone, they are scared.
“I still have that house, but haven’t gone back since. I think I’ll start to rent it because my kids don’t want to go to Barcelona. Their school organised a trip there — they said, ‘No chance I go’.
“I made a mistake not talking to anyone. If I had someone to talk to, a therapist or psychologist, maybe it could have helped. But I didn’t want to do anything. To tell you the truth, I was lost.”
That is why Aubameyang cites “safety” as a crucial reason behind signing with Al Qadsiah in Saudi Arabia last July, a trade which could have been interpreted for the now 35-year-old as a lucrative stop en route to retirement. Aubameyang dismisses such a notion as “bulls**t” and urges people to sample the Saudi Pro League for themselves before formulating judgements.
The Athletic went to see Aubameyang in the Gulf state in late November, watching him train at Al Qadsiah’s multi-sport facility in the eastern coastal city of Khobar and then play the 90 minutes as they beat locals rivals Al Khaleej at their Prince Saud bin Jalawi Stadium 24 hours later.
The following day, we met at a hotel across the border in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, to conduct a wide-ranging interview in which the Gabon international discussed:
- Life in Saudi Arabia, competing in its Pro League, ambitions and criticisms
- His contract “mistake” at Arsenal and Mikel Arteta’s “knife in the back” accusation
- How Barcelona was the “best memory of my career”, despite his confusing exit
- “Disrespectful” treatment and failure to connect during Chelsea “chaos”
- “Crazy” Marseille stint and playing with “anger” after his time in West London
- Taking acting lessons to fulfil “dreams” of becoming a film star post-football.
Given a chance to leave Marseille after only one season, Aubameyang’s favoured destination last summer was always Saudi Arabia, and his family have experienced “no difficulty” settling in.
“People think it is a closed country with hard restrictions,” he says. “That’s the opinion over there (in the West), but when you come here, it’s totally different. The mentality is very open-minded.”
He identifies “room for improvement” in the levels of play and professionalism while admitting that small crowds at some fixtures are “part of the process” and that the Gulf state’s hot weather can harm match tempo.
Al Qadsiah were taken over in June 2023 by Saudi-owned oil giant Aramco and are scheduled to exchange an ageing 20,000-seat ground for a modern 47,000-capacity arena, which is due to open in time for the 2027 Asian Cup and be a 2034 men’s World Cup venue.
Al Qadsiah, in red, play Al Khaleej (The Athletic)
Hosting the sport’s leading event has raised many questions for Saudi Arabia to answer — most notably regarding human rights and specifically the treatment of migrant workers, women and the LGBTQ+ community.
Did Aubameyang contemplate these issues when pondering his decision? “Not at all,” he says. “I’m really into football and, while I’m a player, I will be thinking just about football — that’s it. When I retire, maybe I’ll think about different things. But when I chose to come, I didn’t think about it.”
How does he think LGBTQ+ supporters will react to that reply?
“I can understand how they see life. They can have their opinion, but I also have mine. My choice is only about football, not political situations and everything… I didn’t see anything that shocked me to say it was a mistake coming here.”
“I was sure it wasn’t going to happen. You have until midnight and then the market shuts. It was already 8pm and you have to do a medical and everything. Around 8.30pm, my father said, ‘Let’s go to the hospital’. I was like, ‘Oh my god! Crazy!’. They found a way to get me out of the jail.’”
The prison reference is delivered in jest, but Aubameyang will never forget the drama that accompanied transfer deadline day in February 2022, nor losing the Arsenal captaincy and the weeks spent training by himself before finally joining Barcelona on a free at the end of that winter window.
Amazon’s All Or Nothing series about Arsenal charts the saga and while Aubameyang challenges elements in its portrayal of him — he denies flying to Spain without permission, for example — he does not dispute travelling there before the two clubs had agreed a deal. “I wanted to push it, I just wanted to go,” he says.
He had been banished for his “latest disciplinary breach” in December 2021, according to Arsenal: Aubameyang had returned late after a sanctioned trip to collect his unwell mother from France. For manager Mikel Arteta, it was the final straw.
Aubameyang argues that he fell foul of complex and ever-changing Covid-19 pandemic protocols at the time, which meant he was prohibited from entering the club’s training ground when he did.
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“My mistake,” he concedes. “I should have come back the night before, but I arrived in the morning. I didn’t tell them that I would miss the flight because I was preoccupied with my mum’s stuff (medical examinations).
“I went directly to a team meeting. Everything was normal. After that, he (Arteta) said, ‘Come with me’. This is where he started shouting. He said I could not do this because I was the captain and it was not acceptable.
“He said I gave him a knife in his back; I don’t know why he said that. I was really p**sed off because it was not true and he knew why I flew. He knew the reason and what was happening, he knew I was struggling that year. I was expecting help from him, not killing me like this.”
Might the conflict have been solved by Aubameyang apologising?
“When I’m late, (and) it’s my fault — no problem. I always said sorry,” he says. “But in this case, I’ll never say sorry. For taking my mum from Laval (his hometown in France) to London? No. Even if I came a day late, I would never say sorry. You understand or you don’t. If not, don’t give a day off or tell people they cannot fly.”
Arteta claims to have kept a dossier of Aubameyang’s alleged indiscretions, which centred on punctuality. The player does not contest this but queries why some Arsenal team-mates were treated more leniently for similar offences. He is adamant Arteta could have dealt with it all differently.
Infamously, Aubameyang was late to assemble for the March 2021 north London derby at home against Tottenham and got excluded from the matchday squad — a move that diminished trust between him and Arteta.
Aubameyang (top) watches the north London derby from the stands in March 2021 (Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
“You leave the car at the stadium, then take the bus to the hotel,” says Aubameyang. “I didn’t miss the bus, they were waiting for me. There was a (traffic) accident near my home; maybe I should have set off earlier, but you don’t know what will happen. He was p***ed off as it’s a big game.
“When we got to the hotel, he called me to his room and said I wasn’t going to play. He was strict. The rules are the rules. I felt hurt. I had tears because I wanted to play that game, badly. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. The next day we had a meeting and I stood up in front of everyone to say sorry. He also came to my house to speak, because he didn’t want this to be chaos.
“I said, ‘It’s going to be OK’. But from then it was not the same.”
Aubameyang then contracted malaria on international duty. By the time it was diagnosed and treated, he had faced Liverpool and Europa League opponents Slavia Prague with the debilitating tropical virus in his body. At the same time, Aubameyang continued to navigate the repercussions of his mother suffering a stroke in late 2020.
He was “lost” and “depressed”, he says — a far cry from the euphoria which had greeted the attacker ending doubts over his future by signing a new contract a couple of months previously.
Arsenal were on the road to their FA Cup semi-final with Manchester City in July 2020.
“I was talking on the bus with (fellow striker) Alexandre Lacazette,” says Aubameyang. “Every fan was saying, ‘Sign da ting!’. Laca asked me, ‘What are you going to do?’ I was like, ‘To tell you the truth, I really don’t know’.”
He inspired wins over City and then Chelsea to lift the FA Cup at an empty Wembley during the pandemic. It remains Arteta’s only major trophy for Arsenal.
Aubameyang and Arteta with the FA Cup in August 2020 (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
“If I’m being honest, at that time I wanted to go,” says Aubameyang. “For me, it was time to find a new challenge. I did my time. It was very nice, but I needed to change. It had been four years, I did great and maybe it was time to leave it like this, proper and clean, so people remember me as a good Arsenal player. I felt I needed to go because if I stayed, something would go wrong.”
What altered that notion was a “very refreshing” meeting with Arteta. They discussed the team, players, the need to recruit, staff, methods of working and more. “He convinced me,” Aubameyang adds. “He said, ‘I think you can leave a legacy’. I think it was the first time I heard this word in English.
“He said, ‘If you stay, you can be an icon, like the big names at Arsenal’. I started to change my vision. He and the fans convinced me to stay. But at first, I wanted to leave. This is where it got chaotic, because when you go against your heart, maybe this is where I made my mistake.”
At the point of putting pen to paper, Aubameyang had recently turned 31 and anticipated belonging to Arsenal until hanging up his boots. Scoring 15 goals in all competitions in 2020-2021 signalled he had plenty left in the tank. Yet his personal strife allowed the underlying sentiments to resurface.
“I felt it progressively,” he says. “Slowly, slowly, I was kind of giving up. Sometimes there are things more important than football. Maybe people don’t realise, because they think football is the most important thing. (But) that is not true.”
Time and distance have enabled healing and perspective.
Aubameyang received a “great message” from Arteta after they parted ways and would now gladly engage in a conversation — “You cannot stay with that negativity”. He says he will “always love Arsenal, always love the supporters… even if I went to Chelsea” and hopes to have answered some of their questions with this interview.
(Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
He reckons Arteta’s side are “missing something” as they chase the silverware they “deserve” — namely a “goalscoring machine”. So, who are they missing?
“Me,” he says, tongue in cheek.
In the summer of 2022, Chelsea signed Aubameyang from Barcelona and he agreed a two-year contract, “100 per cent” to be reunited with his former Dortmund manager, Thomas Tuchel.
Aubameyang had cherished his four-month spell at Camp Nou — where his terms should have kept him through to 2025 — and says it provokes “only good memories, the best of my career”. But he “needed” to “feel love again” after Arsenal and prove he was still a “good player and person”.
If Tuchel had not been at Chelsea, there is “no chance” Aubameyang would have left Barcelona, he says. But, within a week of his transfer, the German lost his job. It followed a Champions League defeat at Dinamo Zagreb, a match where Aubameyang — donning a mask to protect his injured face following the robbery at his house — made a miserable debut.
Aubameyang in his protective mask (Slavko Midzor/Pixsell/MB Media/Getty Images)
He “went against doctor’s advice” and explains, “When you arrive somewhere (new), you want to show straight away you’re involved. It was the worst game of my life, but I did it because I had to play.
“I remember that day because I didn’t recognise him (Tuchel). It was not the guy I knew a few years ago. We had a close relationship. He was the only guy who really understood me in Dortmund. At Chelsea, it was like something was wrong. I felt he was not enjoying his time.
“We lost (1-0) and he was p**sed off. Usually, he would go crazy but he came to the dressing room and then left. I was like, ‘This is not the guy I know. Very strange’. The next day, he was sacked.”
Graham Potter was hired away from Brighton and the October brought three goals for Aubameyang in as many outings. But after a home humbling by Arsenal, he barely featured. As Chelsea toiled, he implored Potter to “put me in” but “respected” the Englishman’s honesty about preferring to use Kai Havertz.
Matters got worse the following February, with Aubameyang omitted from the Champions League squad and deemed surplus to requirements. “That is when I started to say, ‘OK, this is very disrespectful’,” he states. “They tried to send me on loan to America. I said: ‘No chance’.
“I felt p***ed off. From that point, I said, ‘The season is done for me already’. I just went to training to maintain fitness; I knew I was not going to play.”
Potter was dismissed in the April and Frank Lampard stepped in temporarily.
“He (Lampard) told me, ‘OK, I need you. I want to know how you feel, if you are ready to play again’,” Aubameyang recalls. “I was like, ‘Yes. I’m waiting for this’.”
“Close to the end of the season, he spoke to me again and said, ‘What are your feelings? I’m sorry, Auba. I can’t really help you’. I understood it’s not coming from him but upstairs.”
Training at Chelsea in April 2023 (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
Aubameyang found himself in the ‘bomb squad’ as the group at Chelsea kept expanding, pushing various renowned figures to the fringes.
“They did a mess,” he says. “It didn’t even look like a football dressing room, it was more like rugby. Hakim Ziyech, Denis Zakaria, Kalidou Koulibaly, Romelu Lukaku… It was good I wasn’t alone. We were laughing every day, so it was OK.”
There is no lingering bitterness, though, and Aubameyang praises Chelsea for how they appear to have regained stability and competitiveness. He feels a “big striker” should be sought to shoulder the goals burden “like Didier Drogba did in the past” and acknowledges he was unable to fit that particular bill.
“I never had that connection,” Aubameyang says. “No connections at all. The fans wanted the Auba they saw with Arsenal. At the time, I was not ready for that and didn’t get the opportunity. I was not ready, as well, because of what happened in Barcelona. It was a chaotic year but it was good for me because I needed a break and, at the same time, they didn’t want to play me.”
He signed a three-year deal with Marseille in July 2023 and arrived in France, where he was born and grew up, with a point to prove.
“I took a picture at a Chelsea game when I was not in the squad,” he says. “I said, ‘We’ll see next season if I’m a fan or player’. I arrived in Marseille with the mentality, ‘You’ll see the real Aubameyang.’”
After just five goals in his first 17 games, Aubameyang’s substitution towards the end of a 0-0 draw against Lille in the November drew anger from the terraces. It flicked a switch. “I was like, ‘I cannot accept that’,” he reflects. “‘Now I’ll change the way I play. I’m going to be more crazy’. I played with anger.”
In the next home match, versus Ajax in the Europa League, Aubameyang registered a hat-trick, and he ended his sole season back in French football with 30 goals in 51 appearances.
“This was the year I showed everybody who I am,” he says.
Marseille’s search for a new permanent coach produced Roberto de Zerbi and despite not gaining an opportunity to perform for the Italian as Saudi loomed, Aubameyang did value the window in which their paths crossed.
He noticed “in the first two training sessions” that De Zerbi was “different”. Aubameyang has operated under Klopp, Wenger and Xavi but views De Zerbi “like Thomas Tuchel and Mikel Arteta” in terms of calibre.
“Very high,” is where Aubameyang forecasts the 45-year-old managing. “He has dedicated his whole life to football. He always wants the best for the team and has proper ideas. Sometimes people aren’t patient but this time Marseille have to be because he can really put them back to the top.”
Now Aubameyang is focused on shining in Saudi Arabia. He spurned interest from higher-profile suitors to choose newly-promoted Al Qadsiah and, under the guidance of sporting director Carlos Anton, coach Michel — who replaced Liverpool legend Robbie Fowler — and ex-Rangers chief executive James Bisgrove, they are flying.
A six-game winning streak secured third spot in the SPL heading into its winter break — below only Benzema’s Al Ittihad and Neymar’s Al Hilal, with Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al Nassr fourth. Aubameyang’s record so far stands at seven goals across 14 appearances in all competitions. “They want to be the best and I can help them grow,” he says.
Aubameyang also has ambitions with Gabon, who have qualified for the Africa Cup of Nations at the end of this year and are in contention to reach their maiden World Cup finals appearance the following summer.
Further down the line, he prefers the thought of club ownership or, perhaps, a sporting director-type position rather than coaching. His motivations, though, transcend football: becoming an actor is one of his “dreams” and he is taking private lessons to master the art.
“Comedy, for sure!” Aubameyang laughs while referring to his choice of genre. “If you see me in a film that’s too serious… nah, you will not believe it. If it’s comedy, yes, you’re going to believe it.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
