With more than 700,000 followers, Shkodran Mustafi is one of our most popular players on Twitter.
Our centre back also has more than one million fans following him on Instagram and while he acknowledges that social media can be used as a tool for good, there have been some times when the 27-year-old would “try to block it out”.
“Social media is difficult to handle when things are going well and then when things are not working out it’s even tougher,” Mustafi told Arsenal Player.
“When things are going well, it’s easy to read those comments and like what you read. It gives you confidence but you have to be careful not to get carried away because you still have to stay professional.
“Then when things aren’t going well, obviously you don’t like the stuff you read. You don’t agree with a lot of comments, so it makes it difficult. It’s so much easier when things are going well because when you’re reading comments you don’t like, you have to go out and play and you’ve got those comments in your head.
“I managed to try to block it out a little bit. I was not that active on social media and wasn’t reading comments, I wasn’t too concerned about social media, I just wanted to go back on the pitch and give everything because I knew that in this moment I was not playing the football I know I could play.
“It gets a little bit frustrating to read those comments but at the end of the day, you have to be professional and I tried to be as professional as I can. Sometimes you read comments and you really disagree, and you want to say something but then you just leave it because you want to stay professional.
“The next day you’ve got training so you’ve just got to take all that energy and just use it on training and trying to improve yourself, rather than just on social media.”
