Özil attended a party for Arsenal fans in Shanghai in 2017 but his comments about the treatment of Uighur Muslims angered many in China

Less than a year after Mesut Özil was filmed playing mahjong and speaking Mandarin to wish Arsenal’s Chinese followers a happy new year, the former Germany midfielder has found himself almost erased from the internet in China.

The backlash against the 31-year-old, after he used Twitter to criticise China’s oppression of Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang region, has been sustained. China’s foreign ministry accused him of swallowing “fake news”; the Özil fans’ group on China’s largest communications platform Baidu announced it was closing; Chinese search engines appeared to have wiped out much of the internet content linked to him.

There has even been a video posted on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, of a fan burning his collection of Özil shirts, while football experts