When Ilkay Gündogan talks about experience on this picturesque autumn day on the New England Revolution’s training pitch, he automatically talks about himself. “Sometimes you need a bit of calm, a bit of patience,” he says when talking about the larger number of older players in the team after the first practice session during the national team’s trip to the USA. “If you haven’t been in a situation that many times, there’s a risk that you’ll end up making the wrong decision.”
Gündogan emphasizes that it’s all about balance, but you can already hear that he welcomes a little more maturity. And then he quickly adds: “But as an experienced person, I often make wrong decisions.” As if a fine sensorium had just sounded the alarm because statements like these could possibly be interpreted as a kind of generational conflict.
At the European Championships next summer, the national team’s prospects will largely depend on Gündogan making many of the right decisions. National coach Julian Nagelsmann has chosen the 33-year-old midfielder from FC Barcelona not only as captain, but based on everything that has been seen and heard so far, also as the head of his team.
A few days later, after the 3-1 win against the USA in Hartford, he would call Gündogan an “extraordinarily great player,” praise him for his offensive drive and defensive work in equal measure, and say about his leadership qualities: “He doesn’t have to be a loudspeaker. Ilkay is a very clever man, an observer who perceives a lot and then channels it, not one who constantly speaks in front of the team, who shouts loudly in the dressing room, he does it very subtly and intelligently. And as a leader, as a footballer, he is very valuable to me because he is incredibly calm on the ball.”
In other words: Gündogan should be a natural authority – and in the German game two things, accelerator and calmer, pulse and resting pulse. So: a decision maker. The decider.
Gündogan and two momentous decisions
When Gündogan plays with the national team this Saturday evening (8:45 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for DFB international matches and on RTL) in Berlin against Turkey, the country from which his grandfather came to Germany to work in mining, then you will come You can hardly help but think about something else first: how Gündogan ended up in this role again in the late summer of his career.
In the short term, this leads to Nagelsmann’s predecessor Hansi Flick, who made Gündogan captain in a last attempt to save what could no longer be saved. But if you delve deeper into the story, you come to two decisions that were perhaps the most momentous in his career. Precisely because it wasn’t about the right pass on the field.
One no longer plays a role in German football, the other is captain of the national team: Ilkay Gündogan (left) and Mesut Özil (center) in 2018 with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Image: AFP
First, as a German citizen and national player, showing up in a London hotel alongside the Turkish head of state Erdoğan and handing him a jersey with the dedication “Sayın Cumhurbaşkanım’a saygılarımla”: “Yours sincerely, for my president.” And then, When many people in Germany thought this was a very bad decision, they quickly decided to try to explain it.
