Europe: Six years ago, during a tense duel between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, Ilkay Gundogan was waiting in the tunnel for the second half to start. Just then Pep Guardiola, then Bayern’s manager, nudged him with his arm, as he went past him. Gundogan stood awestruck, like a fanboy meeting his hero. “I was just like, what the hell was that? It was a casual thing, but why? Surely you would only do that if you liked someone a little bit, right?” He recollects that moment in a piece for The Player’s Tribune.
All his adult life, Gundogan grew up idolising Guardiola — whose Barcelona batch Gundogan considers the best in club football history. But playing for Barcelona or under the Catalan manager was a dream he had never dreamt. For, he was afflicted with self-doubt. For he was often seized by a fear of rejection. Every time he begins to dream, memories of an unpleasant evening roll back into his mind.
He was just eight and had just been acquired by FC Schalke, his hometown club. But after an injury-ridden season, he was asked to go. “They literally threw me out. The incident left me scarred forever. Just imagine a child being woken up in the middle of a dream. After that incident, I became scared to dream, I would always keep a window open for disappointment,” he told bundesliga.com.
He returned to his childhood club SV Gelsenkirchen-Hessler 06, who play in the lower divisions of German amateur football in his hometown Gelsenkirchen, the largest and most populous urban area in Germany, known for coal mining. It’s coal that brought his family from a suburb in Istanbul to Gelsenkirchen in the early 1990s. First arrived his grandfather before the entire family relocated to Germany. His mother became a cook in a swimming-hall restaurant, while his father, Irfan, was a truck driver for a beer company.
The family loved its football — Gundogan’s first footballing memory is watching a UEFA Super Cup game between Arsenal and Galatasaray in 2000 on TV and his uncle Ilhan crying when the Turkish giants won the match on penalties. But the dreams of an aspirational migrant family centred so much on education that he had to focus on academics as well. “They just wanted me to do well at school. Like really wanted me to do well. I still have nightmares about school. I’m not joking. I can wake up in a cold sweat from thinking about old exam papers,” he wrote in The Players’ Tribune.
Start of the journey
Three years later, Schalke wanted him back. He refused. The pain was still too raw. But upon his uncle’s insistence, he joined Bochum FC, in the neighbourhood but a semi-professional team. Then at 17, an age when the best of footballers make their first-team debuts, Gundogan realised that he had the quality to play elite-level football. The scars of the Schalke snub had begun to heal. “I was like, huh, I could do something here.”
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