by Mesut Özil
I think it was down to a lack of knowledge back then that lots of families made the mistake of not teaching their children the language of the host country properly from the start.
For a long time I found every German lesson at school a hurdle race – a race that I wasn’t able to negotiate with confidence. Instead, at every hurdle I got stuck or lost my step. Often it wasn’t just that I stumbled at the hurdles, but I felt as if I would never make it to the finish line.
And so to anyone who moves to another country, from no matter where, I’d like to offer the following words of encouragement. Make use of the opportunity to learn the language. Try to make friends with people from that country. Pay attention to your surroundings. Don’t live separate lives in isolation. And most of all: read!
Nazan Eckes, the television presenter, wrote a book about her experiences as a woman born in Germany with Turkish roots. She interviewed me for the book, which is entitled Good Morning Occident and contains the wonderful sentence: ‘My heart beats German and my heart also beats Turkish.’ A great message that I can very much identify with, as I think like a German, but I feel Turkish.
How often in my young life have I been asked what I am. Turk? Or German? Do I feel more Turkish? Or do I have more German characteristics?
I don’t like this exclusivity. I’m not just the one or the other. I’ve got fantastic Turkish friends, but equally I’ve got German friends who mean a lot to me. I met Fabian, my first German friend, when I was about seven and playing for Westfalia. He played mainly in goal and was captain of the team.
I grew up with boys from Lebanon, and over the course of my career I’ve lived in London and Madrid, and made friends from all over the world: Karim Benzema from France, Sergio Ramos from Spain, Cristiano Ronaldo from Portugal.
I consider myself fortunate to be able to adopt the best from both German and Turkish cultures. I’ve participated in Turkish customs and also tried out German ones.
Here’s an example. When I was a child we had neither St Nicholas’ Day nor Christmas – they aren’t official religious festivals in Turkey. It wasn’t until I got to school that I found out that in Germany you put your boots outside the door on 5 December and they’re filled with sweets overnight. I’d never tried it.
We didn’t celebrate 24 December either. Later on, however, in my mid-twenties, I did enjoy a classic Christmas with all the trimmings for the sake of my then girlfriend, Mandy. With a Christmas tree that we chose and decorated together, with presents and a large family meal. It was a lovely experience.
The family dinner as well as the conviviality and reflection on Christmas Eve are a little like the Turkish Sugar Feast – one of those religious customs we used to celebrate as children with our family. The Sugar Feast always takes place after the 30-day fast, and is a time when families spend several days together, celebrating the end of Ramadan.
These days I’m not able to fast. Personally, I find it’s not compatible with my job as a sportsman. Especially in summer, it’s difficult to cope with the exertions of top-flight sport if you’re not supposed to eat between sunrise and sunset. We’re not allowed to drink water or anything else either. This doesn’t work for me. However, I admire and respect all other sportsmen and women who fast during Ramadan.
As Ramadan, which in Turkish is called Ramazan, always moves forwards by ten days, it occurs at a different time each year. So when I was 14 or 15 the fasting period was in winter. The sun didn’t rise until around seven in the morning and had already set again by five in the afternoon. Obviously it’s much easier to last these ten hours than the 16 in summer. Last year, for example, when the month of Ramadan was during the European Championship in France, sunrise at my parents’ house in Gelsenkirchen was at half-past five. Sunset was after nine o’clock.
As a teenager I did fast occasionally. We children tried it out because we were curious. We wanted to know what it was like to eat nothing all day long. Of course, it also made us feel a bit more grown up. It was a mixture of several things. You wanted to be cool, because you were one of the adults if you fasted – children are excluded from fasting – and of course there was peer pressure too. In the afternoons we used to spend a lot of time with friends or relatives. You’d have looked silly if you were the only one in the group with a full tummy while everyone else was being good.
My parents never made us fast. They gave us the choice of observing Ramadan or not. I tried it two or three times. Once I lasted five days, and another year I even managed to hold out for ten days.
I remember the first time, dragging myself out of bed to the kitchen in a state of total exhaustion. The breakfast table was piled high with stuff. My parents had cooked like world champions so that we could really fill our tummies at ‘sahur’, which is the name of the meal before sunrise.
Fasting doesn’t just mean that you can’t eat; swearing and immoral behaviour are forbidden too. The time when the fast is broken is called ‘iftar’. It’s always the same procedure, beginning with a short prayer, then you eat a date and drink water.
I’ve never really had to justify myself for not fasting regularly. At any rate I can’t ever recall having been criticised by Turks. And nor have I come across Germans who turn their noses up at fasting Muslims.
Looking back I can say that, with all the experiences I had between cultures, my childhood was decisive for my entire career. The awareness of being at home in different traditions has helped me to cope with all the unfamiliarity that’s inevitable when you switch football clubs.
My mother has been particularly important for the path my life has taken. I was always impressed by how hard she worked. How she sacrificed everything to make a better life for us children in this country that was foreign to her, and how loving she was to us despite her arduous day-to-day existence. Most of all, however, my mum’s devoted love for us children and the family inspired me to give something back to her. I wanted to achieve great things so she could be proud of me, and feel that her grafting hadn’t been in vain.
2
Matthias rather than Mesut
People who recognise what’s inside you
My career as a footballer didn’t take a straight path. This was partly down to my background. Although I’ve never been called explicitly racist names, Klaus Beier, spokesman of the far-right political party, Nationaldemokratische Partei (NPD), once referred to me as being German only ‘on paper’. He was reported for his racist comments. I had another experience of xenophobia when I was a youth player, however, which had a more lasting influence. Between the ages of 10 and 12 I went to several trials to try to get into a Schalke 04 youth team. They have a much more substantial development programme than smaller clubs, which lack the money for advancing young talent to the same extent.
I first tried during my time with Teutonia Schalke, then when I was playing with DJK Falke Gelsenkirchen. I attended the trials four times, on each occasion driven with ambition.
I dribbled nimble-footed through the slalom poles. I shot the ball around the goalie’s ears. And, as far as I could tell, did pretty much everything right in the games at the end. But I was never selected for any of Schalke’s youth teams for those age groups. It seemed as if a Matthias or a Markus or Michael was always preferred to me, even if they weren’t any better. Was it because of my first name that they hadn’t taken me? Because they didn’t want a Mesut? Because I was a foreigner? That’s what it felt like, at least.
My father felt the same way. One day, when we were gloomily going back home after yet another rejection, I asked him what I could have done better. ‘Dad, tell me what I did wrong.’ All he said was, ‘Nothing, my son. You can’t do anything about the name you got from your mother and me.’
But it wasn’t just my name that was an obstacle. Our financial situation didn’t help either. Such as the time when I was playing for Rot-Weiss Essen, my youth club after Falke Gelsenkirchen. Before I changed clubs the boys always lost against local rivals Schwarz-Weiss Essen. It was
usually a foregone conclusion: Rot-Weiss would go and get a pasting. But this changed when I moved there in 2000. In my first derby I scored seven goals against our rivals! Against all expectation Rot-Weiss beat Schwarz-Weiss 8–1. My first derby victory.
But for the next game I was on the bench. Rather than being rewarded for my achievement I was punished. All thanks to the parents of one of my teammates. Their boy was playing in my place because, as we later found out, his father was helping Rot-Weiss Essen financially. And this was clearly more important than goals that produced victories. The conflict did not last for too long, however. After a few weeks the coach became convinced that goals were more crucial than a set of jerseys for the team.
I was also given great support by the club legend, Werner Kik. Between 1960 and 1970 he played 293 games for Rot-Weiss Essen and was even selected in the club’s team of the century. Kik bought me my first proper pair of football boots. Until then I’d always had to play in cheap ones. In worn-out trainers with holes in them, which gave me no grip. But now, at the age of 12, I had real Nike boots. They meant the world to me, supplanting my most valuable sporting possession up till then, a leather football that I’d been given on my eighth birthday. Every evening I used to rub it with leather protection cream and polish it for hours on end. Every single scratch on my ball pained me. And it got a lot of them because the ‘Monkey Cage’ – the name of the football pitch in Gelsenkirchen where we played – was a cinder pitch that badly damaged the old-fashioned coarse leather. When my ball became too scratched I carefully removed the individual leather panels and we just played with the inner bladder.
My experiences with Schalke and the supposed prejudice against foreign players affected me for a long time. But then, in my third year at Rot-Weiss Essen, I met Norbert Elgert. Rot-Weiss Essen had offered to make me a professional. At the age of just 15 I would get a contract and play for the second-division Essen side. For around 4,000 euros per month, if I remember rightly. That was a huge amount of money for me and my family; it would have changed our life overnight. Until then I was getting ‘only’ 150 euros a month, which still seemed quite a lot to me. In addition Werner Kik had managed to arrange for me to be picked up from home and driven the 20 kilometres to training when I was just 13. Normally this service was provided only to the age groups 16 and older. One of the drivers couldn’t understand the exception the club had made for me and to begin with he would grumble, ‘Do I now have to chauffeur kindergarten kids around?’
We declined this professional contract, however. Because of Norbert Elgert. At the time I was at Berger Feld school, which was right next to Schalke’s stadium –you just had to cross the road to get to training. And this was the key thing. The school nurtured sporting talent. Three times a week those pupils gifted at football had extra training in the morning instead of maths, English or art. Thanks to a flexible timetable with substitute lessons we could catch up, usually with tutors in the afternoons.
Most of the good footballers at Berger Feld school were already playing for one of the Schalke youth sides. There were very few exceptions at the school, that is to say external players like me at Rot-Weiss Essen. The football training was run by Norbert Elgert. In one of the first sessions after the 2004 summer holidays he got us to play a three-a-side game against some Schalke boys on a small pitch.
I was playing with two other boys from my school whose names I’m afraid I can’t recall. But I do remember exactly that the three of us beat the Schalke boys big time. When I was about to head back to school after training Elgert took me aside.
‘Where are you playing?’ he asked tersely.
‘With Rot-Weiss Essen,’ I replied.
‘Where do you live?’
‘In Gelsenkirchen.’
‘Next year you’re playing here!’
To begin with I didn’t give much thought to what Elgert had said. It never occurred to me that I’d move to Schalke. They had rejected me four times already. Four times they’d preferred to go with a Matthias or a Martin or a Markus. Why should I now forgive them for this humiliation, seeing as things were going so well at Rot-Weiss Essen?
But Elgert spoke to me again after the next training session. ‘I’ve got to talk to your father. You have to come to Schalke.’ I mentioned Elgert’s request to my father and we decided we’d give him a chance and hear him out. After all, this football coach seemed to be an honest and fair man. For our discussion Elgert invited us to Kronski, a pub in Buer Market in Gelsenkirchen. On our way there my father and I didn’t say much. We didn’t work out any kind of negotiation strategy, but decided just to listen to what Elgert had to say. In any case we couldn’t imagine exactly what would crop up in the conversation. Besides, our past experiences with Schalke had left us disillusioned, so we didn’t dare indulge in any dreams or fantasies.
After we’d ordered and were waiting for our food, Elgert turned to my father. ‘Your son,’ he said, ‘is still terribly raw, but he’s highly talented.’ We just exchanged glances and let him continue. ‘I can’t promise that Mesut will become a regular player in his first season with us. I can’t promise that he’ll become a professional at Schalke. Nor can I promise that he’ll become an international. There’s only one thing I can promise the both of you. Mesut, I will give you the very best training in every aspect of the game: technique, tactics, footballing understanding and intelligence, athleticism, mental speed, emotional control as well team spirit and conduct. Apart from that I can’t guarantee a thing. The only guarantee I’ll give is that I’ll always do everything I can for you. And that at Schalke we can improve your chances of fulfilling your ambitions.’
It all sounded good. It didn’t sound like the usual blah blah blah, which you get from lots of agents and scouts, either. But we had huge reservations about Schalke. ‘Schalke doesn’t want a Mesut,’ my father said curtly. And he told Elgert about the experiences we’d had. He listened to everything my father had to say, thought about it briefly and replied, ‘OK, then. I’ll give you another guarantee: Mesut will get a completely fair and genuine chance with me. Just like any player. All that counts for me is performance. Nothing else.’
After the meeting my father and I returned home in a thoughtful mood. Obviously a single conversation couldn’t wipe out all the bad experiences we’d had at several trials – you couldn’t just dismiss the way we’d been treated.
It’s important to remember that I was 10, 11 and 12 when I had felt this form of rejection. I couldn’t just swallow humiliation like that when I was so young. It’s a hard enough lesson at that age to find out that you haven’t been selected for something because you’re not good enough. But if you are particularly good at something and yet have to face the reality that performance alone isn’t good enough, and that a career depends on your background too, then that is really painful.
Elgert was very smart. After our conversation he didn’t come running up and hassle me at each training session. It was a while before he invited us to another discussion, this time at the Marriot Courtyard Hotel, which is right next to the stadium.
‘Let me tell you this,’ he said to my father, without really addressing our reservations again. ‘There’s not much I’m good at. But I think I’m good with people and I know a bit about football.’
He proceeded to outline his philosophy. ‘I see myself as someone who trains and nurtures young players. The primary reason for training footballers here at Schalke is not to win titles with our youth teams. Our chief aim is to produce as many professionals as possible.’
He turned back to my father and explained his position. ‘Sure, players need to learn that professional football is about results. But at this age we mustn’t ram into them that all that counts is winning, winning, winning. Otherwise we’ll just make them mad, obsessed, neurotic. The goal of our training is to make them be better tomorrow than they were today. And the day after that to be better than tomorrow. If a player takes this to heart they’ll automatically win a title some day.�
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Then Elgert promised my father something else. ‘I’m a circumspect man. I won’t let your son become a professional too soon. Until my players are ready they stay with me. I don’t let them go until they’re fully equipped.’
We believed what Elgert was telling us. We liked his views. And so, putting aside his hostility towards the club, my father asked, ‘Do you really think my son’s good enough to play for Schalke?’
‘I can’t guarantee you a regular place. Mesut has physical shortcomings. He’s really quite small. We also need to work on his right foot and heading. He must get better at winning the ball. But if we manage all this then he’s got great potential.’
When we said goodbye we promised to consider Elgert’s offer, even though a professional contract from Rot-Weiss Essen was already on the table. The money was tempting. For the first time I understood that you can actually get rich from football. But we were convinced that my career opportunities at Schalke were substantially higher.
When I played for Rot-Weiss Essen in the Lower Rhine Cup I saw Elgert on the touchline. Whenever I glanced at him he was watching me.
In the end I asked my coach at Rot-Weiss Essen, Michael Kulm, for advice. I wanted to know how he would respond to the Schalke offer if he were in my shoes. His honest answer was, ‘Go for it. It’ll be worth it.’
A few weeks later Elgert invited us to the boarding house for youth players to meet ‘his’ Schalke. After this we were finally convinced. This man really was fair. The efforts we could see him making to get me to come to Schalke meant he must have seen something in me. He wasn’t interested in whether I was called Mesut or Markus. Elgert was interested only in my qualities as a player, not in my background. And so in 2005 I left Rot-Weiss Essen for Schalke.
