So… listen to this… whenever you feel frustrated that your national team manager can’t get anything right… just think to yourself: “at least I’m not english”. . .
because some of the things Gareth Southgate does, no one can possibly explain… Look, you know Jamal Musiala? ! The German 21 year old that may just be the best dribbler on the planet right now?
The one with 58 goal contributions over the last two seasons? Well… he is not so German, in fact, he played for the English under-15s, 16s, 17s, 21s… you name it… 23 matches in total… while only showing up for Germany twice… Just 4 years ago, the director of Germany’s youth program had declared defeat, accepting that “Jamal had clearly signaled that he sees his future with the English national team”. .
. Gareth Southgate had an open goal chance, he just had to make a couple calls, bring the kid over for a friendly or two and it was all over… yet somehow, just 6 months later, as England had to face Germany for the 2020 Euros round of 16… Musiala was standing on the other side of the pitch… and before you come at me saying that “no one could be sure Musiala would turn out to be this good”. .
. Be real for a second, there have been very few young talents as obviously destined for greatness as this kid… His own dad was a football player back in Nigeria. At the age of 5, he joined his local club, still back in Germany, and broke the 100 goal mark in his first season… In the words of his own academy coach, the kid came out of the womb “scoring 5 or 10 goals a match”.
. . I mean, back then he was still so innocent and naive, his coach's biggest worry was getting him to stop celebrating the other team’s goal and yet, they instantly had to bump him up two years because the kids his age stood no chance.
Only 2 years after that, his mom brought him with her to England on a 4-month university exchange program and with the kid being so crazy about football, after only a few days failing to find him a team, his parents legitimately walked straight into Southampton’s offices and somehow by the time they came out, the kid had been invited to be in this summer camp type thing the club was organizing… Musiala didn’t even speak a single word of English, but even with the likes of Levi Colwill already in that same program, it only took a couple days… before everyone realized he was the most talented kid on the block, before his own coach started calling him “the special one” and before the scouts got invited over… In fact, according to that same coach: “The first time a scout came, it couldn’t have gone any better… Jamal scored 6 in the opening 10 minutes then, jokingly, started trying to assist every single one of his teammates… By the end of the match, he was very upset that he had missed one of them”. . .
A week later, Southampton had already brought him in for a test match and even then… Musiala proceeded to score more than 10 goals in the space of an hour or so… From there on out, the club’s mission was to try and hide the kid long enough to convince him to sign a long term youth contract, but only a few weeks later, there were Chelsea and Arsenal scouts on the stands… It was all supposed to be just a 4 month stay while his mom got some university work done and now their phones wouldn’t stop ringing… in her own words: “We couldn’t believe it, we were simply overwhelmed. When Jamal heard that Chelsea were inviting him to take a tour of their academy, he started crying. For him, it was a huge honor just to be invited”.
. . Suddenly, the kid was training at Cobham only a few pitches away from the likes of Drgba and Lampard… obviously Southampton had completely lost the race… you could even find his old coach desperately asking everyone on facebook how they could convince the kid to sign for them but… before any team had managed to do so… his mom’s interchange program was over… and now, they had to go back to Germany… but really, do you think there was any chance Chelsea was gonna let go of this?
. . .
Less than half a year later, the family was already moving permanently to London… as the mom said: “It's a step into the unknown… We definitely packed our bags with mixed feelings… You never know how things will turn out, if Jamal will fit in, if he’ll like his school”. . .
but well… I know it’s easy to say now, but I think it all turned out pretty well… Before you knew it, Musiala was traveling all across Europe with the club, either scoring screamers in Poland, taking top scorer awards in Madrid or, at point, impressing so much in a Belgian tournament, that he and his team got invited to Downing Street to meet the Prime Minister himself… remember, this kid was still in primary school, at the time… Speaking of which… Musiala was what they call a model pupil… the kind of kid who signed up for any extra curricular he could find… he was in the chess club, he practiced martial arts and let me say, he was impressively good at them, but of course, he also had to join the school’s football team and that was just kind of hilarious… because, with him there, they were making it to the final stage of the EFL Kids Cup every year which… is no small feat… not only where there over a thousand schools in the running, but whoever made it was partnered with a Premier League club meaning that one hand: there are pictures of baby Musiala going around breaking ankles in a full Fulham kit… and on the other… well… the first time he won it, he did while playing at Anfield, getting handed his top scorer and player of the tournament awards by Jordan Henderson and Dirk Kuyt… and the year after that it got even funnier… the final… was at Wembley… and when Jamal Musiala got there, he looked his PE teacher in the eye, asked him what players had scored hat tricks at that stadium and told him “Well… I’m gonna score one too”. . .
and not only did he go ahead and score 4 instead, but he did it with Gareth Southgate watching from the stands… In fact, once they won, part of their reward was a training session with him… the man had been aware of Musiala’s existence since the time he was ten years old and he still managed to fumble the chance to call him up… but, regardless, even if Southgate couldn’t spot a talent if it smacked him in the face, everyone else seemed well aware that this kid isn’t normal… The day he finished primary school, he got himself a scholarship to Whitgift… an elite private school known for producing some of the best athletes in the country, from rugby world vice champion Elliot Daly, to cricket world champion Jason Roy, as well as a lot of other Chelsea academy players like Bertrand Traoré, Victor Moses and most important of all, Callum Hudson Odoi… you’ll get what I mean soon… The point is, with 13 year old Musiala now eligible for a call up to England and having just scored 50 goals in a single season with Chelsea under-15s, I’m guessing they realized he could probably be somewhat useful for their own under-15s, so they called him up and he scored on his debut… A year later, they called him up again and he opened their match against the Netherlands by casually scoring a hat trick in the opening 30 minutes of the match, before celebrating by knee sliding towards the corner flag alongside his roommate… a little boy named Jude Bellingham… which got them enough attention that the German national team came calling but… the following year, once Musiala actually gave it a try, he went and played two matches back in his home country but as much as he felt honored that they had invited him, he felt like an outcast, England had truly become his home so he went back… but there was a problem… 3 years before, 51% of the English population had voted in favor of leaving the European Union and with everyone at the time being convinced that March 2019 would be the date Brexit would finally take place… Musiala’s immigrant parents began feeling less and less comfortable with their situation and right then and there… it happened… Bayern Munich, the biggest club in Germany, the one Musiala supported as a kid, had been scouting none other than… Callum Hudson Odoi… who, as I just mentioned, not only played at the same club as Musiala, but went to his same school, just two grades above him… they didn’t just know each other, they were friends… meaning that once Callum’s brother and agent, Bradley met up for talks with Hasan Salihamidzic, Bayern’s sporting director… they mentioned Musiala’s name over and over again and with their under 16 manager having been obsessed with Musiala for over 4 years, ever since he had spotted him in a friendly trip to London with his previous club FC Augsburg, once the negotiations with Odoi stalled and Bayern realized they wouldn’t be able to get him, their head scout Marco Neppe gave the green light and so… In July 2019, for a mere 170 thousand pounds, with Chelsea banking on a 20% sell-on fee to bring them future profit… 16 year old Musiala joined Bayern Munich… The moment he arrived, he was once again treated like a star… His new coach, none other than Miroslav Klose, handed him the number 10 shirt and slid him right into his own team despite the fact he’d be the youngest player there… On his first training session, everyone at the club was in the stands watching and though, this time he started off a little slow, still recovering from breaking his jaw in school right before making the switch… Once he got a game, as always, he went in with a goal… and only 11 matches later, already on 6 goals and 2 assists… they bumped him up to the under-19s… but even that… didn’t last long… in February 2020, only 8 months after his comeback to Germany, Jamal Musiala was called up to training with the first team by manager Hansi Flick… and even with the pandemic coming in between his progress and forcing the league to suspend football for 2 months… By June, in the second to last match of the season… Musiala was given his debut… It was only 2 minutes against Freiburg… but it made him the youngest player in the history of the Bundesliga and came just in time for him to collect the trophy as well… though soon, that wouldn’t look so impressive… With the pandemic forcing UEFA to delay the Champions League and turn into a summer tournament… Flick called up Musiala… who then proceeded to sit on the bench for two of the matches that led them to the final, collecting a medal once Bayern won the competition… After 2 minutes of first tier football, Musiala was an European Champion… and the next season, after 8 more minutes on the pitch, Musiala scored in the league’s opening game to snatch the record of youngest goalscorer in the history of the country right out of the hands of the legendary Roque Santa Cruz… and it was right then, that the drama started… No matter how much his german teammates hounded Musiala, telling him over and over again that he should drop England and represent Germany instead… that year, he went on to debut for England’s under-21s, leading the German football association to announce they had stopped pursuing him, claiming they “wished the best of luck in his sporting career and accepted his decision”. . .
which might have been true, except for one man… Joachim Lowe… Over the next couple of months, Musiala kept making it harder and harder for Lowe to deal with the fact they had just lost a talent like him and by December… with Bayern already trailing 1 goal behind Leipzig only 25 minutes into the match… Javi Martinez fell to the ground injured and asked to be replaced… to which, Hansi Flick decided it was time for Musiala to get more than a quarter of an hour of game time per match and 10 minutes later, he had smacked one in from outside the box to tie the match and started the play that put Bayern in front, as the stadium announcer yelled into the microphone “I don’t believe it”. . .
By the end of the match, Lowe didn’t resist giving Musiala another call and by February, with the kid coming of age and signing his first professional contract with Bayern, Lowe and Bierhoff flew over to Munich to meet him and in Musiala’s own words: “They were very interested in me personally, w anted to get to know me as a person. I was impressed by how they worked out and analyzed my playing style… In the end, even if it wasn’t an easy decision, I just listened to my gut feeling”. .
. meaning that despite insisting that England was still “home”, Musiala, who admitted that even then “his German wasn’t perfect”, the same kid who just a few years back had captained his English teammates in a match against Germany, had now announced that he would be representing the Bavarians instead… The very next month, he was already debuting in the world cup qualifiers, becoming the youngest German to play for the national team since Uwe Seeler… Meanwhile, despite the fact that even Nigeria’s national team manager had made sure to meet with him that very same year… in a last ditch effort to get him to represent his father’s country… When Southgate was asked about it, not only did he admit that the last time he had met with him was way back in the EFL Kids Cup when Musiala was like 10, but he acted like there was nothing he could have done… Thankfully for him, once they did meet in the Euros 3 months later, England managed to take the win… but well… Musiala only played one minute which clearly wasn’t gonna be happening for much longer… After that dramatic exit, Low got the sack and Flick took over while Naggelsman took his spot at Bayern, meaning that in one motion, Musiala now had managers that were willing to bet on him for both club and country so things sped up once more… By October, Musiala had become the youngest player to score for Germany since 1910, the month after, he was in the podium for both the Kopa trophy and the Golden Boy award and by the end of the season and by the end of the season, he was subbed in right in the middle of Der Klassiker and scored the goal that sealed the Bundesliga title… By the end of the year, with Musiala once again in the podium of the Kopa trophy, Naggelsman had no doubt that he had to be in his world cup squad… and it turned out that, in fact, he was the one player who deserved to be there more than than anyone else… After Germany shocked the world by going in with a defeat to Japan, Musiala showed up against Spain, assisting Germany’s only goal and completing a tournament record 9 dribbles in a single match, precisely while going up against Gavi and Pedri, the two players that had beat him to the Golden Boy award, leading Ballon D’Or winner Lothar Matthaus to claim in an international broadcast that “Musiala can be the Messi of the future”. .
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