Gundogan

All his adult life, Gundogan grew up idolising Guardiola — whose Barcelona batch Gundogan considers the best in club football history.

It is not just knowing the right time to arrive at the box, it is the right second. Then came Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool and the heady Dortmund days, when he became a target for most top clubs in Europe. Guardiola was among his admirers, and a few months after the tunnel nudge, he was sitting face to face with his idol, who had joined Manchester City and wanted Gundogan to be his first acquisition. Midway through last season, he was repurposed as a box-to-box midfielder with the licence to thrust forward and drift into the space created by the conventional forwards. The longer you go in life before suffering a setback, I think the harder it is to handle,” he told bundesliga.com. But when City brought Rodri in 2019 and veered away from the double-defensive midfield gameplan, his appearances began to dwindle. 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. He felt terribly lonely — he missed the quaintness of his hometown in a bustling city, the senior players bullied and ragged him, he got injured, and struggled to find an apartment as migrant-phobia festered in Germany. Even Turkish migrants used to refuse, until he became a first-team regular and they started seeing him more on TV. He suddenly remembered Schalke. It gave him strength. The scars of the Schalke snub had begun to heal. 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. 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. For he was often seized by a fear of rejection. But after an injury-ridden season, he was asked to go.