Ilkay Gündogan will be playing with the German national team at the World Cup in Qatar in a few days. Before that, the Gelsenkirchen player spoke about his past – also at VfL Bochum.
In the coming week, Ilkay Gündogan will take part in the World Cup in Qatar with the German national team. Since this season, the native of Gelsenkirchen has also been captain of Manchester City. FC Barcelona is said to be very interested in signing the 32-year-old.
There is no doubt about it: Gündogan has had a picture-perfect career. In a conversation before the World Cup, the father-to-be has now revisited the beginnings of his football career. Afterwards, not only FC Schalke 04, where Gündogan was sent off at the age of eight, but also VfL Bochum may be annoyed.
Gündogan, who took his first steps in the professional game at 1. FC Nürnberg, actually wanted to become a professional at VfL Bochum. He transferred there from SSV Buer when he was still a U17. But a change of coach and antiquated attitudes prevented that.
During the winter break, his then A-youth coach Michael Oenning moved from VfL Bochum to FCN. Gündogan had a very special relationship with Oenning: “I can’t remember one hundred percent, but after the first training session – I don’t remember the exact wording – he said to me something like ‘You’ll play in the Bundesliga one day’,” Gündogan explained in the Bild podcast “Phrasenmäher”. “I was 17 and at that time I hadn’t had any joint training or contact with the professional sector.”
After Oenning’s transfer to the Noris, he said, he was initially sad, but just one month later Oenning wanted to bring him to the “club”. There, Oenning lobbied the then boss Stefan Kuntz for Gündogan. Gündogan also transferred to Nuremberg, although he actually had other plans. “Actually, my goal was to make the breakthrough in Bochum and become a professional there,” said Gündogan. “I even started training with the professionals in Bochum at some point, but I still wanted to go to Nuremberg.”
Because there was another reason that was important to Gündogan. “I wanted to finish my A-levels. I was in grade 11 at the time,” he explained. “I told VfL Bochum that I would love to finish my schooling and asked them how they thought that would be, because it’s not so easy to combine that with professional football. “
Marcel Koller was the coach at VfL Bochum at the time. And he didn’t think much of the young Gündogan’s plan. “To be honest, Bochum didn’t really have a plan at the time and the head coach at the time wasn’t a big fan of the fact that I still wanted to go to school,” the midfielder revealed. “And then the decision was relatively easy. From a very young age, I was always told by my parents that school was the priority and to at least finish as well as possible. I also promised my parents that at the time.”
He did not want to break that promise and at some point it was also important to him not to simply throw away eleven and a half years of schooling. Gündogan transferred to 1. FC Nürnberg on the last day of the transfer deadline in the winter of 2009 and from the Schalker Gymnasium to the elite school of football in Nuremberg. He played his first Bundesliga match on 8.8.2009 in FCN’s 1:2 – against, of all teams, FC Schalke 04, the club from his birthplace.
And Nuremberg also had reason to rejoice, because in the summer of 2011 Gündogan moved to BVB – for what was then a very high transfer fee of 5.5 million.
