Gunning for Greatness: My Life: With an introduction by Jose Mourinho

by Mesut Özil

  The exchange of messages with Khedira helped me cope with the interminable waiting. I’m not the most patient of men. Every evening I dreamed of Madrid. Every evening I had this fascination that emanates from Real in my mind. Although I was still training for Werder, my head was full of Madrid. I wanted to be a real part of that team, not just a silent text-message insider.

  On 17 August 2010 it was announced that the transfer was complete. In the negotiations over the fee, Real Madrid prevailed over Allofs and paid around 15 million euros for me. ‘We were able to get him under contract for a price far below his true value. We couldn’t let such a chance slip,’ José Mourinho said.

  I didn’t care one bit about the amount they’d paid for me. The key thing was that I was finally there. My whole life changed overnight.

  12

  A new world

  Your job is never to be satisfied

  Even before my transfer I knew that Real Madrid was the biggest club in the world. But as an outsider you have no idea of its true dimensions. You have to feel Real to understand it. You need to be part of this crazy entity. Everyone talks about its great history, but these are just words. You only understand the true greatness when you’re part of this monstrous club, which swallows you up entirely.

  When I put on the white jersey for the first time I felt such a thrill. I was actually shaking and even slightly terrified at how overwhelming it felt. It’s not just any old piece of material you’re slipping on and taking off again. The moment it touched my skin I realised the responsibility that now lay on my shoulders. The commitment I’d made.

  When I first stepped onto the training ground I was in total awe. Put next to the facilities of Bremen and Schalke, there’s absolutely no comparison. The gym boasts many more machines than players – you don’t have to queue or wait a single second for a teammate to finish. Everything is in abundance, the perfect conditions. A footballer’s paradise, if you like.

  One of the major advantages at Real is that you can train in total peace and seclusion. There are no distractions. There aren’t any journalists who get wind of squabbles during training and then milk them as much as they can. Nor is there any ‘spying’ during the closed training sessions. At FC Bayern, for example, paparazzi always hang around, taking photographs through holes in the tarpaulin in an attempt to discover training secrets. Reporters permanently stand by the protective screen, listening to the instructions the coach is shouting. None of that is possible at Real Madrid as the ground is too remote. None of the tactical ruses the manager rehearses can slip out. At Real you train as you do at Arsenal: in secret.

  Real also owns a hotel inside the training complex itself, so, if a player gets tired between sessions he can retire to a single room to rest. A fingerprint scanner opens the door – you don’t even need a keycard.

  When I entered Bernabéu stadium, I felt like a dwarf. I looked up at those steep tiers of seats and felt tiny. Really, really small. I don’t know why, but I took my first steps on the grass with great care. Complete madness really. But somehow it didn’t seem appropriate to stomp all over the sacred turf that had witnessed so many heroic deeds. I imagine there must be hundreds of players all over the world who would pay a fortune for the opportunity to play just once on this pitch, in this stadium. Maybe I’d have been one of those players myself if my chance hadn’t come to turn out for Los Blancos.

  Everywhere I went I got a sense of Real Madrid’s dimensions as a football club. At the World Cup in South Africa there were 20 fans outside our team hotel. When I was away with Real Madrid, thousands of fans would lay siege to our hotel, just to get a few seconds’ glimpse of us. I was astonished by the hype surrounding Madrid. It shows the esteem the club is held in throughout the world. No team makes people as crazy as Real. ‘Winning on its own is not enough. The victory has to be achieved in a certain way,’ Emilio Butragueño, the legendary Real striker, once said. In the days and weeks before I joined Real Madrid I read lots about the club and spent hours Googling everything about it. Which is where I came across that quote. Mad, but true!

  The fans and journalists have undue expectations of the club. At Madrid no player is judged by normal yardsticks because the crowds keep getting grandiose performances from Ronaldo and co. They see shooting exhibitions. They’re present when Real breaks one record after another. They permanently watch football at the highest level. And they get used to it. At some stage they start to regard the incredible as normal. If Ronaldo doesn’t score 40 goals per season they say he’s going through a crisis. Real set this standard itself. In Madrid, ‘good’ isn’t enough. Such pressure is really extraordinary. You have to learn how to deal with it.

  Right after my first outing I could see which way the wind was blowing. My debut in a Real shirt lasted 58 minutes against Hércules Alicante, who’d been promoted from the first division. ‘At particular moments Özil shows the class he has,’ Marca wrote. ‘When the ball is at his feet he’s a permanent threat to the opposition goal. In Özil, Cristiano Ronaldo has a high-quality teammate.’ The paper’s rival, Diario As, was more critical: ‘We’ll see better performances from Özil wearing the Real shirt. On his debut the ex-Bremen player showed both highlights and lowlights.’ In spite of his colleague’s positive assessment, another Marca journalist concluded that I’d moved ‘like a priest in a brothel’, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

  To begin with I stayed in a hotel in Madrid. But only briefly, because I was in a hurry to find a home for myself. The first place I found was in Sami Khedira’s neighbourhood. In a building that looked like the White House from the outside. I didn’t really like it, to be honest, but I didn’t think too much about it at first, because I didn’t want to spend weeks in a hotel room as I had in Bremen. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable there. The house came already furnished. So I sat on a sofa that the owner had chosen. I slept in a bed where others had slept before. I wandered through rooms that looked like a dentist’s practice. White, sterile, completely impersonal. The owner’s taste certainly wasn’t mine. It didn’t feel homely at all.

  Which is why I moved out again a few months later, and into a house near my friend, Sergio Ramos. It was still being finished, which meant there was no furniture yet. I could – and had to – arrange it all myself. I bought what I liked, without showing much skill as an interior designer; the individual pieces of furniture didn’t really match. It was all thrown together higgledy-piggledy. But I thought it was nice and I finally felt at home.

  It was the same on the pitch. In the first weeks of training I learned what it means to be obsessed with success. The Madrid squad only has players who never want to lose. They’re crazy. They’ll do whatever it takes to succeed. No one sits back for even a day. I also trained hard, of course, to get into Schalke’s first team or to break through at Werder. But, as I’m sure was the case with all of us, there was the odd day when I wasn’t 100 per cent focused on the job in hand. When I didn’t push myself to the limit. When I worked to rule, if you like. Such moments were rare, but they did happen. I think everybody is familiar with this. Every normal person, whether they work in an office or on a building site, will have days where they don’t try so hard. Until I arrived in Madrid, I thought this was OK, as long as it remained the exception. But throughout my entire time at Madrid I never saw anyone even come close to having days like this. Anybody who watches Sergio Ramos or Cristiano Ronaldo at work soon knows what real effort means.

  Normally I don’t like talking about teammates. I don’t enjoy being asked in interviews about other players, about their performance or potential. But with Ramos and Ronaldo it’s different. They’re legends. They’re unique. And I’m very keen to talk about both of them at any opportunity.

  In the Real Madrid dressing room Ramos behaved like the perfect footballer, and served as an inspiration for me. But he’s also a wonderful person. From the start he literally took me by the hand. He told me all about Madrid,and explained the rules of the club. Barely ha
d I arrrived than he invited me to his house as if it was perfectly normal. Ramos is a highly gifted musician. Sometimes we’d just sit around at his place, and he’d play guitar and sing.

  It was by watching him and Ronaldo in particular that I learned what sheer determination is. How you can really torture yourself. My, oh my, if Ronaldo didn’t score in goal-shooting practice it put him in such a bad mood. He’d get annoyed if a single scissors kick went wrong. Even if the 80 he had done before had worked perfectly, the single one he fluffed would drive him into a rage.

  I’ve never seen a footballer as professional as him. Whenever we got back late at night from an away game, he’d always get into the Jacuzzi to give his body a recovery session, whereas most of the other players would drive straight back home and go to bed.

  Although Ronaldo is a total superstar, he’s remained a perfectly normal bloke. In my early days with the club he’d come up to me when we were warming down and stretching after games and ask how I was. Did I have a girlfriend? What was Germany like? Once we went to watch a basketball match – Real Madrid v Barcelona. We’re both great basketball fans. I told him that I love the permanent tension, the continual back and forth. ‘Do you like ice hockey or American football?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘American football rules are far too complicated and I also find it takes too long to get to the real action. I’m not so much of a fan of the NHL either.’

  I’m certain that many defenders around the world will breathe a sigh of relief when their opponent Ronaldo takes his football pension and cannot run rings around them any more. It’ll feel like redemption when the best of the best retires.

  Everyone at Real Madrid wants success. The players are burning to win. The brake is never on during training sessions. The club is home to the most victory-obsessed players in the world, who drive each other on.

  During my time with the club there was also a manager who was completely obsessed with winning. When Mourinho started out as Chelsea coach in 2004 he said, full of self-confidence, ‘Please don’t call me arrogant, because what I’m saying is true. I’m a European champion, and I think I’m a special one.’ And it is true. José Mourinho really is special – especially good at what he does.

  At the beginning of this book I described the biggest dressing-room bollocking I’ve ever had from a manager. At half-time against Deportivo La Coruña, when we were 3–1 up, Mourinho criticised me in front of all my teammates with a vehemence I haven’t experienced since. He shouted things at me that, given the state of the game and my admittedly lacklustre performance, were perhaps OK in substance. The manner in which he attacked me, however, was not. After I’d enforced the substitution I fled to the shower because it was the only way of calming down. I flung my shampoo bottle at the wall to begin with and slapped my hand against the tiles. Somehow I had to get rid of the aggression that had built up during Mourinho’s tirade. I was swearing like a trooper.

  But when I gradually ran out of expletives and realised I was starting from the beginning again, I asked myself why Mourinho had attacked me so heatedly. I knew him well enough by then to grasp that he hadn’t exploded just for the fun of it. Everything he said and did was very carefully thought through. Which meant that there must also be a message to this bollocking, one he was trying to address to me.

  As the hot water slowly brought me back to my senses, I couldn’t help thinking of Andreas Müller and the scene he’d made in the Schalke dressing room a few years earlier. Back then Müller had just wanted to lay into me. That was quite clear to me. He wanted to make me look ridiculous and get rid of me in front of my teammates. I soon realised that this wasn’t Mourinho’s aim at all. His intention was different, but I didn’t understand what it was until later.

  When I drove home from the Bernabéu stadium through night-time Madrid I tried to recall Mourinho’s exact words. Every single one he’d hurled at my face. And the way he’d said it too. I pictured again in my mind how he’d imitated me. But I couldn’t find the answer to my question on my drive home. Instead my anger boiled up again when I thought of how he’d made me look like a fool in front of my teammates with his Özil imitation. There was no way I could forget that as quickly as I hoped. But most of all I wondered why the two of us couldn’t have had a discussion alone.

  As I reached my house and waited for the gate to open I thought of my teammates.

  ‘What a fucking arsehole I am,’ I suddenly thought. I was such an idiot! Shaking my head, I slammed my hand against the steering wheel. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ I’d let my teammates down. It wasn’t their fault; they hadn’t been part of the argument. And yet I’d refused to help them in the second half. Although I was pissed off with Mourinho, my behaviour had punished them.

  That same evening I popped by to see Sergio Ramos, who lived next door. I had a long chat with him and apologised for my desertion. Later, I did the same with the other players. Ramos accepted my apology immediately and just wanted to know how I thought things would go on from here with the manager.

  ‘What do you want from him?’ Ramos asked. ‘What are you expecting from Mourinho?’

  ‘He owes me an apology,’ I replied.

  The next day Ramos discussed the incident in the changing room with Mourinho. That’s the kind of man he is. He always takes responsibility for others and helps out when things need to be cleared up. Ramos is a genuine guy – a real friend, a player that any team would want to have, both as a footballer and a person.

  By now, however, I’d also worked out for myself why Mourinho had reacted so vehemently and bollocked me in front of the others. It was actually quite easy to understand. After all, he had said it quite clearly: I must never relax! He wanted me to leave my comfort zone on the pitch. He refused to accept a 10 or 20 per cent drop in performance just because it was more convenient for me. He wanted to rid me of my nonchalance and toughen me up as a player. He wanted to push me hard so I’d never stop developing. So I’d get better every day. So I’d be in a position to realise when I wasn’t pushing myself to the limit. Mourinho also probably felt that trying to drum this lesson into me in one or more face-to-face conversations wouldn’t have much of an effect, and that I needed this massive shock in front of all my colleagues and friends to make me grasp the message. He had guessed that I’d be furious and as a result more serious about questioning what might be wrong than if he had just given me a tongue-lashing in private, without any witnesses. Sometimes I do actually need a bit of anger to really perform well or understand things.

  No player in the world wants to be insulted by their coach and called a coward or a baby – anybody would dispute an accusation like that on the spot. But, strictly speaking, Mourinho was right. When I came to Madrid part of me believed that playing beautiful football would be enough. After three dream passes and four super solo runs I’d swagger around the pitch, rather than continuing to fight and do my job with the utmost concentration. I was quickly sated, easily satisfied, and then I’d sometimes be happy to go down a gear. But it was exactly this attitude that Mourinho beat out of me.

  And I thanked him for it. After a few days I admitted to him that the penny had dropped. And that I was grateful to him for showing me with such clarity what my biggest weakness was. ‘I’m not going to leave you in peace until you’ve exhausted your potential,’ he replied with a grin.

  He revisited the subject in front of the whole team before the next game. When we were in Barcelona he said, ‘Perhaps my little act and choice of words were crass. I’m sorry about that, Mesut. We’ve talked about the rest of it. I just want the best for all of you. And sometimes you only understand what’s best when you have it shoved into your face. But,’ he continued, bowing before me, ‘don’t worry, from now on there will be nothing but cuddles for this fine gentleman.’ He laughed and everyone joined in.

  I’ve heard many a dressing-room talk in my life. From a wide variety of speakers. Time and again coaches have tried to stir us players with particular words or give us an extra
injection of motivation with short films. Sometimes managers also show a montage of extraordinary goals. I’m not a big fan of this because it often only produces the desired boost for half the players, while falling flat for the others. How is Manuel Neuer going to benefit, for example, from watching Miroslav Klose’s great goals? Or if Iker Casillas watches Ronaldo make a successful finish? Or if Petr Čech sees his colleagues celebrating with Olivier Giroud?

  The dressing-room talks that have stayed in my memory, which have left a sustained impression, are few and far between. For example, I liked the way Horst Hrubesch prepared us for the U-21 European Championship final against England in 2009. In the dressing room was a screen with a projector. ‘Today I’m going to delegate my talk to a man who has come up with the perfect words. You can’t put it better than he does. So listen carefully and let yourselves be inspired,’ Hrubesch said, pressing the play button.