What it’s like to score the goal that wins the World Cup

There are not many players to have got one over on Argentina in recent years but Mario Gotze, the German playmaker, scored the biggest goal of all.

In the 2014 World Cup final, he stepped off the bench in the 88th minute, replacing the then all-time leading World Cup scorer Miroslav Klose, and scored the goal to win Germany the World Cup in the 113th minute in Brazil.

Earlier in this summer’s tournament, he stopped by The Athletic’s offices in Manhattan and reflected on that moment, and the dynamics of a World Cup in which he began as a starter but struggled for form and did not play a minute of Germany’s historic 7-1 win over Brazil. Then he came on as a substitute to score a World Cup-winning goal aged 23.

Now 34 and having played more than 100 times for current club Eintracht Frankfurt, Gotze talks about a career which included seven years across two spells at Borussia Dortmund, as well as three years in between at Bayern Munich. He has played for Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola and Thomas Tuchel and won five Bundesliga titles.

In 2016 he spent several months away from the game owing to metabolic exhaustion due to a hormone imbalance, which triggered a form of chronic fatigue. He also speaks of the physical impact of an expanded football calendar on leading players, warning career spans will be shorter, while also revealing how close he came to signing for Klopp’s Liverpool and the psychological challenges he overcame as he came to terms with the increased expectations of life as a World Cup winning hero in his early twenties.

His answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

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There seem to be more games than ever now. We have a 48-team World Cup, an expanded Club World Cup and now a Nations League as well. Do you worry for your younger colleagues at all?

Over time it’s too much. The problem we have in Europe is soccer is so demanding but at the same time it is so popular and you don’t have a second sport which makes it difficult for the media, the consumer and society (to take breaks).

Technology helps you to recover better but at the same time the career span of athletes will get shorter. Players play and train more when they are younger. They have more games. I was 18 when I became a first-team player but you can’t compare it, the game is way faster and more physical. So the career span will be shorter than before.

We are here in New York City during the World Cup, so we must talk about your history in the tournament! The winning goal is what everyone remembers but that World Cup wasn’t so easy for you… 

The goal has a bigger impact on my memory. But when I look back and really try to visualise what happened, it wasn’t so easy and I didn’t play all the games.

It was my first tournament. I started the first two, three, four games, then I was benched, so I had a totally different experience. If you win the final and win the trophy, this is what stays with you but the journey within the tournament was completely different.

Did you feel that you had lost some confidence in yourself as the tournament went on?

Kind of, yeah. I had moved to Bayern Munich one year earlier and we won a championship. I then go to the World Cup for the first time… I was the youngest player, so it’s normal that I don’t start every game, but at the same time I was young and I thought that I could do anything.

At a World Cup, the attention is different, everything is different. It was the first time that I had experienced this situation. It was not easy. If I look back now, everything went the right way. But imagine if I came on, Argentina scored and won 1-0, we go home having lost, and I then have had not a good tournament. This goal changed everything. But if you see the whole tournament, it was not so easy.

Can you remember what you were thinking sitting on the bench during that final?

For me, it was ‘OK whatever happens, it happens’  but I tried to shut everything down and thought about having an impact. I was substituted on close to the 90th minute, so it could go this way or that way. You’re nervous, it’s a final. You have the dream of scoring a goal and the fear of making the decisive mistake. You’re always in between. For me, when I go on a pitch, I forget everything. I just played the game.

How did that goal impact your life?

Massively. I was very young, it changed a lot of things: the attention, the expectations, everything. You have the feeling that you’re on the right track to improve, to win things, to develop in the right way. I had won the league in Germany and then I was a world champion.

Did any part of you wonder how, after scoring in a World Cup final, you could ever again top that? 

Kind of, but in the end not really. I had only played four years’ professional football and I thought, ‘this is the standard’. I had to keep pushing. But it was difficult over the next ten years to keep pace with that standard. I needed time to understand that it’s not always like this. It took me also years to understand you need to have bad experiences and bad decisions to really understand yourself. As an athlete, the journey is like this.

You have spoken before about feeling burnout in your career. Can you just explain that feeling? 

When I saw the first five years of my senior career, winning trophies, playing all the games, played for Pep and Klopp… and then I just started having like minor setbacks with injuries. Everything after that, it felt like, ‘OK, maybe I’m moving in the wrong direction’. That was the problem back then, because I had that standard and I wanted to keep that for the next 10 years. That was just impossible. So then I tried to train even more, do more things, and that was more of a big learning curve for me. I needed to understand that to expect to have that momentum for 15 years is almost impossible.

You took a break from the game in 2016. Did you consider stopping altogether?

No, that was not the case but I understood that I needed to change something, I needed a break, I needed to get out of the cycle and to give myself space, to give me more time to understand it. This took me a couple of months to get back to my routine, to my rhythm, to performing again and this helped me a lot.

Talk to me about Lionel Messi. You actually got a picture with him on the night you beat him and Argentina in the World Cup final…

Maybe it was not the best timing! I’m not sure about that. Probably I shouldn’t have asked him, but it was in the moment. I said, ‘OK, he’s my idol, he is so good, he is the best player in the world’. I think he was OK with it, but of course he was disappointed, they lost the game.

You’re 34, he’s nearly 39. When you see what he’s doing…. how do you explain it? 

Crazy, eh? It is almost impossible to explain. He’s just one of a kind. How his career has developed over time and how he did everything and the performances he had, the goals he scored … Performing on that level still is just crazy.

It’s good for him now also to be at Inter Miami to not have that pressure, or that physical impact… If you look at the statistics and the physical load he normally has, it’s very low. But he’s the only person who can do that. It is decisive for him to walk and then to be there in the right moment.

You mentioned earlier you did not always make the best decisions. Can you explain that? 

To presume that that the early standard was normal, that’s a bad decision for myself, to have that expectation. But also the media created that expectation. I moved from Dortmund to Bayern, then I moved back to Dortmund. Maybe it was not the best decision. Because in the end, I was going back to where I have been successful before.

I think that was not the right idea. But when I made that call, Dortmund had played the best season they ever played. Thomas Tuchel was coach. They gained the most points they ever gained in a Bundesliga season. I thought, ‘OK, I know the surroundings. They have a good team. Maybe we can challenge Bayern’. The other option I had was the UK or Italy, but those teams did not play in the Champions League.

Which teams in England? 

Liverpool was close. Klopp was there. I was in Liverpool visiting him. I was speaking to Juventus and there were two clubs in Spain.

When you look back at what Liverpool did under Klopp, is it a regret you didn’t move there?

One hundred per cent. Then I try and understand: was it the club or was it Klopp that made me the player and person who I was in Dortmund? When I look at it through the rear view, he had such a big impact on me and the club.

What position would you have played in that Liverpool team?

Liverpool played 4-3-3, Roberto Firmino was striker, I probably would have worn No. 8 in that system. They had Fabinho, Jordan Henderson, Gini Wijnaldum. Then they bought Thiago Alcantara in this No. 8 position.

You have had amazing coaches. If we start with Klopp, what does he do for players? 

What he understands and what most coaches maybe do not understand is how to manage people. Managing players, managing expectations, putting people together as a whole, he understood that in the perfect way. He can be very sharp in the things he wants and demands. That’s why he was so successful.

I read one interview when he was in Liverpool, he said he has to put together people who like each other, so that they then perform like 120 per cent instead of 100 per cent. That is what he did.

Given what you say about him, why did you not go to Liverpool? 

I really liked the idea of going to him, but the club was in a not so good situation. They played in the Europa League and I came from Bayern, winning the World Cup, playing Champions League every time, always coming in the semi-finals, and that was my expectation. I didn’t understand at that point that some things need time. In the rear view, of course it’s easy, but that’s my learning.

How was Pep Guardiola different to Klopp?

The biggest difference is the managing part of people and humans. This was the core thing Klopp did. Pep was more the specialist in tactics and demanding performance.

Before Pep, I viewed football differently when it comes to free spaces and playing different systems. To understand the game on that level was crazy. He knows so many things but he was clever in giving all the information in a very simple 10-20 minute video, or going on the pitch for tactics for ten minutes. Over a season, it’s a lot because you have so many games but he was perfect in this minimized version of what he wants.

Tell me about Thomas Tuchel…

Also totally different to the other two coaches. He had a bit of everything, but also lacked, at least in Dortmund, a bit of everything as well. But it was his second job. It was things like understanding the dynamics in a club, for example, or political decisions, or managing players, ‘how do I speak to this guy?’… I think he developed that over time, which is also fair, because in the end he was also a young coach.

He became a complete coach and then he went Chelsea and won the Champions League. He developed over time in a really good way. But when I had him, it was his second year in Dortmund. It was not a good season with the team, the club, all these things we had outside the pitch. He understood the game very well and he also had good training sessions. Technically he was good and he was very smart in using the players with their strengths for his system.