‘I would score the World Cup-winning goal when I’m 35 and then stop playing’

Mario Gotze seems relaxed.

He's just come straight from the sauna after training, at Eintracht Frankfurt's beautifully appointed training ground. He sits down across the table from The Athletic and leans back, with the air of a man at peace.

You could forgive him for being more tense. We are meeting two days before Hansi Flick is due to announce his Germany squad for the World Cup. (Against all the odds, Gotze will receive a call-up to Qatar — having not played for his country since 2017.)

But Gotze is calm. It's not that he doesn't care, more that he seems pretty content with his lot at the moment. He is playing brilliantly for Frankfurt, who have qualified for the Champions League knockout phase, which starts in February. He has a young son. Years of fitness and health struggles appear to be behind him. Plus, he has already achieved the thing that everyone who plays international football wants to do.

It's eight years since that winning goal for Germany against Argentina in the 2014 World Cup final. Plenty of time has passed and plenty has happened to Gotze in the interim to allow him to fully process it. You forget that he was just 22 then, arguably too young to fully comprehend the magnitude of what he had done.

“It took me some time to really understand and also to process everything,” he says. “Now I have a bit of time to review and really understand what happened.

“It was interesting for me to understand soccer a bit better. In the end it's just these moments, these highlights, which are very important.”

When you do something like that at such a young age, there must be a temptation to think: what now? What is there left to achieve? The thought must occur: 'Things aren't getting better than this — maybe I should quit at the top.' It's something that Gotze clearly thought about.

“If I could rewrite (history) a bit, I would score the goal when I'm 35, and then I would stop playing.”

He says it with a smile, but you can understand the sentiment.

Gotze was introduced as an extra-time substitute in that final at the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro by Joachim Low: legend has it he told him to “go out there and prove you're better than Messi”.

It feels like one of those apocryphal stories, a nice line and a tale to tell that has little to do with reality.

But, as it turns out, it's true.

“He didn't know what else to say…it was just to motivate me in that moment.”

It worked, Gotze chesting down a cross on the left side of the area from Andre Schurrle and hooking a shot into the corner past Sergio Romero. “It was just instinct, because everything happened so fast. You cannot really make decisions. Then what I can remember is that we still had to play seven, eight, nine more minutes.

“They had a free kick afterwards, like I think the 119th minute or something, and it was like, 'OK if he scores now it's 1-1, then penalties…'.”

Gotze holds aloft the World Cup in 2014 after Germany beat Argentina in the final (Photo: Shaun Botterill – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

After the celebrations, with friends and family in Brazil and with the rest of Germany after their return home, reality returned.

“I had only 20 days of holidays and then I started again with Bayern, then we played a cup game one week after. Four weeks ago you won the World Cup, and now you're playing against a third-division team in the cup. It was quite strange.”

Gotze doesn't mention, perhaps out of modesty, that he scored in that game, too — the first in a 4-1 win over Preussen Munster. From that point of view, there was no problem with his motivation after glory in Rio.

However, over the next few years, more problems began to emerge. Gotze would feel fatigued — not just tired, but fatigued, unable to perform at nearly the level he was used to. Initially at least, he tried to just power through, but soon he realised that was unsustainable.

“Back then if I was training, I trained after training, I did something before training or, if we had a day off, I didn't take a day off. Or if I was on vacation for three weeks, I would start running after three days. These kinds of things I did when I was young — in the end, it was just stupid.

“Going further, doing more, all the time, that you don't give yourself rest or pause. If you do that continuously over many years, my body just reacted to it and said, 'That's enough'.”

It's perfectly understandable that Gotze would try to power through: after all, what footballer hasn't played carrying an injury, or tried to ignore an ailment just to stay in the team?

But it turned out Gotze had metabolic exhaustion due to a hormone imbalance: or, to put it another way, a form of chronic fatigue which simply wouldn't allow him to perform at the levels required to remain at the top of the game.

It's not uncommon to see it in athletes who compete in endurance sports, such as triathlon, but they find it easier to recognise because of the nature of their training, which involves building up to the big events rather than the constant grind footballers and other team-sport players are faced with.

The condition wasn't quite as mysterious as was suggested at the time, although it was exacerbated by a series of injuries, like the torn adductor muscle during his third season at Bayern.

Nor was it exactly career-threatening.

“I wouldn't go that far,” Gotze says. “I knew it could be handled. It's not like a disease or a virus that you cannot get rid of. In the end it was a logical process for me to understand that if I do it right, then, in a couple of months, everything will be fine.”

Gotze went on medication for a couple of weeks, but his most notable method of combating the condition was to take himself away from the game for the best part of half a season, from the end of January 2016. It was a particularly tough call: this was his first season back at Borussia Dortmund, the club he had left to join Bayern in 2013, and in theory he had a new manager to impress, Thomas Tuchel.

“It was a very difficult decision,” he says. “Because I had to explain it to the club — normally if you have an injury, you can say, 'Look, I have a rupture, a broken whatever'. I had to tell them, 'Look for something you cannot really see or feel. But it's there'.

“[Tuchel] was very open to it. He really understood.”

It was an emotionally intelligent decision, a recognition he was not indestructible and that he couldn't continue as he used to.

He came back the following season but, while he had good spells, it was never quite the same. He left for a second time at the end of the pandemic-extended 2019-20 season, and made the conscious decision to get out of Germany, to move away from the immediate spotlight and search for his groove in a place where his history wasn't following him.

That place was Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where under Roger Schmidt at PSV he thrived and slowly rediscovered consistency and form. He hit double figures in goals for the first time since 2014-15. He won the Dutch domestic cup. His two years with PSV helped him to thrive again. So when he had the chance to return to Germany this summer, he took it.

“It was very important for me, especially because I played 10 years in the Bundesliga, and then I had a moment where I could be somewhere else, where I don't know all the people, the players. It was very important to have a different experience and it helped me in a lot of ways — off the pitch, on the pitch. I needed just to play to get back in my rhythm.”

Gotze also overhauled his entire fitness regime. Out went the double sessions and the constant work; in came yoga, taekwondo and rest. He became more willing to listen to what his body was telling him. “I prioritise sleep, nutrition, all these other things which are very important — especially if you get older as an athlete.”

He has some advice for past-life Mario: “When I look back now, what would I say to my younger self now is this thing I had when I just tried to train, do more every day, work on myself — you have to work for sure, you have to have talent, but you cannot forget that also, time changes.”

Gotze with The Athletic's Nick Miller and Laurie Whitwell on their journey to Qatar

Perspective has helped, too. His son, Rome (the name was inspired by the character Roman in US TV drama Succession — Gotze was horrified when he discovered Kevin De Bruyne also named his child Rome), was born a couple of years ago. “If you have children, everything changes. It's not important if you score or win or are injured, you have to wake up and feed them. You don't have a choice.”

That perspective perhaps helps him deal with the national-team talk. That, and a recognition that if he retired tomorrow, he would still have a career to be proud of.

“I played eight years in the national team. I started when I was 18, until 26. I think I've played 60, 65 games. So when I look back, I had a great time.

“I didn't expect this to happen because in the end, for me, my club is very important and I haven't been with the national team for six years. So in the end, for me, the most important thing is what happens here at the club, especially now with the Bundesliga, the Champions League and the cup.”

The fact he was even in the conversation for the World Cup squad is extraordinary, considering what he has been through.

Regardless of what happens in Qatar over the next month or so, Gotze has rebuilt his career, but perhaps more importantly, he seems happy, content with where he is now.

Gotze belongs to that slightly odd bracket of players: not one of the very greats — a Diego Maradona, or a Ronaldo (either one), or a Lionel Messi — but one who has achieved the greatest thing in the game.

Everyone dreams of scoring the winner in the World Cup final.

It's tempting to liken him to the men who have walked on the Moon, then returned to Earth and had problems adjusting to the realities of normal life.

It's taken Gotze a while, but now he's back.

Who knows: maybe he'll walk on the Moon again.

(Top photo: Amin Mohammad Jamali/Getty Images)