Rise and rise of a kid who couldn't lose

THE skinny lad from a nondescript town became a superstar.

Mesut Ozuil

MESUT Ozil arrived with quite a boast. When the slight, shy seven-year-old's father, Mustafa, first approached Ralf Maraun, the coach of DJK Westfalia, a boys' team in the Gelsenkirchen suburb where the family lived, to recommend his son, his sales pitch was an extravagant one.

"I'll bring him next week," he said. "With him in the team, you will never lose another game."

True to his word, both Ozils were in attendance for the team's next match. Mesut was nothing much to look at; skinny, small, a scrap of a lad, according to Maraun's son, Fabian, one of the young Ozil's new teammates.

"My dad told me what Mesut's dad had said," Fabian Maraun remembers. "We laughed about it. It was a big claim. The other teams tended to laugh when they saw Mesut, too, because he was so much smaller than everyone else. Then he started playing."

Ozil Sr was not quite right. Westfalia did lose a game in the three years his son turned out for it, but it won all of the others. "When he had scored three goals in the first five minutes, everyone stopped laughing," Maraun says.

Word soon got out Westfalia had something special. Maraun's father recalls other coaches asking him to leave his star turn out of games to level the playing field.

Three themes emerge when investigating how Ozil went from the painfully shy son of second-generation Turkish immigrants in Gelsenkirchen, a nondescript town in the Ruhr Valley.

Those who know him, and know his family, agree on his obvious natural talent, honed in the Affenkafig -- the "monkey cage" -- in the heart of Bismarck, the district where he grew up. It is a five-a-side pitch, enclosed by a mesh fence, where children play scratch games for hours on end.

"Everyone can join in and there are not many rules," Maraun says. "You could tell that was where Mesut learnt to play. You need good technique . . . you need to be able to play passes through the smallest spaces. That was his gift."

They talk, too, about how quiet he was. Ozil went from Westfalia to another local team, Schalke Teutonia-Nord, a club affiliated to the Bundesliga side, then on to the junior ranks of Rot-Weiss-Essen. "I don't remember him saying anything other than 'yes' or 'no' for the first few months," Andreas Winkler, his coach there, says. "The first time I heard him say a full sentence was when he came to my office to ask for a pair of boots. Those were the days when everyone wore black boots, but Mesut liked coloured ones, and I would buy them for him every few months."

The most prolific leitmotif, though, is the role his father played in shaping his career. It was Mustafa who took Mesut to Westfalia, rather than one of the Turkish teams -- his brother, Mutlu, and uncle, Serdar, played for Firtinasport then Genclerbirligi Resse -- and it was Mustafa, too, who sounded out Essen. "There is nobody at the club who could say they first spotted Mesut," Winkler says. "His father came to us and said his son would be one of the best players in the world."

Ozil stayed for five years in Essen, working his way through the youth ranks. In 2005, Essen refused to offer him a senior contract -- the president at the time did not know how special he was, Winkler says -- so Mustafa took him to Schalke. Essen did not get a cent. He would leave Schalke after a contractual dispute, too, before he rose to prominence at Werder Bremen.

It would be easy to assume Mustafa's motives were pecuniary, but those who know the family insist that it is not the case. "He just wants the best for his son," a friend says. "He knows the talent that he has." He has for a long time, it seems, since that first, bold, accurate promise.

THE TIMES