Why footballers love playing with Ilkay Gundogan – ‘The game is more fluid with him on the pitch’

Germany are playing Hungary in their second group-stage game at Euro 2024, and seemingly from his bed, Jack Grealish is watching on.

After 67 minutes, Ilkay Gundogan scored, somehow finding eight yards of space in the box to sweep in Maximilian Mittelstadt’s cross. Grealish reached for his phone — and sent a post about his former Manchester City team-mate.

“Can’t explain how good this guy is man,” he said on his Instagram story, adding a clapping emoji. “Honestly one of the best I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with.”

There was something incredibly sweet about Grealish’s note. He had been devastated to miss out on England selection before the tournament, and could have been forgiven for burying his head under the covers. At the level Grealish plays at, he is not surrounded by anything but exceptional talent.

But most of all, there was no compulsion for Grealish to offer the compliment, no marketing spiel of transfer market long game (that we know of…). Instead, this was just one football obsessive offering his admiration of another.

It also showed something else.

“Can’t explain how good this guy is,” Grealish begins — and that is the nub of discussing Gundogan. There has always been something unexplainable about the 33-year-old’s game.

To be clear, nobody disputes his quality. That is why he is captain of Germany and has played in some of the defining sides of the last decade, such as Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City and Jurgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund.

But to ask people to explain exactly why Gundogan is so highly rated? That’s the challenge.

Maybe this is taking Grealish’s post too literally. But even so, the implication is clear. Gundogan has never been the best player in his team — but has always been a player who the best players want in the team. For almost 15 years, Gundogan has been the footballers’ footballer.

What do we talk about when we talk about Ilkay Gundogan? The Athletic spoke to his team-mates to discover the answer.

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Game intelligence

It is Gelsenkirchen, Gundogan’s hometown, and Portugal have just lost 2-0 to Georgia. Despite the result, and his desire to be back on the team bus, Bernardo Silva’s face lights up when asked about the topic. Together for six years before Gundogan’s departure for Barcelona last summer, the pair were symbols of the style Guardiola implemented at City.

“People might think I’m a bit biased because he’s a big friend of mine,” he begins. “But it was one of the biggest privileges of my career to share the dressing room with him.

“He’s a guy that can do a lot of different things. He can play No 6, No 8, No 10 — but my favourite position for him is when he plays close to the striker, because he’s so good at finding those spaces. The most difficult place to play is in the pockets in between the lines.”

This is the role he has been playing for Germany this summer — but that ability is also difficult to quantify. Finding space is finding absence, if duels equal data, he is moving away from numbers rather than towards them.

However, one useful metric was brought up by former Nuremberg team-mate Stefan Reinartz in an interview with Gundogan released on the tournament’s opening day.

In last year’s Champions League, according to Reinartz’s data analytics company Impect, Gundogan’s positioning when receiving the ball allowed him to bypass an average of 30 defenders per 90 minutes. That was the third-highest number in the competition — behind only Rodri and Federico Valverde (both 31.0).

Finding space as an advanced midfielder is like steering a ship through a storm — stillness only opens up momentarily, pressure can crash in from any direction. The processing speed required is exceptional. Gundogan’s sharpness is evident when he describes just a single clip from the 2023 Champions League final, his final game for City.

“Here, I need to give Rodri the opportunity to pass to me, because if I stay where I am, I am directly behind (Inter Milan midfielder) Nicolo Barella,” Gundogan explains.

“He has no way to pass to me, he cannot go over, it would take a lot of luck to play directly to Kevin De Bruyne (covered by Hakan Calhanoglu). So I have to change the angle to Kevin. It makes no sense for me to stand on the same line, so I have to go a little further forward, but also diagonally to open up the passing route.

“It is an extremely clean ball from Rodri, and easy for me to process whether to take the ball with my left or right foot. I hit Kevin, and then he can play the ball first time.”

Gundogan’s pass finds De Bruyne in stride. With Gundogan drawing defenders after spinning and turning himself, De Bruyne is in enough space to play the ball through to Erling Haaland, who has a good shooting opportunity. By offering himself as an option to Rodri, allowing the ball to reach De Bruyne indirectly, Gundogan creates what is known as a ‘third-man run‘, misdirecting Inter’s defence. The puzzle is solved in milliseconds.

“He spins and turns around in an outstanding manner,” says another former City team-mate, centre-back Aymeric Laporte, interviewed at Spain’s training base this week. “He gets every ball-control oriented towards going to attack straight away. I’ve seen very few players who can do that in those central positions.

“I would possibly compare him to David Silva, who was as good or even better in that regard, and Phil Foden from the younger generation. They make the difference simply by how they control the ball. Gundo gets it, and in a second he has a mental picture of your team, and his actions — it can be a pass, driving the ball, or a movement — always improve the attacking sequence of the team.”

The other Silva agrees. “He’s so patient, so good at deciding when to turn, when not to turn, when to play one touch, when to play two touches,” says Bernardo, who could meet Gundogan in a potential semi-final on Tuesday.

These are micro-details, not glamour — but Gundogan’s part is in the collective. The midfielder might have been born in Germany’s coal country, to a father who was a miner, but he plays the role of oil.

Jens Hegeler partnered Gundogan in midfield at Nuremberg in 2010-11, his final season before joining Dortmund. After retiring, he co-founded Impect alongside Reinartz.

“It always feels good to have him on the pitch, because you feel like the whole game is more fluid,” Hegeler explains. “There’s less chaos on the pitch, which somehow is created through his good positioning, through his calmness, through his way of supporting his team-mates.

“And that’s probably the part that Grealish is referring to, in a way, these small little things that he’s doing that, in total, have a big, big impact on the game.”

Others are always more visible than Gundogan — and that is probably why the Barcelona midfielder has always been a little underrated, the fourth- or fifth-most important name on a team sheet when listed by outsiders. Many players would not settle for this — but Gundogan is not wired in this way. Listening to him talk about his own game, everything is computed through his team-mates’ perspectives.

“These qualities are always a little underrated,” Gundogan told Prime Sport Deutschland. “Many people just think: ‘OK, who played the final pass, who got the assist, who scored the goal?’. But also, in the end, it is about who created the chance.

“Players who move between the chains need to have the quality of seeing where their team-mates are, where the opponents are — it is about making it as easy as possible for your team-mates.

“If you watch the highlights, you can maybe only see this role if you are really tactically analytical, or if you watch 90 minutes of the game – and honestly? Sometimes I don’t even watch it like that myself.”

Speaking to team-mates from Nuremberg, they are insistent that Gundogan’s game intelligence has always been intuitive — even if it has gone to another level since linking up under Klopp and Guardiola. Hegeler believes he knows why Gundogan developed it.

“(Game intelligence) was always his main strength,” Hegeler explains, remembering a midfield partner who was a callow 20-year-old when they played together. “And I think, to a degree, it was down to him not being the most physically gifted player. When other players were capable of solving situations due to their physical power and their pace, he needed to find solutions in a different way.

“He learned that he could be quicker than them — but in his awareness and decision-making process.”

The solution is reminiscent of a maxim made famous by Johan Cruyff, Guardiola’s footballing mentor — ”Every disadvantage has its advantage.” In Gundogan, Guardiola recognised a player who had achieved mastery of that.

Technical ability

When former Bayern Munich centre-back Jan Kirchhoff got to know Gundogan, while the pair played together for Germany Under-21s, what immediately stood out was his ability with the ball.

“It was the technical ability,” he tells The Athletic over the phone, in between taking training sessions for Mainz’s under-19 side. “Even under pressure he could control the ball, defend it. His passing and dribbling abilities were amazing.

“But then he developed into a more strategic role — reading the game, anticipating it, playing a little bit deeper than when I first got to know him. But those technical skills have always been there.”

These are the basics on which Gundogan’s game is built — for all his brain might understand, his body still must be able to follow. But when De Bruyne, one of the great ball-strikers of the modern era, describes your technical abilities in the following way, that scarcely seems an issue.

“It’s incredible how he hits a ball,” the Belgium international said in June 2023, describing Gundogan’s FA Cup final goal against Manchester United. “It went in perfectly. You can’t train on these things — the ball came in front of him and he smashed it.”

But really, when it comes to technical ability, the skill at which Gundogan excels is much more subtle. Hegeler uses the term ‘skill’ deliberately — though we may associate the word with rainbow flicks and Cruyff turns, it can encompass something as simple as foot selection.

“I don’t think any other player in the world picks the correct foot so often in order to take the best first touch for any situation,” he argues. “You know, picking it up on your left foot, second touch with the right foot, dribbling with the left.

“That’s something that looks easy afterwards, because it looks smooth because he does it so well. It’s natural for him, because he has learned it creates an advantage for him.”

This is all factored into Gundogan’s processing time — he is both scanning externally, situating the other 21 players on the pitch, and preparing himself internally, shuffling his feet to improve his speed of action.

“I’d have actually preferred to get the ball from Rodri on my left,” says Gundogan, analysing the same clip from the Champions League final (shown again above). “The opening might have emerged a bit faster and the action would have been slightly easier — but you have to make decisions within milliseconds. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but really good players adjust in a very short time to play the ball as best as possible.”

Here is another example, playing for Barcelona against Napoli in the Champions League last season. Sergi Roberto cuts infield, where Gundogan has found one of his trademark pockets of space.

The ball is played towards where his left foot is placed — but Gundogan quickly recalibrates. Realising that the tempo of the action lends itself to two touches — the passing angle for a return ball will open slightly too late for a one-touch pass — he shuffles his feet, receiving the ball with his right foot, and knocking it slightly back towards his own goal.

That subtle shift slightly widens the window — allowing him to play it through the narrow gap with his left foot, straight into Roberto’s feet. Roberto squares the ball to Robert Lewandowski for a simple finish. The margins were such that, had Gundogan used his feet in any other combination, the chance would have disappeared.

But Gundogan, of course, has what feels like an uncanny knack to score himself.

Box-crashing

Back in the summer of 2009, Nuremberg were undergoing an overhaul. They had made 15 signings — including an 18-year-old Gundogan, signed for €850,000 (£720,000; $920,000) from Bochum’s under-19s.

Australia international Dario Vidosic had joined two years before. That pre-season was more important than most — the team needed to quickly sort through the influx of new talent.

“I won’t forget this game he played,” Vidosic says, calling from Victoria, where he now coaches Melbourne City Women. “It was against Fenerbahce, who were a good team, and (Brazil legend) Roberto Carlos had just gone there. Ilkay was playing on the right of midfield, so they were facing each other — and he was the best player on the field in that friendly. It was his breakout game.

“There was one thing I remember, and it’s almost identical now, but it’s his ability to get in the box and score as a midfielder. He was so comfortable, he would just glide. He’s evolved, obviously, but still has some of that youthful exuberance, where he just seems free.”

That has continued for Germany at Euro 2024. In the game against Hungary that compelled Grealish to post, Gundogan not only scored himself, but gambled on a loose ball in the box, rapidly shuffled his feet, and managed to play it to Jamal Musiala for the opening goal.

Video for UK viewers:

Jamal Musiala opens the scoring for Germany 🔥

But was it a foul in the build up?#Euro2024 #GERHUN pic.twitter.com/3AINw3BLTb

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) June 19, 2024

Video for U.S. viewers:

GOAAAALLL GERMANY!! 🇩🇪

Jamal Musiala with the finish 👏👏 pic.twitter.com/sjwMHL0FX5

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) June 19, 2024

Back in 2020-21, he scored 17 goals for Manchester City in all competitions and was their top scorer as they won the Premier League. The scale of his scoring was the one thing that surprised former manager Klopp. In 2021-22, his two late goals against Aston Villa allowed City to pip Klopp’s Liverpool to the Premier League.

“Not at all,” Klopp replied when asked in February 2021 if he was surprised at Gundogan’s level of influence. “The goalscoring maybe a little bit, the rest not. Ilkay was one of the best players I ever coached. He was a very young player when he came to us from Nuremberg to Dortmund. Especially in the 2012 season, he was unbelievable and played pretty much like he is playing now. He was always that player.

“When you are smart and experience comes into play as well, it’s another jump in your performance level, and I’m not surprised at all.”

So what is the secret to his goalscoring? Gundogan scores scrappy goals — and this is a compliment — the sort of poached finishes expected from a grizzled striker, not from a box-to-box midfielder.

The chart below shows his average shot distance — and though he might have the occasional shot from long range when not under pressure, the hotspots are within the penalty area.

“I’ve never seen him take a shot he shouldn’t, or take a shot in a way that he shouldn’t,” says Kirchhoff. “It’s always controlled. It’s always smooth. It’s always the right thing to do.”

Guardiola has coached some of this generation’s greatest strikers — Lionel Messi, Sergio Aguero, Lewandowski and Haaland — and has described Gundogan as sharing some of their traits. After one goal against West Bromwich Albion in January 2021, where Gundogan made a run in behind and controlled it perfectly with his left before finishing with his right, Guardiola analysed the finish in detail.

“He has the right tempo to make the run,” Guardiola said. “He doesn’t arrive in the box 10 times or 20 times, (he) doesn’t arrive one metre before or one metre later. He had to arrive in the right tempo, in the right time. When he arrives he has the calm, the slowdown, that action to make a decision.”

At Nuremberg, Vidosic remembers Gundogan striking up a friendship with club legend Marek Mintal, a Slovakia international, who had scored 66 league goals in 180 appearances for the club. The pair are still close today.

“We were a young group back then, and so we would hang behind after training and learn from the older ones,” he says. “Ilkay was close with Marek, and both of them were incredibly professional. After every session, they would work together, work on different types of finishing.”

This has led to moments of rare innovation. Remember Gundogan’s description of the top players adjusting? Here, against Everton, in his final season at City, Gundogan receives a cross at an awkward height with his back to goal.

He solves the problem instantaneously — using that footwork. First, he controls the ball on his right thigh to send it looping in the air, which gives him enough time to reset, rebalance on his left leg, and raise his right foot. By using the outside of his right boot, he can manipulate the ball around Nathan Patterson, who is shirt-tight behind him, giving Jordan Pickford no chance.

Amazed, City’s players lose their heads. Gundogan keeps his.

Mentality

This is the final trait that Gundogan’s team-mates raise — his demeanour. Variously, they mention his ability to deal with pressure, his leadership, his calmness. In a Germany attack where he is surrounded by younger talent — Musiala (21), Florian Wirtz (21), and Kai Havertz (25) — he is the gleaming pillar around which the merry-go-round horses rotate.

“Lots of players were maybe equally talented but didn’t make it,” says Vidosic. “But even at a young age, he had this maturity around him, even about how he was off the field.”

For Kirchhoff, Gundogan was often his escape. “You know when you’re under pressure and face questions within a game? You look to who’s finding and offering solutions. It was Ilkay. These are the players you want — who keep possession in tight spaces, who see the pressure before it arrives, and can think a step ahead in terms of getting out of that pressure.”

To a man, Gundogan’s ex-team-mates bring up press resistance as a defining characteristic.

The chart below, using data from SkillCorner, explores how often a midfielder receives pressure on the ball. Gundogan is low in quantity — just 44th out of 58 eligible midfielders in La Liga last season — and some of that may be due to his ability, described by Kirchhoff, to predict pressure and find space.

When he is pressured, he has a retention rate of 87 per cent — well above the average for his position.

“He was just super, super pressure resistant,” explains Hegeler. “I don’t just mean in terms of the opponent pressing you — he also didn’t care if he was playing Bayern Munich away, in front of a big crowd, when he was still a young player. He could always manage his expectations, so the bigger the game, the better he’d play.”

Over the last decade, Gundogan has scored goals in FA Cup and Champions League finals, and Premier League deciders. The one thing he is missing is an international tournament knockout moment. He did not make it off the bench at Euro 2012 and was injured for the 2014 World Cup and Euro 2016, and Germany did not even reach the quarter-finals at the next three tournaments.

He is now captain of Germany, at a tournament played on home soil.

“Ilkay would lead from example, more than yelling at anyone or anything like that,” says Vidosic. “It’s a calm leadership — let me show you, let me lead you, let me be there for you.”

Gundogan is, however, prepared to be firm — as he had to be at times with an underperforming Barcelona last season.

“It is extremely important to hold the mirror in front of your face. I am always open, very honest and very direct with how I deal with the situation,” he told Prime Sport Deutschland.

Later, the way he discusses elite managers gives one final window into his personality. “Human skills should not be underestimated,” he explains. “You are in a squad with a minimum of 25 different characters. You have to deal with them on a daily basis, as a coach, get them under control, and to satisfy everyone is basically impossible. That balance is extremely difficult to find, but also extremely important.”

Gundogan wants this characteristic in managers — but he already has it in the way he plays. Why is he the footballer’s footballer? One adjective describes it best. Empathy.

He has 25 team-mates in the Germany squad — and Hegeler believes Gundogan’s greatest skill is the ability to understand each as players. He has experienced it himself.

“He just makes it easier for you, in the sense that you feel there’s someone who, in any action, is working to support your action,” he says. “He’ll give you more space if you need more space, if you need support, he’ll come close and give you the option of a little one-two.

“That’s different to a lot of players who might be concerned with what they want to do, or how they can get into a situation where they can do their own magic. Of course, Ilkay has the magic himself, but he’s more looking at: ‘How can I support my team-mate? How can I help him get into the area he prefers? How can I help Grealish into the situation that suits him most?’.

“He’s an empathetic player on the pitch. That’s Ilkay.”

Additional contributors: Oliver Kay, Pol Ballus

(Photo: Kevin Voigt/Getty Images)