Leon Goretzka is getting more and more muscular and more dominant in Bayern’s game. He would like to crown his positive development in the Champions League final against PSG.
—
Not only physically strong, but also gifted on the ball: midfielder Leon Goretzka (25).
Photo: Keystone
For Ralf Rangnick he is “the best box-to-box player in the world” at the moment. Many will agree with the 62-year-old expert, who most recently worked as sports director and trainer at RB Leipzig, after the impressions of the final tournament of the Champions League in Lisbon: Leon Goretzka belonged in the two games against Barcelona (8: 2) and Lyon (3 : 0) to the best Bayern players. And in the final against PSG the midfielder would like to crown his performance over the last few days.
The fact that Goretzka is playing an increasingly decisive role in the central midfield of the German champions is mainly due to the fact that he is no longer the slight professional he used to be. He used the free free time during the Corona game break for muscle training, but not for the purpose of attractive Instagram pictures, “but to increase muscle performance,” as he says. “Anyone who watches a 100-meter final in the track and field athletes will see that a muscular upper body and speed are more dependent than mutually exclusive.”
His values on the topics of speed and endurance would prove the positive development, he says, and there is also a new self-confidence at a high FC Bayern level. The latter, however, is a characteristic for the entire team: “With the good performance came the victories, with the victories came even more self-confidence, with the self-confidence came even more victories – like a vicious circle, only the other way round.”
As a 17-year-old he didn’t speak so pointedly, but Schalke’s manager Horst Heldt, who works for 1. FC Köln today, was already impressed by him before Goretzka moved from Bochum to Gelsenkirchen in 2013: “Polite, nice, respectful, clever, grateful for advice, but independent. He had a well-defined career plan, but there was nothing daydreaming about it. He was still a little shy and still quite grown up. ” But it was already clear then that Goretzka would not end his career at Schalke, says Heldt.
Snowballs were thrown at by the fans
The first few years passed slowly, injuries threw the talent back, and the new proportions impressed him. Goretzka had experienced wild things with Bochum, for example a 1: 6 in the icy Ore Mountains, in which the fans threw snowballs at him – their own fans. But 60,000 Schalke players in the stadium, especially 60,000 Schalke players in a bad mood – that was another dimension.
When he sees Goretzka today, Heldt recognizes “a mile jump, one sentence forward to the power of ten”. But he sees the same player from before – a player who attracts attention because he is “inconspicuously important”: “You don’t always see him, but he is always there.” At 25, Goretzka is where everyone saw him back then – but not yet there, as he himself says: “I’m pretty sure that my best time is just beginning.”
