Schürrle and the places the cameras won’t take you

Owner of a World Cup and a Premier League winners medal. Salary of around £5 million per year.

André Schürrle, age 29, retired last week.

After a season of niggles on loan in Russia, he terminated his contract with Dortmund through a mutual agreement, stating that “I no longer need the applause. The depths became deeper and the highlights less and less.”

It’s rare that a footballer in his prime physical years retires without major injury being the cause. David Bentley is the only other player that springs immediately to my mind.

Things like this fascinate me.

Most of us, through our teens and early adulthood, pay to play and watch football. A fiver here, forty quid for a ticket there, sports subscription packages. I almost feels like an essential to us. We don’t question doing it, even if it’s a stretch sometimes.

Imagine the psychological place you would have to go to to stop playing the game if you were at the highest level, being paid handsomely.

It may be difficult to put yourself in that place; in his boots. We would almost need to imagine his full career to fully understand coming to the destination he arrived at. I’m sure Schürrle loved football at some point. I’d guess for the vast majority of his career in fact.

What has happened to erode his love for the game to the point where he doesn’t want to be around it any longer?

I would love to know but we probably never really will. That’s fine; he doesn’t owe anybody an explanation, but my fascination remains.

His brief statement may be fleshed out a little over time. There may be more in-depth interviews. We may get an autobiography at some point. But we’ll probably get some glossy, low resolution, PR’d version of what happened. Like I said, fair enough. It is his business.

But my fascination remains. Even just as fans, we invest so much into the game that it’s impossible not to be curious about what really goes on behind the scenes and in the lives of players.

Documentaries like All or Nothing, Sunderland ‘Til I Die and The Last Dance go some of the way to satisfying these curiosities but they can never go all the way. They often need to keep their subjects happy or else their access stops.

Of course, players’ personal lives are more or less off limits.

The cameras can’t go there. We can’t know the full truth.

That’s where fiction comes in.

Sometimes, fiction allows the fullest exploration of the truth.

With no real subjects’ feelings to protect and no limit to where we can follow, we can get all the way to the bottom of things.

That is why I wrote FOUL. I had questions I knew would never be fully answered by documentaries, interviews and autobiographies.

If you’re fascinated by what truly goes on behind the scenes in football, I’d say my book is for you. You can even read the first few chapters for free at Amazon by downloading the sample here.

Back soon with more thoughts and interviews.

All the best to Schürrle on life after football.

Arton