England’s Biggest Regret? How Jamal Musiala Became Germany’s Golden Boy

Whenever you feel frustrated that your national team manager can’t get anything right. Just think to yourself: “at least I’m not English.”

Because some of the things Gareth Southgate does, no one can possibly explain. Look, you know Jamal Musiala?! The German 21-year-old that may just be the best dribbler on the planet right now? The one with 58 goal contributions over the last two seasons?

Well, he is not so German. In fact, he played for the English under-15s, 16s, 17s, and 21s… you name it… 23 matches in total… while only showing up for Germany twice. Just 4 years ago, the director of Germany’s youth program had declared defeat, accepting that “Jamal had clearly signaled that he sees his future with the English national team.”

Gareth Southgate had an open goal chance. He just had to make a couple calls, bring the kid over for a friendly or two, and it was all over. Yet somehow, just 6 months later, as England had to face Germany for the 2020 Euros round of 16. Jamal Musiala was standing on the other side of the pitch.

And before you come at me saying that “no one could be sure Musiala would turn out to be this good”

How A 4 Month Vacation In England Led Chelsea To Buy 8 Year Old Jamal Musiala

Be real for a second. There have been very few young talents as obviously destined for greatness as this kid. His own dad was a football player back in Nigeria. At the age of 5, he joined his local club, still back in Germany, and broke the 100 goal mark in his first season.

In the words of his own academy coach, the kid came out of the womb “scoring 5 or 10 goals a match.” I mean, back then he was still so innocent and naive. His coach’s biggest worry was getting him to stop celebrating the other team’s goal, and yet, they instantly had to bump him up two years because the kids his age stood no chance.

Only 2 years after that, his mom brought him with her to England on a 4-month university exchange program. With the kid being so crazy about football, after only a few days failing to find him a team, his parents legitimately walked straight into Southampton’s offices. Somehow, by the time they came out, the kid had been invited to be in this summer camp type thing the club was organizing.

Jamal Musiala didn’t even speak a single word of English, but even with the likes of Levi Colwill already in that same program, it only took a couple days before everyone realized he was the most talented kid on the block. His own coach started calling him “the special one” and before the scouts got invited over.

In fact, according to that same coach: “The first time a scout came, it couldn’t have gone any better. Jamal scored 6 in the opening 10 minutes then, jokingly, started trying to assist every single one of his teammates. By the end of the match, he was very upset that he had missed one of them.”

A week later, Southampton had already brought him in for a test match and even then, Jamal Musiala proceeded to score more than 10 goals in the space of an hour or so. From there on out, the club’s mission was to try and hide the kid long enough to convince him to sign a long-term youth contract. But only a few weeks later, there were Chelsea and Arsenal scouts in the stands.

It was all supposed to be just a 4-month stay while his mom got some university work done, and now their phones wouldn’t stop ringing. In her own words: “We couldn’t believe it, we were simply overwhelmed. When Jamal heard that Chelsea were inviting him to take a tour of their academy, he started crying. For him, it was a huge honor just to be invited.”

Suddenly, the kid was training at Cobham only a few pitches away from the likes of Drogba and Lampard. Obviously, Southampton had completely lost the race. You could even find his old coach desperately asking everyone on Facebook how they could convince the kid to sign for them.

But before any team had managed to do so, his mom’s interchange program was over, and now they had to go back to Germany. But really, do you think there was any chance Chelsea was gonna let go of this? Less than half a year later, the family was already moving permanently to London.

As the mom said: “It’s a step into the unknown. We definitely packed our bags with mixed feelings. You never know how things will turn out, if Jamal will fit in, if he’ll like his school.”

How 10 Year Old Jamal Musiala Got A Personal Training Session With Gareth Southgate

I know it’s easy to say now, but I think it all turned out pretty well. Before you knew it, Jamal Musiala was traveling all across Europe with the club, either scoring screamers in Poland, taking top scorer awards in Madrid, or at one point, impressing so much in a Belgian tournament that he and his team got invited to Downing Street to meet the Prime Minister himself.

Remember, this kid was still in primary school at the time. Speaking of which, Musiala was what they call a model pupil. He was the kind of kid who signed up for any extracurricular he could find. He was in the chess club, he practiced martial arts, and let me say, he was impressively good at them. But of course, he also had to join the school’s football team, and that was just kind of hilarious.

With him there, they were making it to the final stage of the EFL Kids Cup every year, which is no small feat. Not only were there over a thousand schools in the running, but whoever made it was partnered with a Premier League club. This means there are pictures of baby Musiala going around breaking ankles in a full Fulham kit.

On the other hand, the first time he won it, he did so while playing at Anfield, getting handed his top scorer and player of the tournament awards by Jordan Henderson and Dirk Kuyt. The year after that, it got even funnier. The final was at Wembley, and when Jamal Musiala got there, he looked his PE teacher in the eye, asked him what players had scored hat tricks at that stadium, and told him, “Well, I’m gonna score one too.”

Not only did he go ahead and score 4 instead, but he did it with Gareth Southgate watching from the stands. In fact, once they won, part of their reward was a training session with him. The man had been aware of Jamal Musiala’s existence since the time he was ten years old, and he still managed to fumble the chance to call him up.

But regardless, even if Southgate couldn’t spot a talent if it smacked him in the face, everyone else seemed well aware that this kid isn’t normal.

The Insane Butterfly Effect That Led Bayern To Sign Musiala

The day he finished primary school, he got himself a scholarship to Whitgift. This elite private school is known for producing some of the best athletes in the country, from rugby world vice champion Elliot Daly to cricket world champion Jason Roy, as well as a lot of other Chelsea academy players like Bertrand Traoré, Victor Moses, and most important of all, Callum Hudson-Odoi. You’ll get what I mean soon.

The point is, with 13-year-old Jamal Musiala now eligible for a call-up to England and having just scored 50 goals in a single season with Chelsea under-15s, I’m guessing they realized he could probably be somewhat useful for their own under-15s. So they called him up, and he scored on his debut.

A year later, they called him up again, and he opened their match against the Netherlands by casually scoring a hat trick in the opening 30 minutes of the match. He celebrated by knee sliding towards the corner flag alongside his roommate, a little boy named Jude Bellingham. This got them enough attention that the German national team came calling.

But the following year, once Jamal Musiala actually gave it a try, he went and played two matches back in his home country. As much as he felt honored that they had invited him, he felt like an outcast. England had truly become his home, so he went back.

But there was a problem. Three years before, 51% of the English population had voted in favor of leaving the European Union. With everyone at the time being convinced that March 2019 would be the date Brexit would finally take place, Jamal Musiala’s immigrant parents began feeling less and less comfortable with their situation.

And right then and there, it happened. Bayern Munich, the biggest club in Germany, the one Musiala supported as a kid, had been scouting none other than Callum Hudson-Odoi. As I just mentioned, Callum not only played at the same club as Musiala but also went to his same school, just two grades above him. They didn’t just know each other; they were friends.

This meant that once Callum’s brother and agent, Bradley, met up for talks with Hasan Salihamidzic, Bayern’s sporting director, they mentioned Jamal Musiala’s name over and over again. With their under-16 manager having been obsessed with Musiala for over 4 years, ever since he had spotted him in a friendly trip to London with his previous club FC Augsburg, once the negotiations with Odoi stalled and Bayern realized they wouldn’t be able to get him, their head scout, Marco Neppe, gave the green light.

So, in July 2019, for a mere 170 thousand pounds, with Chelsea banking on a 20% sell-on fee to bring them future profit, 16-year-old Jamal Musiala joined Bayern Munich.

Taking A Champions League Medal At 18 Years Of Age

The moment he arrived, he was once again treated like a star. His new coach, none other than Miroslav Klose, handed him the number 10 shirt and slid him right into his own team despite the fact he’d be the youngest player there.

On his first training session, everyone at the club was in the stands watching. Though he started off a little slow, still recovering from breaking his jaw in school right before making the switch, once he got a game, as always, he went in with a goal. Only 11 matches later, already on 6 goals and 2 assists, they bumped him up to the under-19s. But even that didn’t last long.

In February 2020, only 8 months after his comeback to Germany, Jamal Musiala was called up to training with the first team by manager Hansi Flick. Even with the pandemic coming in between his progress and forcing the league to suspend football for 2 months, by June, in the second to last match of the season, Jamal Musiala was given his debut.

It was only 2 minutes against Freiburg, but it made him the youngest player in the history of the Bundesliga and came just in time for him to collect the trophy as well. Though soon, that wouldn’t look so impressive. With the pandemic forcing UEFA to delay the Champions League and turn it into a summer tournament, Flick called up Jamal Musiala.

He then proceeded to sit on the bench for two of the matches that led them to the final, collecting a medal once Bayern won the competition. After 2 minutes of first-tier football, Musiala was a European Champion. The next season, after 8 more minutes on the pitch, Jamal Musiala scored in the league’s opening game to snatch the record of youngest goalscorer in the history of the country right out of the hands of the legendary Roque Santa Cruz.

And it was right then that the drama started.

How Gareth Southgate Lost Musiala

No matter how much his German teammates hounded Jamal Musiala, telling him over and over again that he should drop England and represent Germany instead, that year he went on to debut for England’s under-21s. This led the German football association to announce they had stopped pursuing him, claiming they “wished the best of luck in his sporting career and accepted his decision.” This might have been true, except for one man: Joachim Löw.

Over the next couple of months, Jamal Musiala kept making it harder and harder for Löw to deal with the fact they had just lost a talent like him. By December, with Bayern already trailing 1 goal behind Leipzig only 25 minutes into the match, Javi Martinez fell to the ground injured and asked to be replaced. Hansi Flick decided it was time for Jamal Musiala to get more than a quarter of an hour of game time per match.

Ten minutes later, he had smacked one in from outside the box to tie the match and started the play that put Bayern in front, as the stadium announcer yelled into the microphone, “I don’t believe it.” By the end of the match, Löw didn’t resist giving Musiala another call. By February, with the kid coming of age and signing his first professional contract with Bayern, Löw and Bierhoff flew over to Munich to meet him.

In Jamal Musiala’s own words: “They were very interested in me personally, wanted to get to know me as a person. I was impressed by how they worked out and analyzed my playing style. In the end, even if it wasn’t an easy decision, I just listened to my gut feeling.” This meant that despite insisting that England was still “home,” Musiala, who admitted that even then “his German wasn’t perfect,” the same kid who just a few years back had captained his English teammates in a match against Germany, had now announced that he would be representing the Bavarians instead.

The very next month, he was already debuting in the World Cup qualifiers, becoming the youngest German to play for the national team since Uwe Seeler. Meanwhile, despite the fact that even Nigeria’s national team manager had made sure to meet with him that very same year in a last-ditch effort to get him to represent his father’s country, when Southgate was asked about it, he admitted that the last time he had met with Jamal Musiala was way back in the EFL Kids Cup when Musiala was like 10. He acted like there was nothing he could have done.

Thankfully for him, once they did meet in the Euros 3 months later, England managed to take the win. But well, Jamal Musiala only played one minute, which clearly wasn’t gonna be happening for much longer.

Outperforming Messi At The World Cup

After that dramatic exit, Löw got the sack and Flick took over while Nagelsmann took his spot at Bayern. This meant that in one motion, Jamal Musiala now had managers who were willing to bet on him for both club and country, so things sped up once more.

By October, Musiala had become the youngest player to score for Germany since 1910. The month after, he was on the podium for both the Kopa Trophy and the Golden Boy award. By the end of the season, he was subbed in right in the middle of Der Klassiker and scored the goal that sealed the Bundesliga title.

By the end of the year, with Jamal Musiala once again on the podium of the Kopa Trophy, Nagelsmann had no doubt that he had to be in his World Cup squad. It turned out that he was the one player who deserved to be there more than anyone else. After Germany shocked the world by going in with a defeat to Japan, Musiala showed up against Spain, assisting Germany’s only goal and completing a tournament record 9 dribbles in a single match. He did this while going up against Gavi and Pedri, the two players who had beaten him to the Golden Boy award.

This led Ballon d’Or winner Lothar Matthäus to claim in an international broadcast that “Jamal Musiala can be the Messi of the future.” This looked almost like foreshadowing when, in the very next match, the 19-year-old dropped the second-greatest dribbling performance in the history of the World Cup. He created 3 chances and hit the post twice, but above all, he allowed his Nigerian ancestry to kick in and got within 2 dribbles of breaking Jay Jay Okocha’s all-time record for the most completed in a single match.

For some perspective, once the group stage was done, he had completed twice as many dribbles as Messi. In fact, he had almost twice as many as any other player in the tournament. No wonder everyone on Twitter was raving about him, comparing him to Messi once more. Had Germany not gotten knocked out, I think Enzo Fernández would have stood no chance going up against Jamal Musiala for the Young Player of the Tournament award. He had outperformed so much that the FA voted the 19-year-old as the national team’s Player of the Year by a huge margin.

When Jamal Musiala Dunked On Jude Bellingham

Regardless, if that wasn’t enough, then Jamal Musiala brought his game to a whole new level. He dropped a perfectly balanced 16 goals and 16 assists in just 3000 minutes, closing out his year by scoring an 89th-minute match winner in the very last match of the season. This goal snatched the title right out of the hands of rivals Dortmund and his old friend Jude Bellingham as they were already celebrating the title with the fans.

It was one of the most legendary endings to a season in the history of European football, and Musiala was front and center. Even though that earned him a nomination for the Ballon d’Or, he still lost out on the Golden Boy once again, this time to Jude Bellingham. Now, 6 months later, with England struggling at the Euros, Jamal Musiala has scored in every match and has partnered up with Florian Wirtz to make Germany, in the eyes of some, the favorites to take the title. I can already see him taking the Player of the Tournament award with Bellingham watching from home. One thing is sure: choosing Germany over England is looking like a better decision each and every day.