Serge Gnabry
After an uncertain, injury-hit start at Arsenal, the livewire forward is thriving in Munich and will be a key man for Germany at the Euros
As Germany prepare to do battle with France and Portugal in their Euro 2020 “Group of Death”, Bundestrainer Joachim Low will have one overriding wish this year: that front-running virtuoso Serge Gnabry suffers no further injuries after an Achilles problem just before Christmas. Over the last 12 months or so, the 24-yearold Bayern Munich forward has morphed into a Nationalmannschaft talisman, not only emerging as the team’s top scorer in the European Championship qualifiers with eight goals but also supplying much of the team’s attacking explosiveness and craft.
While the Stuttgart-born star normally operates on the right wing for Bayern, Low likes to unleash him in several different ways in national team colours – sometimes out wide, on other occasions as a second striker or as leader of the line. In a German side in transition following the debacle of Russia 2018 he is now a gold-plated reference point; both gamechanger and tone-setter. The son of an Ivorian father and German mother, Gnabry is the complete weapons-grade package. Short, squat and powerful, he can leave defenders for dead with his pace and tricks. He has two good feet, is sharp and clever on the counter-attack, and boasts a fine football brain. Often
the quickest players have the worst on-field instincts, but he stands for the best of both worlds.
He is a natural finisher, too. One only has to look at his recent highlights reel: a four-goal blitz in Bayern’s 7-2 Champions League win away at Tottenham Hotspur in October; his hat-trick as Germany crushed Northern Ireland 6-1 in a Euro 2020 qualifier; and his magnificent solo strike in the 3-2 victory in Holland in the same elimination group, cutting in from the left, turning centre-back Virgil Van Dijk inside out and firing a right-foot effort into the top corner.
Just 13 games into his international career he averages a goal a game. And of all the great German strikers, only Gottfried Fuchs, Gerd Muller and Klaus Fischer had more goals after 13 caps. By way of comparison, Germany’s all-time leading marksman Miroslav Klose had “only” managed11 at the same point.
Nor does Gnabry often miss the target in club football. In his 18 months at
Bayern he had racked up 24 goals in 64 competitive games by the start of 2020 and become one of only three Bundesliga players to hit double figures for three German top-flight clubs – with Werder Bremen, Hoffenheim and Bayern – in consecutive seasons.
From top to bottom he is a Team DFB prize asset. And Low makes no bones about it. “If he’s fit, he must play,” declared the national-team coach at a press conference in Estonia last autumn.
“Gnabry has all the ingredients to play at the highest level. He’s strong on the
“If he’s fit, he must play. Gnabry has all the ingredients to play at the highest level” Germany coach Joachim Low
ball, he’s dangerous in and around the front of goal and I like the way he moves into space. I wanted to include him in my squad for the 2014 World Cup. Unfortunately he was injured.”
Early in 2014 there was much talk of Gnabry, who at the time was in his third season of a five-year stint with Arsenal, being on the plane for Russia, with Gunners manager Arsene Wenger backing the youngster to be part of Low’s plans. Arsenal’s German internationals Per Mertesacker and Mesut Ozil were said to be raving about the youngster’s express-train pace and Germany’s assistant coach Hansi Flick also publicly admitted that Gnabry was in contention.
Low, a coach renowned for pulling last-minute selection rabbits out of the hat, was clearly ready to give Gnabry a shot. He always has had a soft spot for speed merchants and was ready, willing and able to throw the kid in at the deep end. It made no difference to Low that Gnabry was an Arsenal first-team novice with just a handful of Premier League starts under his belt. The Bundestrainer was itching to roll the dice.
Tragically for the teenager, two months before the start of the World Cup, he was forced to the sidelines by an inflamed knee and for six months the condition kept him confined to the stands.
Effectively, this was the beginning of the end for him at Arsenal. In the 201415 season he did not feature at all in the first-team and after moving on loan to West Bromwich Albion, in August 2015, he spent six months on the sidelines, only getting onto the field of play for a laughable 137 minutes.
West Brom’s manager at the time, Tony Pulis – a conservative football thinker if ever there was one – viewed the young loanee as a wasted transaction; neither fit nor experienced
enough for a relegation dogfight.
By the summer of 2016, shortly after starring for Germany at the Olympic Games, Gnabry decided to call time on his English adventure and insisted on leaving North London to join northern German side Werder Bremen in a £4.25million deal.
He had undoubtedly made a great deal of progress at Arsenal, successfully making the transition from the under18 side to the first-team fringes while receiving a thorough grounding in topquality attacking football. But the bottom line was he was desperately short of game minutes. Now 21, something had to give. Why stick with the status quo when West Brom labelled him a dud and Wenger had only given him nine starts?
Many Arsenal fans thought the player should have shown more patience and loyalty. However, they were not down and out on the squad depth chart, sat behind such as Alexis Sanchez, Alex OxladeChamberlain, Alex Iwobi, Santi Cazorla and Danny Welbeck. Whatever Wenger’s misgivings, the break had to be made.
Former Bayern and Germany midfielder turned TV pundit Dietmar Hamann is convinced Gnabry made the right decision in quitting the Premier League, explaining: “In England, young players are always being loaned out. Twenty-five guys make it onto a squad and the rest are left to their own devices. They have to take their chances. You have to remember that, in 2015, West Bromwich coach Tony Pulis said that Gnabry was not good enough for his club.
“For me, Gnabry now rates among the five best wingers in the world. His story is proof of his unbelievably strong character.
“As well as being a tremendously gifted footballer, he has an indomitable spirit. Nothing ventured, nothing gained is his motto. Hats off to him. In life, you must never give up. There’s always another day. Gnabry has shown that. “
Returning to Germany in 2016 to play for Bremen was the best possible outcome for the youngster, a case of a step back prior to the great leap forward. Bremen were only a mid-ranking Bundesliga side, but what mattered most was his vastly increased workload. At Bremen he played every week, going on to score 11 goals in 27 Bundesliga games and thrilling the Weserstadion faithful with his sizzling sprints, energy and moments of sublime wizadry.
While at Werder he won his first cap for Germany, marking the occasion with a hat-trick in the 8-0 hammering of San Marino. The last instance of a German international scoring three times on their debut was Cologne’s Dieter Muller, who managed a treble in the 4-2 win against Yugoslavia in the 1976 Euro semi-finals.
Over and above his goals against San Marino, Gnabry was the most impressive player on the pitch that night, dribbling past defenders at will and continually making great off the ball runs. “The
Bundestrainer wanted me to play with freshness,” he said after the game. “I think I was successful in that.”
Always alert to the best talent in the country, Bayern came calling for him in
the summer of 2017, only having to stump up €8m to trigger a release clause. Bayern, who regarded him as a replacement for ageing Dutch winger Arjen Robben, did not need him immediately though and sent him on a 12-month secondment to Hoffenheim, where he would again post great numbers, with 10 goals and as many assists in 22 Bundesliga outings.
Especially influential for Hoffenheim in the second-half of the season, Gnabry played a key role in the southwesterners’ excellent third-place finish in the Bundesliga, a classification worthy of the club’s first-ever Champions League ticket. For a period, the Hoffenheimer board thought that they might be able to persuade Bayern to extend the loan deal but, somewhat inevitably, a big fat
“nein” was the response. At least he had bequeathed a tangible legacy.
Prior to definitively joining Bayern at the start of last season, Gnabry was the archetypal injury-prone professional. At Arsenal, Bremen and Hoffenheim he was the poster boy for knocks which could not be run off, for all varieties of muscular and articulation. Name any part of the body and he used to be a martyr to it: chronic knee trouble, a trapped nerve in his back, thigh strains, a damaged groin...
Without the malfunctioning knee he suffered at Arsenal he might have been
a world champion with Germany in 2014 and he also had to forgo the 2018 edition of the same competition, scratched from the selection stakes by a nasty springtime adductor tear.
In an interview with Kicker magazine in mid-April 2018, up-and coming Hoffenheim coach Julian Nagelsmann, who is now in charge of RB Leipzig, offered an interesting insider’s view of Gnabry’s “China Doll” tendencies.
“Unfortunately, he did not play a lot for us up until Christmas,” said Nagelsmann. “We had to get to grips with this problem after the winter break. As a youngster, he had a relatively high number of injuries.
“During the week at Arsenal his mindset was to hold back a little [in training], even when physically he was in a position to give it his all. To our eyes, that wasn’t the right approach.
“You can only come up to scratch on a matchday if you’ve gone all out in training in the preceding days.
“You can’t cut corners and say that all will be well at the weekend. That’s how injuries happen, when you have not prepared as intensively as you should.
“We’ve found a good method to keep him injury free in the second half of the season. This has played a big part in his development.”
Sadly Nagelmann had spoken too soon. Just a fortnight later, Gnabry was en route to the infirmary once again seriously, hobbling off against Hanover with heavily bandaged thigh. The result of a scan was a badly damaged adductor and his Russia 2018 dream was over.
Incidentally, Nagelsmann was not the
“You can only come up to scratch on a matchday if you’ve gone all out in training in the preceding day” Julian Nagelsmann
first coach to point the finger at Gnabry for not always paying attention to his fitness as his Germany under-17 boss, Stefan Boger, had once made a similar critique of the youngster.
It says much for the competence of Bayern’s strength-and-conditioning staff that Gnabry had until recently been injury free in his first 18 months at the AllianzArena. Hence his core role in the side’s attacking potency, contributing 24 goals and 17 assists. However, the Achillestendon injury sustained during Bayern’s winter-break training camp in Doha is a sign that no one can rest on their laurels.
Although he is plainly box office these days, certain figures in the Bayern hierarchy seemed more than a little surprised to see him settle in so quickly.
“When he returned to us after his spell at Hoffenheim we thought we’d take a look at him and see whether we’d play him,” former club president Uli Hoeness explained to Kicker last April. “Now he’s a regular starter, is having a lot of fun and is the biggest revelation of the season.”
Every time Gnabry plays for Bayern he looks totally energised by the challenge and responsibility. He clearly loves operating in the rarified air at the top of the mountain.
Yet do not make the mistake of thinking that Bayern are the ones who have moulded him into a world-beater. Much of that credit must go to former coach Nagelsmann, who improved his
game across the board, making him more appreciative of time and space, encouraging him to get into the box as much as possible and generally rendering him more mobile, not tied down to one wide station.
Nagelsmann also succeeded in lighting a motivational fire beneath Gnabry.
For all his great talent – maybe even because of it – the youngster could be lethargic at times, often leaving his Hoffenheim coach with no option other than to “give him a kick up the backside”. As a result, the German international is far less likely to go through the motions these days. He now is a 90 minute “trier”, ever ready to go through the pain barrier.
If ever there was a watershed moment in Gnabry’s career it has to be his showstopping turn for Germany at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, where he ended up as the tournament’s joint-top scorer with six goals – along with team-mate Nils Pietersen – and picked up a silver medal.
Logically, he should not have come close to that Olympiad. He had just been through a nightmare loan spell at West Bromwich Albion and was terribly short of match practice, having made only two first-team starts in the entire 2015-16 campaign – and even those were just a couple of League Cup run-outs with Arsenal. Indeed, prior to the Rio Olympics, he had gone 11 months without competitive action.
Arguably the only man who truly believed in him at the time was German boss Horst Hrubesch. He had worked with him at under-21 level – notably picking him for the 2015 European Championships – and was certain that Gnabry’s pace, eye for goal and wounded pride would render him an extremely dangerous customer at the Olympics. And how right that assessment turned out to be.
“At the Games in Brazil he showed exactly what he is capable of when he is healthy, fit and in a match rhythm,” says Hrubesch. “He has to play. In Brazil, he displayed all his qualities.
“It frustrates me that no one has ever shown any faith in him up to now.”
Gnabry’s career can be separated into two distinct periods: pre-the Brazil Olympics, when he was searching for his path, and then starting to fulfil his potential after the Olympiad.
Renowned from the earliest of ages for his rare footballing ability, for his speed off the mark and prodigious dribbling, he played as a kid for southwestern clubs Weissach, Ditzingen, Hemmingen, Feuerbach and Stuttgarter Kickers. He was only 10 when Bayern offered him an academy place. Yet, much to his dismay, his father, Jean-Hermann refused to play ball and was adamant that he wanted to carry on coaching his son himself.
“Oh boy was I angry,” recalled Gnabry in an interview with Bayern’s club magazine. “I was completely ready to go there. I cried. My dad wouldn’t budge.”
Two years later, the youngster would join VfB Stuttgart, and while there he rose through the ranks alongside an adolescent by the name of Joshua
“At the Games in Brazil he showed exactly what he is capable of when he is healthy, fit and in a match rhythm” Horst Hrubesch
Kimmich who, like his best friend Gnabry, would go on to shine for both Bayern and Germany.
Footage exists of the pair playing for VfB in the Knabenturnier, a prestigious national five-a-side tournament for under-13s. It was a taste of a world to come, with Kimmich, defending and regulating to the rear, Gnabry running amok and scoring goals. Needless to say, Stuttgart won the competition.
For over a half-century, the Knabenturnier has been a showcase
for future German stars, including Gnabry, Kimmich, Thomas Muller, Manuel Neuer, Toni Kroos, Michael Ballack and Mats Hummels.
“In our year group, Serge was always the best player,” says Kimmich, now one of the best right-backs or controlling midfielders in Europe. “I’ve rarely seen a player who is so single-minded when going for goal. We’re different in some ways, but the most important thing is that we laugh together and know we can rely on one another. Even when things aren’t going right”
Their partnership would temporarily be broken in 2011 when the 15-year-old Serge quit VfB for Arsenal. Some might say, Gnabry was a touch too quick to fly the nest, but he insists it was too good an opportunity to turn down.
“Who knows where I would be now if I’d stayed with VfB,” he told the
Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper last year. “It was not an easy decision. I did have a few concerns, but on the whole I’m someone who likes to take risks.”
It might not have worked out for him at Arsenal, but what matters is where he sits now and that is on the top table. Champions have no use for regrets.