Don’t try this at home. It was October 2010 when a dad turned up at Southampton’s St Mary’s Stadium with his seven-year-old son. It wasn’t match day, however. The dad was just looking for a game for his boy. Recently arrived from Germany, they hadn’t a clue about the English football scene. It seemed natural to head down to the nearest professional club and ask to play.
Which is how Jamal Musiala, Germany’s generational talent, took his first steps to becoming Bayern Munich’s key creative playmaker – in Southampton, a vulnerable young boy, without a word of English, looking up at his dad, desperately trying to find somewhere to play.
Musiala, 21 now, is laughing at the memory, sitting at Bayern’s Säbener Strasse training ground, preparing for Saturday’s top‑of‑the‑table clash with Bayer Leverkusen. “My dad’s always a really open person and when we first went to Southampton, I didn’t have anywhere to play football and we didn’t know anything about the place so we just went to the stadium on a random day – there was no game or nothing – just to see where I could play.
“I wouldn’t give that idea to someone else but it happened that we met someone there at the stadium who had a local team in the community. Sometimes you need a bit of luck. They said: ‘You should come over.’ I was in the local team for a little bit and then Southampton saw me and I had a trial with them.”
That person was the Southampton FC community worker Jazz Bhatti, who sent him over to his brother’s kids’ team, City Central, to play. The way Bhatti tells it, within 10 minutes of seeing the seven-year-old Musiala his brother was on the phone insisting he get the Southampton scouts down to watch. Musiala even outshone City Central’s star player at the time, a lad called Levi Colwill.
And that is how England came close to winning the heart of a German-Nigerian who built a home here, first in Southampton, where his mother, Carolin, was on a one-year exchange programme in the social science department of Southampton University. Then, with Jamal having attracted the attention of Chelsea, in New Malden, south-west London, spending eight years at the Premier League club’s academy before joining Bayern at 16.
“Football builds friendships,” Musiala says. “It goes back to those years as a little kid when you just go to the park and it’s how you make friends.
“It definitely helped me make the transition from Germany to England. I learned English quite quickly. But it did take me a couple of months to really settle in and feel at home. For six months in England, I didn’t understand everything, couldn’t speak it properly but because of football I made my friends. It made life easy for me.”
England did almost win that battle for his allegiance but it turns out the Germans have a word for the emotion that clinched it: Bauchgefühl, or gut feeling. “I don’t think my decision would have changed. I was living in Munich [at 16, when he made his choice], I was born here, my mum is from Germany. There was just a feeling, a Bauchgefühl. It was nothing to do with England. England is still a home to me.
“When I was living in England, I was playing for the national teams and all my friends were there so for a while everything was English but I started to see the German side again once I moved back here. How English [do] I feel? How German? You could say 50-50. I still have the English side of me. It’s always going to be like that.”
In England memories and photos remain of an extraordinary England Under-16s team that included Musiala, Jude Bellingham, Cole Palmer and Morgan Rogers, against the last of whom he will play on Wednesday in a repeat of the 1982 European Cup final, when Aston Villa host Bayern in the Champions League. At Chelsea he was close to Newcastle’s Tino Livramento and his Bayern teammate Michael Olise, whom he has taken under his wing in Germany, accompanying him to interviews as moral support, spokesperson and translator.
Given that England is often caricatured as the land of 4-4-2 long-ball football, it is intriguing to hear from Musiala that is not what he learned there. “Football-wise what helped me a lot [in England] was playing with freedom. When I was at the national team in England that was the biggest goal for the young players, to just play with freedom and show their skills. That helped me develop my dribbling, skills and get comfortable in tight situations, to keep playing even if I make mistakes. Sometimes what you need is freedom as a young player.
“I made some close friends [in the England Under-16s team] and they had the same idea – to play with freedom. That’s still in my head. When you’re 15, it is just dribble, dribble, dribble. Once that’s good, you can pick up the other stuff. You need to enjoy playing football. It’s like that with anything in life. You have to enjoy what you do.”
For most it is a trait they love in Musiala and it earned him a place in the Euro 2024 team of the tournament, after his three goals made him the joint top scorer with Harry Kane. But the former Liverpool player Didi Hamann, a prominent German pundit, recently characterised it as a negative, labelling Musiala an “individualistic solo entertainer”.
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Did that hurt? “Hurt?” he replied, snorting with laughter. “No, I’m a self-critical person already. There’s always going to be critics. I don’t look too much on social media, what’s being said. You’re going to see lots of good comments but the one bad one will stay in your head. So I already try to stay away from that. The most important is the feedback I get is from the coaches, players, the team all around me, my mum and dad. These are the things I would take more seriously.
“Everyone has their own point of view. I just try to do everything that is good for the team. I’m not going to do anything unnecessary. I never wanted to be the player that dribbles just so you can get a nice highlight on Instagram or anything like that. That’s not the type of player I am. In some games I make a lot more passes and maybe get only one dribble and in some games the team needs me to dribble more, take more risks, maybe lose the ball more often. But if that is what the game needs … every game is different, [you need] different things for each game.”
Given his superb Euros, it a surprise he didn’t make the shortlist for next month’s Ballon d’Or of the best 30 players in the world. “I’d be lying if I said no individual awards matter to me,” he says. “I think everyone growing up wants to win an individual award of some kind. [But] the most important thing is, we had a tough season last season and [we need] to do better this season. The main focus is on winning trophies and everything else will come when the time is right.”
The fact that Bayern ended last season without a trophy is something of a scandal in Bavaria. “It’s expected that you win a trophy and there comes a pressure in that,” he says. Saturday’s visit of Leverkusen, the champions, means Bayern have an opportunity to put down a marker. “There’s lots of good competition in the league and we just need to focus on ourselves right now and do the things right that we maybe didn’t do last season.”
If Bayern resume their trophy domination, England will surely claim a slice of credit, with Kane, Eric Dier and Musiala (50% English, remember). “There is a lot of English spoken in the dressing room now,” he says, Olise adding to that mix. And the best German speaker among the English contingent? “Michael not. Harry? I think he can say a couple of words. Maybe Eric.”
Perhaps in time their influence may make Musiala reconnect with his English roots in the Premier League, though he is focused on restoring Bayern’s ascendancy. “I don’t really have a plan or anything. I don’t try to think too far forward about where I want to be because situations can always change by the year or by the month.
“At six years old I didn’t think about being in England at seven! I don’t know. I’m open to everything but I’m very happy where I am right now.” At least he will be at Villa Park on Wednesday night, the German wunderkind so nearly one of England’s own.