An ode to young Mario Gotze & his Maradona-esque worldy for BVB

When a player has a career as lopsided as Mario Gotze’s, it can be easy to focus too heavily on the bad side and forget that the other side was really, really good.

Gotze left Borussia Dortmund when his contract expired at the end of the 2019-20 season, but the conversation around the World Cup winner’s departure is very different to the first time he waved goodbye to the Westfalenstadion.

It’s not just because he had a proper farewell, after injury robbed him the chance of a glorious goodbye in the 2013 Champions League final against Bayern Munich, at the same time robbing Dortmund of one of their most lethal weapons for a once-in-an-era game.

Make no mistake, this Jurgen Klopp team didn’t belong to the same generation as the 1997 European champions, and the loss of Gotze was the first step in the eventual dismantling of the squad before they had another shot at this kind of glory.

Gotze was a real star in that 2012-13 season, reaching double figures for both goals and assists – netting twice as Klopp’s team went 11 straight games without defeat en route to the Champions League final – but it wasn’t the start of his greatness.

No, we first became aware of his brilliance back in 2010-11 when Dortmund won the league by a distance, thanks in no small part to the contributions of a teenage Gotze enjoying a breakout season.

One of the greatest tests of a team is how they respond when things stop going their way, and there was a point in that campaign when Dortmund began to stumble in pursuit of their first title for nearly a decade.

After a narrow defeat to Hoffenheim in March, a late equaliser from Mainz’s Petar Sliskovic at the Westfalenstadion and a surprise opener from Mohamed Abdellaoue of Hannover next time out left