The thing about being the youngest of ten children is that you inherit a world already in motion. By the time I arrived—screaming into existence in our family home in Brauweiler on the third of May, 2003—the Wirtz household had long since established its rhythms, its rules, its very own ecosystem. And at the center of that ecosystem, beating like a heart, was football.
I don't remember a time before the ball. That's the honest truth. Some children's earliest memories are of birthday parties or seaside holidays. Mine is of my father's hands—large, calloused, belonging to a man who'd spent years as a locksmith before finding his calling as a teacher—guiding a football between my feet in our back garden. I couldn't have been more than three. The grass was wet from rain, and I kept slipping, but Papa never laughed. He just picked me up, set me right, and rolled the ball back.
"Again, Florian," he'd say. "Feel it with your foot. Don't kick it away—talk to it."
Talk to it. Even then, I understood what he meant.
Our house in Pulheim wasn't grand. We were comfortable, nothing more. No television cluttered the living room—Papa had made that decision years before I was born, and Mama, ever practical, agreed. "Screens make passive minds," she'd say, adjusting her handball training kit before heading off to coach yet another youth team. "Active children need active lives."
And active we were. With nine siblings ahead of me, the house never knew silence. Someone wasalways running somewhere, shouting about something, kicking a ball against something they
shouldn't. The cupboard doors bore the scars of a thousand makeshift goals. The coffee table had a
permanent wobble from being used as an obstacle in our living room matches. Mama would shake
her head at the chaos, but I never once heard her truly complain.
"Karin," Papa would say, wrapping an arm around her shoulders as Juliane—my sister, two years
my senior and fiercer than all the boys combined—nutmegged one of our older brothers between
the sofa and the wall, "they're not destroying the house. They're building their future."
Juliane was my first opponent. My first teacher, too, though she'd never admit it. While our brothers
had their own games and their own friends, Jules and I were aligned by proximity and age. She'd
already been playing at Grün-Weiß Brauweiler, Papa's club—his kingdom, really—for a year when
I started. Four years old, barely tall enough to reach the coat hooks, and Papa was already putting
me through drills.
"Florian and Juliane," he'd call from the edge of the pitch, "one-on-one. Let me see your feet talk."
Jules didn't go easy on me because we shared a mother. If anything, she went harder. She'd shoulder
me off the ball, slide in with perfect timing, position her body like a wall between me and the goal.
I'd fall. Often. The grass would stain my knees, sometimes break the skin, and I'd look up to find
her standing over me, hands on her hips.
"Get up, Flo. You think defenders in Bundesliga will wait for you to stop crying?"
I wasn't crying. I never cried. But I got up.
The living room was where we refined what we learned on the pitch. After dinner—always a
production with twelve people around the table, sometimes more when teammates came
round—Jules and I would clear a space between the furniture. The sofa became the goal at one end.
The old oak cupboard that held Mama's good dishes became the goal at the other.
"First to five," Jules would say, already rolling the ball under her foot.
"First to ten," I'd counter, because even at five, six, seven years old, I wanted more time with the
ball.
She'd smirk. "Fine. But I'm going to destroy you in seven minutes."
She usually did, at first. But here's what she didn't count on: I was learning. Every time she
dispossessed me, I studied how she'd done it. Every time she shielded the ball, I memorized her
body position. And in that cramped space between our family's furniture, with no room for pace or
power, I had to think faster. See angles that didn't exist yet. Make the ball do things that surprised
even me.
"Where did that come from?" Jules demanded one evening, after I'd rolled the ball behind my
standing leg, spun, and slotted it past her into the cupboard-goal.
I shrugged. I didn't know where it came from. It just... happened.
"Juliane! Florian!" Mama's voice carried from the kitchen. "If I hear broken glass, you're both
scrubbing dishes until you're eighteen!"
"Sorry, Mama!" we shouted in unison, then grinned at each other and kept playing.
The other thing about our house: no phones until you were twelve. I thought everyone lived like
this. It wasn't until I started at Cologne's academy that I realized other kids had mobiles in primary
school, had tablets, had entire digital lives I knew nothing about. But by then, it was too late—I was
already formed. My entertainment came from moving, from being outside, from the feeling of my
bicycle wheels beneath me as I tore through the streets of Brauweiler.
That bicycle. God, I loved that bicycle.
Thirteen kilometers from our house to Cologne's training center. Thirteen kilometers I rode, often
alone, sometimes with Papa cycling behind me at a distance. In summer, I'd do it twice a day.
Morning session, cycle home for lunch, cycle back for afternoon training. My legs burned. My
lungs burned. But something in my chest sang.
"You don't have to ride, Florian," Papa said one blistering July afternoon when I was nine. "I can
drive you. It's no trouble."
We were standing in the driveway. My bicycle was already loaded with my kit bag. I remember
looking at him—really looking—and seeing something in his eyes. A test, maybe. Or an invitation
to choose comfort over commitment.
"I like riding," I said.
It was true. On that bicycle, I was alone with my thoughts. I'd replay training sessions in my mind,
seeing where I should have passed instead of dribbled, where I should have moved into space.
Sometimes I'd imagine I was someone else. Someone better.
Someone like Messi.
I was eight when Papa brought it home. I can still picture him walking through the door, his face
trying to be serious but his eyes giving him away. Behind his back, he held a plastic bag.
"Florian," he said. "Come here."
I came. I always came when Papa called.
"You've been working hard," he said. "Your coaches tell me you listen. You learn. You don't
complain." He paused. "This is for you."
From the bag, he drew folded fabric. Blue and red. I knew the colors before he even shook it out.
FC Barcelona. And on the back, printed in bold letters: MESSI. 10.
I must have stared at it for a full minute.
"Well?" Papa said, and now he was smiling. "Put it on."
I did. It was too big—everything was too big when you were eight and the smallest in every squad
you played in—but I didn't care. I pulled it over my head, and the world changed. I became
someone else. Someone who could dribble past five defenders. Someone who could curl the ball
into the top corner from impossible angles. Someone who could talk to the ball the way Papa
always said to.
"Thank you, Papa," I whispered.
He crouched down to my level, his knees cracking as they always did. "Lionel Messi is special,
Florian. You know why?"
I shook my head.
"Because he makes difficult things look simple. He doesn't try to prove he's the best. He just... is.
Do you understand?"
I nodded, though I wasn't sure I did. Not then.
"Keep this shirt," Papa said. "Wear it. Sleep in it if you want—"
"I will!"
He laughed. "But remember: Messi became Messi by working when no one was watching. By
staying late after training. By practicing until his feet bled and then practicing more. Talent is a gift,
son. But work? Work is a choice."
I wore that shirt everywhere. To bed, to school when I could sneak it under my jumper, to the park
when I went to practice with my friends. It got grass stains that never quite washed out. It got a
small tear near the hem from catching on a fence. It faded from countless cycles through Mama's
washing machine.
But I kept wearing it.
Late at night, when the house finally quieted, I'd lie in bed with that shirt on and watch videos on
Papa's laptop. Clips of Messi dribbling. Messi scoring. Messi threading passes through impossible
spaces.
"Fifteen minutes," Papa would say. "Then sleep."
But I never watched for just fifteen minutes. I'd study Messi's feet—the way his left foot seemed to
have the ball on a string, the way he'd drop his shoulder one direction and burst another.
Then I'd go outside and try to copy what I'd seen. I'd set up cones made of whatever I could find and
dribble until Jules called from her window.
"Flo! It's eleven o'clock! Come inside!"
"Five more minutes!"
She never told on me. She understood.
Saturday meant match day. The best day of the week.
At Grün-Weiß Brauweiler, Papa was chairman, coach, referee, and groundskeeper. The club was
his life's work, and for me and Jules, it was home.
Match days had a rhythm. Arrive early. Change in the locker room that smelled of Deep Heat and
old socks. Pull on my kit—number 10, always number 10. Warm up while Papa checked the field.
The other boys were bigger. Papa often played me up an age group because I "needed the
challenge." When everyone around you is bigger and stronger, you can't rely on your body. You
have to rely on your mind.
"Flo's going to get crushed," I heard a parent say once.
Papa smiled. "Watch."
I didn't get crushed. I got the ball, dropped my shoulder—Messi's move, the one I'd practiced a
hundred times the night before—and glided past the defender. Then another. Then another. The
goal was open, but I saw one of my teammates better positioned.
"Here!" he called.
I passed. He scored.
Walking back to position, I caught Papa's eye. He nodded once. That was all. But it was enough.
"See?" Papa said to the parent. "Football isn't about size. It's about space. And my son sees space
others don't."
After matches, win or lose, the ritual was always the same. I'd find Papa, and he'd ruffle my
hair—still damp with sweat—and say, "What did you learn?"
Not "good game" or "well done." What did you learn?
Sometimes I'd learned I needed to track back faster. Sometimes I'd learned I was trying to do too
much alone. Sometimes—the best times—I'd learned nothing because everything had clicked, and
the game had felt like flying.
"I learned I can play simple," I told him once after a match where I'd recorded three assists but zero
goals. "Like you said. Like Messi."
Papa's face split into the widest grin. "Now you're understanding."
At home that evening, Jules cornered me in the hallway.
"Three assists?" she said, eyebrows raised. "Who are you and what have you done with my selfish
little brother?"
I threw a cushion at her. "I was never selfish!"
"You literally used to dribble past the whole team and shoot from impossible angles."
"That's not selfish. That's... ambitious."
She laughed, and the sound filled the whole house. "Fine. But now you're ambitious and smart.
That's dangerous, Flo. That's how you become something."
Something. Not someone. Something.
I thought about that word a lot.
In primary school, when we were asked to write what we wanted to be when we grew up, most of
my classmates wrote paragraphs. Teacher. Doctor. Astronaut. Engineer. Long, winding
explanations of dreams that would probably change by next year.
I wrote one word: Fußballer.
My teacher, Frau Schmidt, called me to her desk.
"Florian," she said gently, "this assignment was to write a full response."
"That is a full response."
"But you've only written one word."
"It's the only word I need."
She studied me for a long moment. I was small for my age, skinny, with hair that never sat quite
right no matter how many times Mama tried to tame it. I probably didn't look like much. But I
meant what I'd written.
"Well," Frau Schmidt said finally, "if you're going to be a footballer, you'd better be a good one."
"I will be," I said.
It wasn't arrogance. It was certainty. I knew, the way you know your own name, that football wasn't
just something I did. It was what I was.
The years at Brauweiler passed in a blur of grass stains and early mornings and Papa's voice calling
instructions and Jules tackling me in the living room. But by the time I turned seven, something was
changing. Scouts had started appearing at our matches. Men in dark jackets with notebooks and
serious expressions. They'd stand apart from the other parents, watching.
Always watching.
"Don't look at them," Papa would tell me before matches. "They're not your concern. You play your
game. Let them watch or not watch—it makes no difference to you."
But it did make a difference. I could feel their eyes on me. Feel the weight of possibility.
After one match—I'd scored four goals and created two more—a man approached Papa. I was
collecting cones, but I could hear them talking.
"Herr Wirtz, I'm from FC Köln's academy. We'd like to discuss your son's development."
Papa didn't respond immediately. The pause stretched long enough that I stopped moving and
looked over. Papa was studying the man the way he studied my matches—carefully, missing
nothing.
"We'll discuss it as a family," Papa said finally. "If Florian wants to go, we'll consider it. But this is
his decision, ultimately. Not mine."
That night, after dinner, Papa called a family meeting. All ten of us kids crammed into the living
room. The older ones looked bored—this was clearly about me—but they stayed because Papa
asked.
"Florian," Papa said, "you have an opportunity. FC Köln wants you in their academy."
The room erupted. Questions, congratulations, jokes from my brothers about me becoming rich and
famous and forgetting about them.
Papa raised a hand, and silence fell.
"This is not a small thing," he continued. "Köln is a big club. You'll train with better players. Better
coaches. You'll have opportunities you wouldn't have at Brauweiler." He paused. "You'll also have
more pressure. More eyes watching. More people with opinions about what you should do and who
you should become. Do you understand?"
I nodded.
"And you want this? Not because I want it. Not because your brothers think it's cool. Because you
want it."
I thought about Messi. About the hours in the garden. About the feeling when the ball did exactly
what I asked it to do. About the word I'd written in school.
"I want it," I said.
Jules caught my eye across the room. She smiled, and for once, there was no teasing in it.
"Then we'll try it," Papa said. "One year. We see how you like it. If it's not right, you come back to
Brauweiler. No shame in that."
"It'll be right," I said.
And it was. Mostly.
Köln's academy was different. The pitches were perfect. The equipment was new. The other boys
were talented in ways that made my Brauweiler teammates look casual. But they'd been told they
were special so many times they'd started to believe their talent was enough.
I knew better. Papa had made sure of that.
So while they rested between drills, I did extra touches. While they went home, I stayed late,
because Papa would wait—always wait—and because thirteen kilometers on a bicycle was time to
think.
"You're mad," a teammate told me after I'd declined a ride home in his father's Mercedes. "It's
raining. You're going to cycle?"
I smiled and swung my leg over my bike. "I like the rain."
The thing about being the youngest of ten is that you learn early: the world doesn't wait for you to
be ready. You make yourself ready, or you get left behind.
I wasn't going to get left behind.
Not when I had Papa's voice in my head, teaching me about space and simplicity. Not when I had
Jules at home, ready to defender me into the cupboard if I got cocky. Not when I had Messi's
shirt—still too big, still grass-stained, still perfect—hanging in my closet.
And not when I had a word, written in careful letters in a primary school workbook, waiting to
become true.
Fußballer.
That's what I was going to be.
That's what I was already becoming.
One pedal stroke at a time