Mario Gotze Quotes

For me, playing through all the youth teams at Borussia Dortmund was a really good experience because I was able to play against talented opponents at a relatively early age.

I was born in Westchester, NY. I grew up around the Rye Brook area, and then I moved to White Plains with my family.

My whole world before I joined the Navy was my neighborhood in the Bronx.

I'm not actually from Compton - I'm from South Central Los Angeles, and my father still lives in the same house I grew up in, so I'm there all the time.

I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.

My first club was FT Gern. I joined through my parents and friends. My father played for them and a friend from nursery school took me to training once. I was five at the time.

I experienced everything at FC Bayern.

To be honest, I started playing for Belgium in the youth team stages. As a kid, Belgium was all I knew. We played football with my schoolmates as well as at the academy.

My Dad was briefly an Everton player and I used to follow them as a boy.

Kanpur is my own town. I was born and brought up here.

I first came to Mumbai when I was very young. My mom is from here, and dad always had some work around here, so Mumbai always felt like a second home. I moved here when I was 16 and went to junior college here as well.

I have a lot of experience at Under-21 level, so hopefully that can show in my performances.

I think with my generation, your first game of senior football was often a Sunday League game of football. Sometimes you're playing on pitches that aren't great, you've no referee, you've no goal nets.

I grew up on Long Island. It was pretty normal.

I was born in Germany, grew up in Germany, and when I was becoming a professional footballer, I felt like a German.

I've visited Mangalore as a kid because we had relatives there. But I was born and brought up in Mumbai. So I don't know much about the place or the people.

I arrived at Inter when I was very young and I had the chance to play with Giuseppe Bergomi, and I met Giacinto Facchetti too.

I have said in the past that I dream of playing in Spain, but Dortmund has become my second home. I love this club, its fans, and this city.

Growing up, Arsenal were always such a big team, they were dominant and would always give you a tough game.

I started playing at six. I was at a school always playing football with my friends. But I was always bored at home. I asked my father if he could start me in a football team. He took me to a team called Rupel Boom, who were playing in the fourth division in Belgium, and I stayed there for four years.

I grew up in the amateurs.

In India, the key is to start at the base and start very young. We need professionally trained talent, talent that wants to make football their career, and people must see football as a strong professional career option.

I started lower down the leagues with Coventry, so I'd had that taste of first-team action at a young age. I'd already played 40 or 50 games before moving on, and when I got to Norwich, I had to bide my time at the start.

Growing up in Highbridge was real. Me and all my friends, we never really went to any other places in the Bronx but Highbridge. We always just stayed in Highbridge. It was like territory, to be honest, because Highbridge is like a town.

For a kid that just played for Oviedo, to then going to play for a team like Real Madrid, it felt fantastic. But being taken out of my family home and moving away alone, into the residence Madrid have for young players, it was a bit difficult. But as time passed, I got used to it.