BLUES BROTHERS
Doubt Timo Werner at your peril. Few players in German football have been as talked about, questioned and judged like the 24-year-old during his fledgling career. Fans, media and managers will always be critical, but Werner has also had it from his team-mates in the past.
It wasn’t always like this. At 17, Werner was promoted to Stuttgart’s first team on a wave of optimism ahead of the 2013-14 Bundesliga season, touted as one of his country’s most exciting rising stars.
“I knew about Timo before he came up to the first team,” Christian Gentner, Stuttgart captain between 2013 and 2019, explains to FourFourTwo. “My older brother was working as the academy manager in those days, so he and I often discussed the young players coming through. He told me that we had an exceptional young striker on the books, so I’d had an eye on Timo before he joined us.”
The teenage talisman had long been tipped for success. Born and raised a stone’s throw from the club’s Mercedes-Benz Arena, Werner was lethal at youth level after initially joining Die Roten when he was eight. Fast-tracked to Stuttgart’s under-19s at just 16, he smashed 25 goals in 24 appearances the season before his call-up to the senior team. For a Stuttgart outfit lacking star quality at the time, it was an opportunity to unleash a secret weapon on their Bundesliga rivals.
But something struck Gentner, and several other team-mates, as a little unusual about the boy wonder. “Timo was very quiet,” says Gentner. “He was still a boy, of course, but he wasn’t the sort of player who would always raise his voice in the dressing room. He was incredibly shy.”
For veteran Stuttgart forward Cacau – then a 32-year-old in his 11th season at the club, and part of their 2006-07 Bundesliga-winning squad – Werner’s personality didn’t exactly fit the profile of a top-level striker.
“He was a pretty reserved character,” the Brazil-born former Germany international. “He had been comfortable playing at youth level, but it was a big step up to join the senior team. I wasn’t convinced he was ready for it, to be honest.”
