ES Lifestyle newsletter The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive trends and interviews from fashion, lifestyle to travel every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

At Chelsea Football Club’s training centre, deep in the lush and quietly wealthy Surrey countryside, a sense of tense anticipation is building. It’s the week before the start of the new Premier League season and across the 140 acres of sun-warmed, mown-grass-scented pitches, players are training, coaches are lugging equipment, and cars and trucks are whizzing around on urgent errands. In the hi-tech reception area, a tracksuited José Mourinho bursts through the doors yelling at a coach, ‘You are a disaster! You have betrayed your best friend!’ — and then grins to show he’s joking.

You can see the excitement on the footballers’ faces as they drive in, says the security guy on the gate. All are cheerful because they know that the new players, including Cesc Fabregas, Spanish striker Diego Costa and the returning Didier Drogba, make Chelsea one of the favourites for the title. But one among them seems particularly chipper — the tall, blond, 23-year-old German forward André Schürrle.

Twelve months ago no one other than Chelsea fans really knew who Schürrle was. Bought from Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen for a reported £18m last summer, he was just another foreign player in a team that ultimately came up short and won nothing. Football, however, can change lives in an instant, and at 10.26pm (BST) on Sunday 13 July this year, it changed his. With seven minutes of extra time left to go in the Germany v Argentina World Cup Final in Rio de Janeiro, the player sprinted down the left wing and made the pass that allowed his friend Mario Götze to score the goal that won the game and made the young German team champions. André Horst Schürrle starts this season as one of the biggest stars in the world game.

Since the final, he says, as we are introduced at the training centre and immediately in-terrupted by a staff member politely re-questing a selfie, ‘it has been crazy. People coming up to me all the time, always wanting the selfies, or saying, “You must feel so happy!” Of course I feel happy! Sometimes I forget, then suddenly I find myself thinking, “God — I won the World Cup, didn’t I?” ’

Six feet tall, blue-eyed, slender and unassuming in his Chelsea kit, Schürrle (known affectionately by fans as Shirley) looks rather like a blend of Peter Crouch and a young Hugh Dennis. It is strange to think, as we settle in the conference room overlooked by Adidas, Gazprom and Samsung logos, that he has a reported weekly salary of £80,000 and a value of £17m — and rising. He speaks fluent English and has an unusually intelligent air about him. It is not, after all, every footballer who posts Aristotelian maxims on his Instagram account. The most recent was, fittingly: ‘Pleasure in the job makes perfection in the work.’

In training Schürrle has been running for fitness (in which, he admits, he struggles to find pleasure) and working with the ball (which he loves). The most inspiring element, however, is clearly his time with Mourinho; the boss is said to be personally fond of Schürrle and the protégé returns the feeling with something resembling bright-eyed hero worship. ‘It’s his thinking,’ he explains. ‘There is only one way for him and that is to win. And with his psychology, the way he talks… he gives that thinking to you. The hardest thing is when you feel tired in training and he’ll push you, but it makes you better as a player. It’s why I wanted to play for him.’

Usually Schürrle finishes at 2pm and then hangs out with friends in the chi-chi coffee shops on King’s Road, before going back home to have dinner and relax with music (Drake, mixed by a DJ friend), TV (German shows on satellite) and his PlayStation (FIFA 14). He lives in an apartment in a complex on the river just a stone’s throw from Stamford Bridge and is having a house built at home in Germany. At Chelsea, the players divide into a majority who settle for the quiet life in Surrey and a smaller, more social set who live in town and frequent the Chelsea and Mayfair scene. Schürrle belongs to the latter group. Having grown up in a working-class family in the provincial industrial city of Ludwigshafen, he was struck on arrival by the sheer variety of London (‘The way that the areas are so different… you have everything! Something for whatever mood takes you’) and has been ‘in love’ with the city ever since.

He was shown around by then team-mate Ashley Cole and Ryan Bertrand (the London-born Chelsea player currently on loan at Southampton). His childhood idol and former Chelsea legend Michael Ballack also helped out and started Schürrle’s obsessive love affair with the capital’s restaurants by taking him to Jak’s on Walton Street. At Jak’s he was won over by the distinctive informal sophistication that is so often extolled by London’s international incomers, and he finds a similar feel at his other favourites, Cut at 45 Park Lane, Tsukiji Sushi at The Westbury, and Nobu on Berkeley Street.

Has he been to any of the places such as Fischer’s, Katzenjammers or Herman Ze German that are currently giving Mittel-European food something of a moment in town? Not yet; for dining à la Deutsch, he says, the best restaurant is Stein’s in Kingston, and for the best bratwurst you want Harrods Food Hall. His enthusiasm for Harrods Food Hall is unbounded: ‘All that cheese! All that ham!’

His passion for schnitzel and wurst is matched by an equally Germanic interest in speedy driving and cars; he owns a Merc and an Audi, although he won’t say which models. There, though, the Teutonic clichés end. He has said, tongue in cheek perhaps, that he would like to help change the stereotype and to this end he not only has an untidy apartment (he and his friends use it to practise their golf using soft balls) but also — shock horror — a sense of humour. Shortly after moving here he played a practical joke on Ashley Cole by calling a Chelsea TV phone-in as ‘André from London’) and asking where he could find the white suit of Cole’s that the players had been ribbing him about.

Schürrle won admirers in the summer with another distinctive show of emotion, this time at the end of the World Cup Final. As the German players’ wives and girlfriends came on to the pitch to greet their heroes, Schürrle looked up into the stands to see his elder sister Sabrina, mother Luise and father Joachim (the manager of a waste management company) waving down at him. His parents had spent his childhood driving him hundreds of miles around Germany’s grimy industrial heartland to play matches for his local club; now there they all were in the Maracana stadium in Rio, Germany were champions of the world, and he had set up the winning goal. Overcome, Schürrle fell sobbing into the arms of his girlfriend Montana Yorke. ‘I was so happy, but I couldn’t believe it was happening,’ he recalls. ‘I was confused, everyone was shouting, everyone was crying, everyone was celebrating. And there was something inside me, so much emotion that just needed to come out. It was indescribable.’

It has to be said that the impact of those images was all the greater for Yorke. The 21-year-old Canadian university graduate, who he met in London in January, isn’t standard-issue WAG material. Rather than courting the paparazzi, she posts Instagram videos of herself playing football in her backyard; eschewing high-fashion looks, she went to the final in a German football shirt and jeans (far left).

While their pals Mario Götze and his girlfriend Ann-Kathrin Brommel have been turned into a pap-friendly glamour couple, André and Montana — ‘Montsxo’, as she calls herself online — seem to embody a more humble, modern and confident-but-simple style that is a world away from the last decade’s old-school, attention-seeking WAG excesses and the Premier League’s current crop of charisma-bypassed average-Joe Harts. She, like others among what has been called ‘WAG 2.0’ circles, prefers to be seen as a person in her own right and doesn’t try to cash in on the soccer spectacle. ‘That’s her character, and it’s important to me,’ he says. ‘She didn’t go there to show herself, to go on the pitch dressed up in high heels, or whatever, she went there to support me and the team. Most of the girlfriends were like that.’

There is a fairly widespread, privately held view at senior levels in European football that the heels ’n’ hair circus of the 2006 World Cup was regrettable, even a distraction to husbands and boyfriends. In Brazil, the wives and girlfriends of the German players stayed in a hotel 30 minutes from the team’s and were allowed to come over only the day after a match, when they could stay for one night before leaving after lunch the next day. It obviously worked.

We chat about football. Who is he most afraid of this season? He mentions the top six rivals from last year, and singles out Manchester United, who ‘will be good again’. He isn’t sure about individuals; last year it was Luis Suarez, but he doesn’t know who’ll take his place. About Frank Lampard’s shock move to Manchester City he admits to being ‘a little surprised, because you only saw Frank Lampard in a Chelsea shirt. He will always be a legend here. But he has his own decisions and his own career, so you respect that.’

Would he offer any opinion about the scandal over FIFA’s decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar? No, he politely declines to answer; it’s a matter for the FA not clubs or players. He is also cautious when asked who would win a game between Chelsea and Germany: ‘It would be tight,’ he says, too diplomatic to point out the inevitability of a draw, with Germany winning on penalties.

I wonder about those Aristotelian maxims on his Instagram (@andreschuerrle) and he tells me that the one about work and pleasure was related to him by coaches for the German team. (Do Wayne Rooney and Roy Hodgson ever get together to ponder Greek philosophy? Could Plato be the answer we’ve been looking for since 1966?) Schürrle thinks of Instagram and Twitter as wondrous things because they ‘let the fans see what you’re doing in your life. It’s cool for young guys to see what their idols are doing. When I was young I would have thought it was really cool if my idols like Michael Ballack had had this.’

Suddenly it’s the wide-eyed kid from Ludwigshafen talking, the kid who spent his weekends being driven 100km to muddy games in other back-of-beyond industrial towns. For some players, he says, social media has become a key part of their lucrative commercial profile and ‘they use posts mainly to advertise sponsors’ products, which is cool, the sponsors like that. But that’s not what I want. For me, I like to be true and clear, and show the things I really do in my life, and to see what other people think. I just want it to be as natural as possible.’ ES

André Schürrle is supporting the Chelsea Foundation, which is dedicated to providing football to support communities at home and abroad (chelseafc.com/foundation). Portraits by Levon Biss.